Why do bard songs need a target?

[Rika007]

Uh....yes they do lol.

No they don't. Black Mage has downtime tools like umbral soul that allows their Astral and Umbral rotations to keep ticking when the boss is untargetable. They can hold or use their most powerful GCD due it's stacking mechanic so that they don't lose potency if a burst window has to be delayed by 30 seconds because of unfriendly raid mechanics.

Bard has none of these things. If a boss becomes un-targetable they can't use their songs. Which can completely throw off their burst rotation and misalign Wanderer's minuet. If it makes sense for a raid to delay their burst window then their are times that a Bard literally has to go songless, thus entirely locking a Bard out of their rotation. They can't spend their most powerful GCD if it overcaps, they just have to hold it and deal with overcapping because of lost potency. These are not things a Black Mage has to deal with.

Literally one of the things people always list as a strength of Black Mage is how flexible it's rotation is, how much easier it is to recover from a death, or recovering from drift. If you had said a job with more strict rotation timers like Ninja or Summoner sure. But Black Mage is one of the more flexible jobs in the game when it comes to it's rotation. Bard is probably second to only Summoner in rigidity.