Quote:
Originally Posted by Fammaden
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Rangers really have the most awesome hybrid toolkit, its just overshadowed as a jack-of-all-trades/master-of-none by the bard, which is essentially a broken OP class in some phases of the game. Paladins are stacked with tools that many overlook as well. Really SK is kinda the lamest hybrid IMO, despite its popularity. A lot less diversity, but of course having FD and snare goes a LONG way.
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I've never actually agreed with the notion that the bard is a jack-of-all-trades. I mean, that particular phrase was used by the developers themselves to describe the class, and printed in the manual and shit, which is why it lives on to this day; but if we look at the actual jobs that a bard can do, they're not particularly versatile. A bard can't tank, heal or DPS. It's basically a puller and CC class, with some buffing and mana sustain thrown in. If we look at it in terms of actual group roles, there's only a few classes that can fill more than one to any meaningful extent, and bard certainly isn't among them.
To gauge the versatility of a class, take any given group with one of that class in it already and then add another member of the same class who has to take up a different role. How happy are you with that? In the bard's case, nobody in their right mind would ever want two of them in the same group. Meanwhile, you can have a perfectly serviceable group with two rangers in it, and they can be filling two different roles.
The versatility of bards is generally overrated. They have a lot of different types of abilities, but the vast majority of them are pointless garbage that never gets used. When you get right down to it, there's really just a handful of bard songs that are ever called for in a typical grouping environment. Haste, mana regen, Selo if outdoors, lull if pulling, mez in exp groups, resist songs in raids, and I guess slow if there's no other slower. That's 98% of what a bard exists for, and they don't have the kind of versatility where you could have two of them in a group and feel fine about it.
The class was designed
in spirit to have a bit of everything, but it's not as if anybody genuinely considers the bard to have any relevant melee capabilities, or tanking, or damage-dealing. Having a long list of ability types doesn't mean much if most of them are either weak as piss or serve no particular purpose in ordinary gameplay. Many aspects of the bard class are comparable to a car with two wheels--technically it's better than a card with no wheels, but it's still not a usable car. Having dual wield but no double attack means your melee output is irrelevant, having plate armor with garbage hit points and defensive skillcaps means you're not really tanky, etc.