Red mage coming

[ShaneDawn]

The BRD excuse is flimsy at best. BRD's DPS contributions had a ceiling due to being tuned inherently lower than everyone else plus damage penalties for resource recovery. The argument would have merit if BRD had matched BLM or SMN-level DPS post-nerfs. We also can't ignore that people actually liked the mobility and that it was one of the things that helped it stand out from the other ranged DPS. Lastly, the change was implemented as a bait-and-switch (because instead of doing a class and job overhaul, they just shoved the change down people's throats at lv52), and that's pretty much inexcusable.

With a Dragoon, Bard damage was hardly "undertuned". Sure you couldn't match Monk DPS in most fights, but decent Bards never did sub-par DPS for playing a so called "support class". The damage penalties incurred by singing mana and TP don't even apply on a lot of the fights, as those songs are generally sang during down-time periods. Only during early progression, weak runs or long fights without down-time periods did those penalties ever get prevalent.

The amount of mechanics that were made completely trivial by a good Bard are numerous. While I agree we could have taken another approach (melee-range ogcds as a part of dps rotation for example, to make excessive running around less desirable), I can understand why Minuet was implemented.