Bard needs a new support:

[BloodPact]

Let's not give Bards more support responsibilities please; most of them don't even use their current abilities, meaning any new addition will also have to be yelled in caps several times in /party before you can actually benefit from it.

[Kirinichibon]

If a second dedicated dps job was added to archer, I would say that BRD needs a bunch more critical support abilities. But I don't think the current playerbase could handle more key support abilities...most bards right now can barely use what they have.

[FritoBandito]

I think the speed-things-up song that bards have right now should be allowed in battle, and also caste a haste buff on skill and casting speeds. Have it drain mana like the other songs so that bards are discouraged from using it ALL the time, but can you imagine how nice it would be to have this for groups struggling on Titan?

NB4 "Titan is so easy." Great, it's easy for you. It's not easy for everyone. Ability to run a bit faster would help a lot.

[Chickenbacca]

Bard needs nothing added to it. It is the easiest job to play by far.

[Kuwagami]

ballad if the healer had low mp¿? thats not perfectly thats normal...its like saying that as whm i buffed perfectly ...i casted protect.

you cut down the part of you message I wanted to quote

It's not about being praised for doing our bard's job. To put it simply, it would be the same as a tank never using any defensive CD. Sure you can still manage to win somehow, but that tank wouldn't be doing his job and would probably end up being yelled at. A bard never singing should be exactly the same, as he isn't doing his job either.

Bard needs nothing added to it. It is the easiest job to play by far.

Not sure if serious. All jobs are easy to play. I could play half of them blindfold, and I haven't really tried the other half at all.

Being good at playing them though...

[Estellios]

As nice as Haste is, it's pretty much OP in every game it's in to the point where it becomes a necessity, and if it isn't a necessity then it makes fights trivial. If that happens then any future support jobs are going to need to have Haste just to be able to compete.

You only really need to look at it in F11 to see why they are very hesitant about it.

They released a headpiece for all jobs that had Haste on it and that became a required piece of gear for all jobs for several years. It was silly seeing everyone in-game with a turban.

[Lstkaws]

It would be nice to have some more support abilities.

As for the ones we have. You should only be using songs when necessary, which honestly isn't all that often. Keep foe up if there is a caster in the group and ballad if healer has low mp. If you are doing it right and have invigorate you should rarely (if ever) need paeon; I think I may have used it a couple times during brayflox speed runs. I have even had healers ask me to take ballad off because they can manage their MP pool and didn't want to hurt DPS (he/she was hell of a healer btw).

I would love to see more useful songs, but the ones we have outside of foe (when a caster is in the group) are very situational. If you have a song up more than 50% of the time and there is no caster in the party; someone is doing something wrong.

[Velox]

You guys forget we still haven't even had our first level cap raise yet. Bards will feel a bit more "supporty" at level 80+ with 4-5 new songs. Hell, you may even see all the songs suggested in this thread added. It's likely the first level cap raise will be to 60 at a minimum, and thus, you'll be getting 2 additional job abilities (which, if it were me designing the job, would be an HoT song and a -def song) on top of class skills.