All physical range DPS are perfect now!

[Jonnycbad]

Make Bard into Ranger. Change songs into traps or arrow types or something. Create a new healer called Bard that uses instruments to sooth and heal with various songs

[HyoMinPark]

Make Bard into Ranger. Change songs into traps or arrow types or something. Create a new healer called Bard that uses instruments to sooth and heal with various songs

And do what with BRD’s existing lore? Retcon all of it? I’d rather see BRD return to its roots—not be overhauled (again) and turned into a completely different class and in a completely different role at that. If people want a Ranger, it would be more feasible to just design a new DPS job into it, and return BRD to what it was before without all the need for overhauling a job deemed near perfect in the last expansion by many and retconning its BRD lore into Ranger lore.

[Rika007]

Simply put will never happen.

1) It technically would be a massive undertaking. They would have to rework the entire questline to an entirely new job, rewrite a whole new job's questline from level 30 to max level. Recode all art assets and gear to the new job which would also be a role switch. The amount of background development that would go to this would be absolutely obscene, it is not as simple as just create two new jobs.

2) It would require an entire retcon of the lore and backstory of not only the current Bard, but the world around the current Bard as well. The dev team has proven time and time again that this is a story first MMO, and considers the lore and story of the world one of it's highest priorities. Retconing the entire lore of the Bard job would force them to rewrite their lore books and the entire base story any time a Bard was in play. This is why they left themselves open in certain lore based decisions like Male Viera or Female Hrothgar. They didn't totally shut down that they don't exist, just stated you almost will never see them. Thus leaving it open for them to make the change down the line. But to completely rework the entire jobs's lore that Bard had nothing to do with bow's or empowering their fellows and instead was a healer? Not happening.

3) SE would also want to avoid making players who are perfectly happy with Bard as this hybrid DPS/Support job and have gained an identity with it over the last 6 years angry. Bard is one of the most popular jobs in the game. Taking the risk that they would make such a drastic change to the job is taking a risk that you are making a sizeable portion of the player base angry about it. They wouldn't take that risk.