Quote Originally Posted by ty_taurus View Post
The Bard has always been musical in Final Fantasy, which is the series we're playing.
If we were going by the job's franchise history alone, then Bards would still be using daggers or, more often, bows, while swapping to Harps only against enemies vulnerable to the Harp's elemental vulnerability or where the Harps' %HP damage finally exceeds the flat damage of bows, while every Bard song would just be a watered-down AoE version of another job's spell (e.g. Bravery -> Sinewy Etude, Refresh -> Mana's Paeon, Regen -> Mighty March, Stop -> Romeo's Ballad, Confuse -> Alluring Air). If you want to go truly original, it's generally a Agility/Mind/Vit > Int > Str build, and therefore inflicts more damage with physical Agi-based weapons than Harp-based attacks, though its support functions can be decently strong.

Of all its iterations, Deuce is probably the most appealing to me gameplay-wise, but I see no reason why we can't have her level of flexibility without having to go quite so all-in-with-all-guns-blazing as Type-Zero or limiting Bard to just an instrument.

I would love to start into combat with a 3-5 second flute riff of sorts. Heck, I wouldn't mind seeing a clutch moment in which a wisely pessimistic bard starts playing Song of Time on his ocarina in order to adapt their LB3 into one which reverts all players' HP and buff states to the highest they've had in the last 20 seconds. But... I really don't want to be machine-gunning enemies down with musical notes, alternating between stabbing them with sharps and smashing them with flats. I'd much rather retain an Archer base and use Bard for strictly Bard-y effects rather than turning it into a full-time weapon -- or worse, making its support effects a byproduct of music-blasting damage rotations rather than any deliberate supportive choices.