Thoughts for a bard song

[SaitoHikari]

This is the problem we have SE totally messed up with MCH/BRD. Ok fine maybe not totally as they work, but they are now stuck in a situation it would be incredibly difficult to get them out of. Give BRD a song that increases healing? Well MCH needs to get that too (or something similar) otherwise it'll be left out, repeat this add infititum.

The situtation isn't a good one for both jobs.

I just want to understand why the devs thought it was a good idea to create a class specifically designed to compete with BRD, even down to using the exact same party mechanics (just done in a different way). I mean I'm sure they wanted to stomp the idea that a Bard may be seen as mandatory in every party (and that was probably the case throughout 2.x, but I wasn't around then). But I've never seen a game successfully address that issue by releasing a new class that didn't horribly backfire in the end, and those were classes that had far less similarities compared to BRD and MCH.

It's also for that reason that I'm indifferent on the idea of any new jobs being added to this game. New jobs shouldn't be released for the sake of having new jobs if we're going to end up with this sort of situation again. Plenty of games have been ruined balance-wise in the end for the sake of meeting a 'new class release quota', which clearly took up valuable development resources as well.

I've played some games that did get around such things by retooling existing classes instead, even though it ran the risk of alienating existing players of that class (although it can't be as awkward as the Bard transition into Wanderer's Minuet).