Welcome!
Recently i started a bard with the same intentions that you have, mostly group, never swarm. My bard was twinked a bit, but not that much (i am not rich). For the first 35 or so levels it's nice to have some decent 1h weapons, later on they become more and more obsolete, cause your melee damage does not scale well, while your other abilities get better and better. You can get decent 1h weapons for a few hundred plats or maybe somebody will even give you some for free, not that uncommon here.
Bards really are not very gear dependant. It's nice to have some better instruments. Medium instruments are not expensive and generally the power gain for better instruments isn't that big... so you can even get far with starter instruments.
The one thing that you *really* should do is create 8 macros with /stopsong and /cast x, where x is a number between 1 and 8. That gets rid of the fact that in order to change a song you need to click it twice. Gets annoying very fast, since you will do it all the time.
|