Bard "buff"

[Kabooa]

That's not the reason there was a BRD in their group.

While we can only speculate why it's specifically "Bard", there is a strong preference for Bard in world race teams. Maybe the ranged player just loves bard that much, who knows.

But it's more likely that out of the three PRanged, Bard is the only one that actually brings a non-number based utility. Thus giving it a DPS boost would only solidify it.

And, because we're bringing up Sfia's team again, recall it's Melee - Caster - Ranged - Something that they're pushing for. The caster slot is effectively locked to Red Mage / Summoner (Favoring summoner), and the only time this wasn't true was early in 5.0, where sometimes, rarely, you had a solo caster Black Mage for prog, but still a strong preference for Summoner even with the problems people had with their annual rework.

It would be ideal if the "Something" was legitimately a competitive spot for every job to throw in their unique utility, but that ship has likely long sailed.

I've brought it up before, but might as well formalize the "Something" as its own role, shove the problem children into it, and we start from a new normalized baseline.