It's been quite some time since I played BRD in any serious capacity.

I found myself playing it sporadically in Shadowbringers and barely touching it in Endwalker. It has been a main from 1.0 until Stormblood, where it was an alright secondary job. Now I've been trying to play it again and I find my damage output to be wanting. I feel like I have never been able to fall this low on DPS on the job as I do now.

While I appreciate some of the call backs to ARR bard with the return of Hawk's Eye and Wide Volley, I feel there is something missing. The removal of River of Blood has made using/spreading DoTs very... awful in trash mob pulls. And I know that there are more Bards that have the musing that the job should get something along the effects of Bane for SMN in the old days.

On another note, there was someone mentioning that a lot of jobs have some form of an ability to increase their gauges for their specific abilities. Where BRD has 3 gauges and not a single ability to do so. But this might be an issue that could be addressed another time.

Now, to the part about the song. We have Mage's Ballad, which somewhat replaces the River of Blood proc trait. Rain of Death is a very nice way to do AoE damage and Bloodletter/Heartbreak Shot do well for single target damage. Army's Paeon which will speed up our Quick Nock/Ladon's bite damage output in AoE situations, or Heavy/Burst shot on single target. But what does Wanderer's Minuet do when it comes to multiple enemy pulls? It's entirely focused on stacking procs and burst damage to a single target. Complete with oGCDs that's best meant to be used in that song's duration, it actually renders the song a burden or even somewhat useless for such battles.

I would suggest as an alternative to such a pull, Wanderer's Minuet paired with Foe's Requiem as an alternative song. A choice between single target burst phase as a song, or an AoE bane + fester mechanic as a song. Both sharing the same recast timer, and both providing the Wanderer's Coda.

The BRD should put on the DoTs on at least 1 enemy, and when the song is activated, it will spread the DoTs to all enemies within range of the BRD. The Requiem's Repetoire would accumulate the same way as with Wanderer's Minuet, but instead of a high damage burst shot, Pitch perfect (or equivalent ability) would guarantee a boosted damage tick from the poisons (like fester did for SMN, or Shadowbite in the past, but weaker).

There is also an issue with Iron Jaws. This is a single target weaponskill. Maybe it would be best to made this an ability that's oGCD that foregoes the initial damage potency and applies a DoT refresh in a radius around the BRD to all enemies affected. This would increase the enjoyability of BRD a lot, certainly with an improved utility of handling bigger pulls of mobs.

I hope there's any valuable information I have provided with these suggestions.