Simply put, Bard/Mechanist DPS is so much lower than other Damage Dealers that they decided to title them 'support' to prevent themselves from looking bad by association.

(Kidding aside - real part below)

To say the least, Bards/Mechanists are support classes. They offer up Damage but never quite at the levels of the other DPS - unless the Bard/MEchanist severely overgears them. Assuming equal levels of gear, however, a Bard/Mechanist just won't offer up as much DPS as the other jobs.


This is even more appearant in things like 4-man dungouns. on all 3 of my tanks (yes - even paladins) I could outdo Bards/Mechanists in DPS on bosses.

The trade off for this lower damage, however, is two fold:

1) They get easily sustained ranged dps (Easy to click off gauss / wanderer's, and a good support will)
2) They get support abilities to enhance the parties they are in (They are the only class with an AoE regeneration of TP/MP. Their ability to make enemies vulnerable to physical/magical is gravy on top, but it shared somewhat with NIN - who is the lower of the three melee DPS but offers up limited physical vuln and limited single target TP regeneration)

I do hope one day that SE will add in a pure-DPS variant, however considering the player's reaction to Gauss Barrel and Wanderer's Minuet, I'm not sure if they'll ever be able to add a Ranger with standing cast-times (Think more in line with BLM cast times) without whiplash, and it's a balancing act to make sure a pure mobility class wouldnt' be able to out-dps others because then that's all you'd want to take.

It's a rough situation to be sure.