Bard ability feedback

[Connor]

This thread is to give feedback on Bard abilities, something I haven't seen nearly as much as for other jobs. I want start by saying that Bard is much improved over it's 3.0 form and I understand that it's considered an incredibly powerful job, especially relative to its competitor Machinist. But that's something for a different thread. This isn't a thread calling for buffs, just some personal feedback.
Anyway, lets get started:

Army's Paeon
Paeon unfortunately feels somewhat less satisfying to have up than Mage's Ballad or the Wanderer's Minuet. Where the other two allow for chain Bloodletter or blasting off Pitch Perfect, Paeon offers a small speed boost (16% at 4 stacks of Repetoire). I feel like Paeon was intended to be tied to Refulgent Arrow, where the speed increase facilitates the straighter shot proc so you can always Barrage with Refulgent Arrow. Due to Barrage lining up with Raging Strikes (80 sec cd on Raging Strikes, 90 on Barrage), you should always be using it whilst in Minuet, meaning there aren't really any openings to use Barrage with Paeon.In fact, I believe it's best to cut Paeon early specifically so you can get into Minuet as soon as Raging Strikes is up (if Ballad cd has 30 seconds left). I just feel like as Paeon is one of our main song, it could perhaps be a bit less underwhelming than the other two

the Warden's Paean
I've met many people who flat out don't know this ability exists, including other Bards. Paean gives an Esuna effect to a party member whilst also providing a barrier against the next one. The issues with this ability is that, especially with Esuna being moved into the role skill category, it's very rare to be inflicted with a debuff that can be removed. Paean can be useful in these situations (such as Doom in V4), but outside of this these few encounters it goes completely unused. Unfortunately, unlike healers we can't swap out Esuna for something else. I think something that could make this more appealing to use could be to have a 200 heal potency on the ability, like Erase.

Refresh and Tactician
Minor feedback on these, they're very fun to use and always worthwhile to use, but I feel like the 180 cooldown is perhaps a bit steep.

Refulgent Arrow
Minor feedback again, as mentioned in the feedback for Paeon, Refulgent Arrow can sometimes be frustrating to proc, especially if Barrage is about to come off cooldown

Nature's Minne
Honestly I feel like my feedback on this will probably be reviled, but here goes. Nature's Minne is a very useful ability that increases the amount of HP healed by spells by 10% for the target, on a 45 second cooldown. This works fine, but the thing about Minne is that it can only be as good as your healers are. If healers are desperately trying to raise the party, keep the tank alive, DPS are getting slapped, using Minne doesn't provide any actual help to the party, as the healers are going to be casting the same amount of healing on party members regardless of when it's applied. Honestly I think it'd be perfect if it was on the GCD with a cast time and heal potency as with Paean

Bard's support
This is one last bit of feedback about the Bard's abilities as a whole. This one is likely gonna get me some hate as well, but anyway. Personally I think one of the main issues causing Bard to be considered unbalanced in comparison to Machinist is that it loses nothing for the utility it has. Because all songs and buffs are oGCD, a Bard can provide all this powerful utility and still continue to do the close to the maximum amount of DPS available to it. I understand that Bard has the second lowest DPS of them all, but when the premier support class of the game is out-doing an offensive DPS (Machinist), I feel like perhaps they might look into whether the utility should come at a cost. As I've mentioned before I think putting songs back on the gcd wth a 1.5 cast time (same as Foe Requiem), including Paean and Minne, could be a great way to balance this out, but I get that this would be a massively unpopular idea