Can bard become a Support?

[Connor]

I’d love to see Bard return to a more support oriented DPS role, but SE has made it clear that they don’t want ‘support’ abilities in FFXIV. And when they do decide to add support abilities they’ll probably automatically go to Dancer, since the devs seem to want it to be the sole ‘support oriented DPS’ in ffxiv.

I’d be surprised if they touched ranged DPS at all for the rest of the expansion. Bard is OP in ultimate, Dancer is still popular and that other one they pretend doesn’t exist is...there (poor Machinist). So i think, from the view of the devs, they look at the ranged physical role and say ‘ok this is perfect’.

Honestly I kinda wish they’d rename Bard at this point to like Ranger or Hunter or something so it stops confusing people into thinking it’s going to have anything to do with supporting the party like it does in any other final fantasy game. I mean, they wouldn’t even have to change anything in the lore really since ‘Bard’ is just an Archer who sings anyway, not something’ separate from Archer like how a Conjurer isn’t a White Mage or a Thaumaturge and Black Mage are two separate schools of magic (though still inextricably linked). They could just keep it called ‘Archer’ and have ‘Bard’ be like a title or something rather than a ‘pseudo-profession’ of archers-who-aren’t-but-still-are-archers.

Again like I always say in these kind of threads I’d love to see Bard become more support oriented. In like my ideal world, they’d separate Bard and Archer somehow and make Bard a support oriented healer that can compete with Astrologian in terms of buffing then party, though obviously it would have to offer something different than the damage increases so it’s not a clone. Archer/Ranger would be the exact same as what we have now (mostly). Or hell, even make it a caster DPS so it can use Raise and have a healing spell like Red Mage.

Obviously though, this isn’t my ideal world, and with the developers moving away from support on all jobs (most especially on jobs that used to be considered support oriented like Bard/Astrologian/Machinist to a lesser extent) its more likely that we’ll see jobs like Bard become even more personal DPS oriented in future. And since they don’t have the time or resources to do something like split the jobs so they can both get the attention they deserve, the current iteration of Bard as a highly mobile, high aoe DPS class with some limited support abilities is likely going to remain for at least the next few expansions. I mean, the job is still so popular in its current iteration that they really don’t have any reason to change anything about it