If you're interested in playing a melee, and the choices you're weighing are between bard and ranger, ranger is the clear choice. Despite being a part of this melee class forum, bards really are not melee. In fact, until you get your epic you'll often spend a lot of time with out even having weapons equipped. Even with close to BiS, my bard does like high 20s-low 30s DPS. Bards are a really powerful and fun class, but melees they are not.
As for the positives of playing a ranger. In velious they get strength of nature (hp + atk) and call of the pred which is +40 atk and huge for raids. Having one or two rangers on a raid will make every DPS that much better. Additionally, there aren't a lot of rangers around, so while a raid might only need one or two to buff the whole raid, a lot of raids currently have none. Also, while their melee DPS is better than ranged DPS and I believe stays that way through velious, having a ranged DPS option is really useful on certain fights. Even now I could see arguments for rangers using ranged on a fight like Gore. Finally, DPS wise they're not rogues or monks, but they're probably some where near warriors for DPS, which is still good dps.
If you can handle the penalty and don't have a problem throwing your own groups together, a ranger is a much more solid class than most people give them credit for.
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