At this point should Bard and... I dunno, "Sniper" just be split into two jobs?

[Xbob42]

No I don't agree.
I don't think there's enough substance to have a job that just shoots arrows, or conversely with all the complaints about MCH having too many 'machines', for a job that just shoots a gun either.
Both jobs are built around a dual paradigm, shooting and machines or shooting and songs.

Imagine if Dragoon didn't have anything to do with dragons and just stabbed things with a spear, or Dark Knight didn't have any dark magic, just a job that swings a greatsword. You're asking for base classes, not a fully fleshed out job fantasy.

As for it not having enough support, that's entirely a balancing issue. With more support comes less personal DPS, and we now have DNC at the extreme end of that, any more support or less personal damage wouldn't be feasible, not least because all of these party buffs have to be able to work while stacking with each other. The more support jobs we have, the weaker their individual support becomes.

Ah yes, because if you basically left Bard as it is now except stopped pretending their songs are in any way bard-related and just called them something else, it'd be sooooo different. They're already just an archer. The bard portion of the class, despite the class being named bard and not archer, is so minimal it's like someone slapped a "bard" badge on an archer and called it a day. It's bard-lite, it's bard-adjacent. It's an archer cosplaying as a bard. But it's not a bard, and the elements of bard that are there are completely insubstantial and I can't believe I have to actually explain this to another human.

As for the other replies, it is pretty typical of how official game forums go, though. "Hey, I think this would be a good change and make more sense." "No, that could never happen. It would be lots of hard work. Ergo, unreasonable request. Also, we're waiting on them to do X, so clearly they can't do Y." Same goddamn conversation I've had on every MMO forum since the dawn of time. To be quite frank, I don't give a shit how much work it is, I think it sucks right now, and I think the soul of the game is being drained away as they go from the hardworking team that rebuilt the worst MMO ever to the team that apparently needs coddling anytime someone suggests something approaching work outside the typical patch/expansion flow we've seen. It's on them to determine what is too much work. Not me, not you. If they decide things like this aren't worth their time, that's fine, but I don't care what random forumgoers think is too much work. If you don't like the idea, that's great, but I find the "hard work" deflection so tedious.