Personally all I want is for Minne and Paean to be considered because they’re not very useful compared to what any other ‘support-flavour dps’ has (e.g Dancer / Red Mage / Summoner, hell even Reaper has better ways to support the healer lol). The damage boost stuff is all fine, but I feel like Bard’s defensive support songs are too weak.

Healing boost from Minne is on too long a cool-down for the effect; healers aren’t generally struggling with heal requirements in the first place, and if they’re struggling that much chances are they need more help than a 20% boost to their healing on one person every 90 seconds. Even if you manage to throw it on a someone after they mess up a mechanic the healer will have them at full HP before you can even give anyone the buff lol.

Esuna is far too niche usage for any dps to be having to devote a skill slot for lol. Status ailments are infrequent, rarely lethal (except when they’re completely fatal lol), and generally affect more than one party member. If they’re not lethal, a healer isn’t normally going to bother using Esuna at all, so why would a Bard? I’m sure there are better ways to use my weaving spaces lol. If it is lethal, you’d better hope only one person was affected because of Paean’s 45s cool-down.

Some suggestion for changes:
1. Go the lazy route and make them Dancer heal equivalents for single target. Minne could restore HP to target, Paean could be regen or HP shield.
2. Give them charges to make them more readily available in emergencies (which I guess is when the developers think we’d use them lol)
3. Go all in and put them on the GCD. Upside would be always available when needed, but obviously the dps loss would be such a huge loss that this would probably kill the skills more than anything lol
4. Pull a complete 180 and delete them to replace them with DPS abilities that are appropriate to what they want the job to be this expansion (pure dps? Support dps? AoE DPS? ). Some initial thoughts include the fabled Bard Bane and maybe something that interacts with DoTs to give them more value.

And of course in terms of dps kit everyone else has outlined the issues better than I have. Personally, I’m not a fan of having to stock up Bloodletter during Army’s Paeon. I still do it obviously because dps gain but still lol, it feels weird and counterintuitive when you’re coming right out of a song whose entire purpose is to make you hit Bloodletter (or Rain of Death) more