I agree with you on the class dependency thing, however I feel like bards are already overly being relied upon, which I dislike.

I think this kind of dependence causes people to unfairly bias towards certain comps.

As someone's already pointed out, you already have to get invigorate on all DoW (er DoW dps that is). Now this could be seen as a trivial requirement (taking only a couple hours of work), so for hardcore or progression or endgame this isn't such a biggy.

But as a casual or such, I don't think anyone thinks sitting on your butt when a fight lasts more than 2 minutes is fun. I especially noticed this while I was still leveling archer...especially in longer dungeons, when I didn't have/know about lancer, it was a pain to just sit there and autoattack. So I had to go and get lancer (which I didn't really enjoy playing) just to even do fights that weren't trash fights.

So there is already dependency on other classes simply from cross class skill requirements (similarly, every DoM must have swiftcast).

I haven't been in coil, so this is just from what I read on the forums.

But BLM seems like a safe pick for massive AoE potential with self sufficient resource. SMN are great single and AoE sustained dps and bring great utility.

Bards support those two and your healers, so its a no brainer to bring one.

And for the last one it seems you either get another bard for more singing (one offensive one mana) or a dragoon to buff the bard.

So that kinda leaves monks out as a synergyless dps. Melee being disadvantaged aside, we simply do not have enough party spots for the "dream" comp or whatever of ideally all the different classes.

I think its a good thing that classes rely on bard for buffs, but given that bard is a dps and not a pure support role, I feel that dependence is a bit too much.

Furthermore, as its kinda odd that one of your base stats is only super useful if you have a bard, especially if you stack it and have to convince the bard to Paeon instead of other songs.

Also could someone answer if autoattacks are affected by skill speed? I've been wondering that and have no idea if it does or not. Similarly, does spell speed affect autoattacks (it doesn't make sense to, but it might!).