Quote Originally Posted by ForteNightshade View Post
It's a mixture of both. They have a weird obsession with fitting jobs into a specific hole with no rhyme or reason. In this case, only one "support" Physical Range. That being said, it hasn't been performing well even in the casual scene based on unofficial censuses. Naturally, we can't know for certain but this same dated denoted the extreme dislike towards Monk, 5.0 Ninja, healers in general and etc. With all of them changed, it's hardly a stretch to claim Bard isn't popular anymore.

I do share your concerns though. Scholar may end up bench warming because they focused everything on making Sage stand out.
I was talking about 4.X Bard, sorry. I meant that it was performing extremely well in Savage, but it was also quite popular in casual content. So I don't think they changed Bard because it was "too hard" for casual players, but because they didn't know how to make two support jobs.

I agree with what you say about sage, but I'd add a concern for the upcoming WHM / AST duo. If WHM has to compete with AST, rather than bringing WHM up to AST's level of support / utility, they might bring down AST's utility further.
And I'm also quite sceptical about a clean heal / barriers mindset when shields have so little value in healing unless they are oGCDs currently. If they don't change encounter damage, I'm not surprised if healers will boil down again to "which two jobs bring more DPS to the party"