Quote Originally Posted by Taban View Post
If you're constantly singing in dungeons, you're doing it wrong. Don't get me wrong, ballad is great when things go to hell, or a healer dies and needs a quick pick me up. But your job is to dps, most healers have decent enough mp management they don't need your songs outside of specific situations. Singing when they don't need it is just needlessly lowering your dps.
It's not about singing all the time. It's about singing all the time that's needed. The difference is huge.

Bards have access to a lot of offensive CDs to help while they are singing.
It's not a coincidence if furious strikes have a 20% damage buff, while your songs are lowering your damages by 20%. That's 20 seconds of free song without any dps loss. Also, hawk's eye gives a nice help for that. With internal release, you can have a never ending rain of bloodletter procs. and B4B also gives a little extra.

I believe these buffs aren't here to satisfy bards' epeen. they are here to compensate the lowered damages while singing.

As for "useless songs", ballad gives the healer to go rampage with holy/ DoT without worrying too much about MP management for a few GCDs, which isn't neglictable in SRs, or to give some raises/come back to life without too much trouble (but again, out of SRs and raids, that's pretty useless as they can do all that without MP problems)
Paeon allows the physical dps to go rampage in heavy AoE situations
Foe is the most useful song you have due to its total awesomeness without compensation. tbh, I would gladly eat the 20% damage debuff considering how much the mages (any of them, DDs or healers) love to wreck things when Foe is up, and how much more efficient than me they are when doing so.

The real problem here is that SE made the bard out of his support role by just making it dps (I know that he would be alone as a support, thus exclusive, thus rarer than tanks, etc... not the point), and only giving him some songs which people do not care of, and which they cannot find a real use if they want to bother.
Sadly, without forcing it by doing SRs or Coil, only Foe will come in handy.


TL;DR :
You're a bard, a buffer, a support SE made dps because there is only ONE support at the moment in FFxiv. That does not make you a dps. Be more useful to your party and sing.