Quote Originally Posted by Cetonis View Post
The dev fear of too much utility is irrational anyway, and easy to cover for. They've proven that they're capable of doing this if you look at the three ranged vs. one another - all fairly close if you assume a top-rate dance partner. If anything they undershot on Dancer a little.

Tuning for optimal-at-the-time jobs getting buffs is super hard to account for, and a constant +2.5-3% net damage for one rotating job is not substantially (if at all) smaller than adding 0.5% overall damage to the party. But the latter is an easier number to nail down with more precision.

I think, broadly, that Bards just want to be interacting with their support kit in a way that feels like they're putting effort into helping the party and getting a payoff for it. Whether it's your idea, or people wanting Foe back as an MP spender, or etc. the idea is that people want to spend more of their energy in combat thinking about what they're doing to help the party.

If, in the end, it's numerically nowhere near as much party-damage as Dancer or Ninja bring, I don't think people would really have a problem with that. It's more about feel and flavor than data output, I think.

Maybe just for added absurdity I'll post a new thread just trying to talk about these sorts of principles without getting into the nitty gritty of specific suggestions? That might be more useful feedback than the kind of wild all over the place stuff that the other threads are resulting in.
That's because people want every job to solo without relying on other jobs whatsoever, which is ironic considering it is an RPG and JRPG MMO at that.
Meaning, synergies and reliance on other members are not welcomed to some of that mains and raiders hence we get the super linear hyper self-sufficient jobs all over this expansion and the identities of some jobs that was not just about damage are just gone poof into worse clones of another.