Direction of Bard?

[Bustercucumbers]

Personally, I feel the OP may be playing the wrong job if they are as unhappy with it as the post implies. I have played bard as my main class in several MMOs, and they tend to be a great utility class with a "Jack of all trades, master of none" play style to them. I feel that is the direction in FFXIV as well. Perhaps that style of play is simply not for the OP.

As of now, bard is solid damage output in itself. It raises the overall group damage exponentially, by giving BLM more sustainable MP regen, gives the other mellee classes more acc, thus more damage from not missing, as well as increasing ther TP flow, thus allowing more damage with weapon skills. We can raise in a pinch, support heal, AoE stun, and can give a HP boost before attacks like Prmals heavy AoEs slam the group. This all adds to our support and the nature of the class, the OP is attempting to make al of these support abilities appear to be a bad thing because we are not a debuffer.

I do not feel we need more debuffs. I believe bard is to be a "jack of all trades, master of none" support role, with another class will most likely be the debuff support. In general I prefer bard stays just like it is.

Although BLMs can go through their mana very quickly, they usually shouldn't due to the large amount of hate issues that they will gain. Also, you speak about how you can raise melee's accuracy and tp generation. You never said "or", you said "as well as", which implies that bard can do both those songs at once. Correct me if I'm wrong, but only one bard can have one of their songs on a target at a time. So unless your group has two bards, you cannot do as you say in a party. Also, you imply that Bards have an AOE stun in which they can use in a "pinch". That is also very highly unlikely. The AOE stun you speak of is the rein of death combo. This is a three way finisher combo on a three minute cooldown. Add in poor server response time and the fact that the second part of the combo, "quick knock", requires that you stand much closer to the mob, really makes this AOE stun nowhere near feasible as a "in a pinch" ability. I love playing my bard, but I do feel that there are areas that need improvement. I love that majority of our combos add some sort of debuff on the target, but I wish we would have some better debuffs for boss fights. Bloodletter is a great example of a weaponskill debuff for a boss.