It's fine for songs to be imbalanced, honestly. There's really very little wrong with Bard itself -

:: SkS being a weak stat is largely universal and a separate topic. They shouldn't try to address it with a bunch of job-by-job hamfists.

:: The matter of piercing / crit buff is another broader design problem. In and of itself, having a crit-focused job is not a problem, it's a feature.

:: Button bloat is also largely universal, and will likely be addressed via role skill changes first and foremost.


Bard is the biggest "ain't broke, don't fix" job in the game right now. Relative to current Bard, the only mostly-QoL things that come to mind are -

:: Make Pitch Perfect cooldown 1s

:: Make Straighter Shot upgrade to a buff that only activates Refulgent, such that it's not consumed if you want to use SS (a blessing and a curse, but one less annoyance). Or make Refulgent re-apply / replace SS, but SE would have just done that in the first place if they were going to.


Then for future things, I'd expect little in the way of messing with core song mechanics. At most, maybe do the oft-tossed-around idea where AP stacks increase your RA proc rate by 5% each or something (this would make 4-stack AP slightly stronger than MB).

Instead, I imagine we'll finally get the regen song (consumes MP like Foe, thus near-useless in 8-mans, but hey folk want it) and probably a little more focus on MP management otherwise. Like it'd be kinda neat to have a skill that procs or gets stronger or something when you're at low MP or empty your MP or something. Then some sort of blatant "this is meant to increase Bard pps to keep up with other jobs' gains" button/trait and call it a day.