Personally, I've been enjoying BRD ever since I've been leveling it. It seems to be as good as Archer, if not better. However, with that said, my linkshell was having a discussion in our chat recently and we were joking around about healing arrows and healing bows because one of our bards was being delegated to backup-healing.

So here's a suggestion, SE: how about giving Bard a "healing bow" of some sort? To keep it from being OP'd, it would be non-meldable, either have a lower damage rating than normal and/or a slower attack speed, and probably some other stuff perhaps.