Is a bard wrong for me?

[Wakanda]

IDK if bards are necessarily always going to be the puller. When I play my cleric I get a little heated if the bard is pulling instead of sitting next to me playing mana song at all times 😹 in my experience though I don’t think most groups you are going to encounter are going to be super cutthroat and will understand you are new to pulling or new to certain zones. My last couple of groups have had rogue pullers even though we had a monk in the group 😹 they were just having fun.

[Toxigen]

highly doubt the op is ever going to be racing in VP lol

to go back to op: if ya gotta ask, then bard may not be for you

necro can do a lot in a group without trying too hard...and they're very capable solo

might be a better pick for ya

[Lowako]

Originally Posted by RPGrandPa [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

Played the game on launch, never raided much at all and played a Cleric back then. Was thinking of trying a Bard since I am returning brand new on Green. Never played one, but they seem like a lot of fun. I played on live at launch but only made it to 25-30'ish I forget.

My biggest fear is being main puller. I don't know enough about the game to effectively be a puller lol I would not even know how if I had to do dungeons and lord raids would be murder since I've never raided.

So my questions are:
1) I figure I'll be soloing for most of my leveling life but at 40+ if I find groups, what will be my roll in the group?

2) For raiding what would be my role? I've heard Bards are mostly song bots on raids, is this true?

I basically want to see if playing a Bard (for me) is a mistake or not. Sure, over a long time of playing I'm sure I would learn but that's way down the road.

1.) in groups you will primarily be pulling and/or CC and buffing the group with your songs when you do land in camp. given that bards are a highly versatile class your role will tend to shift slightly depending on context, namely the zone you're in and group makeup.

if you know enough about the game to understand the concept of a puller roll existing then you likely understand enough about the game to fill the role. keep a steady flow of bad guys in the camp without overwhelming your group. how do you accomplish this? use the bajillion tools bards have available - running fast, snare, pacify, mez, charm - experiment and use your best judgement to find what tools work best for a situation. they all accomplish the same goal of limiting the number of bad guys your group has to fight.

if lack of knowledge of zone layout / mob placement is what has you scared those are both things you'll learn very quickly. maps exist and if you have enough navigation skills to not get lost on your way to the bathroom at a friends house you'll probably be okay.

2.) depends entirely on the zone/encounter/context/are you the first bard there - sometimes you'll be kiting a whole zone, sometimes you assist in pulling, sometimes you just stand next to the clerics behind a wall and press 1 2 2 2 on repeat until you question where you went wrong in life.

honestly tho if you're new i wouldn't be concerned with how any class plays in raids because raiding is so vastly different from the rest of the game it borders on being its own separate mini-game. pretty much every class has responsibilities that range from "guy who is barely indistinguishable from someone who's AFK" and "guy who is responsible for carrying the 65 of the 70 players present"

[dajudge]

Bard is by far one of the most fun classes in the game. Soloing is a blast, especially for solo leveling. That is if you like twisting songs and running in circles with 25 mobs. You can also charm kite, it's slower leveling but doable.

Do you like dungeon crawling? There's a few zones in which a bard is capable of this but summoning mobs make it a bit trickier. Most likely you'll be grouping up in those zones.

As for raiding your utility is by far the largest asset you bring. Clerics want you in their group, rogues want you in their group and your raid leader will want you kiting adds/Bard DA's and ability to bind sight and gather raid knowledge to relay for engages.

In an ideal world you level up 4 bards, one perma VP parked, one for ToV/CoV factioned content, One for fear portal and the final bard for VS engages. That's the sweatiest of dreams.

[WarpathEQ]

Originally Posted by RPGrandPa [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

Played the game on launch, never raided much at all and played a Cleric back then. Was thinking of trying a Bard since I am returning brand new on Green. Never played one, but they seem like a lot of fun. I played on live at launch but only made it to 25-30'ish I forget.

My biggest fear is being main puller. I don't know enough about the game to effectively be a puller lol I would not even know how if I had to do dungeons and lord raids would be murder since I've never raided.

So my questions are:
1) I figure I'll be soloing for most of my leveling life but at 40+ if I find groups, what will be my roll in the group?

2) For raiding what would be my role? I've heard Bards are mostly song bots on raids, is this true?

I basically want to see if playing a Bard (for me) is a mistake or not. Sure, over a long time of playing I'm sure I would learn but that's way down the road.

Bard is a jack of all trades and a master of few (fastest run speed, highest resist buffs, and critical unique debuffs), my favorite class in the game as evidenced by 50% of my toons being bards (3/6). The best part about bard is you can do a little of everything and you can provide value in any situation, but that also means people will look to you when something is needed and expect you to step up.

Bard is a class that can group or solo at any level 1-60 which is nice that you can pick and choose when and how you want to level your toon. Fear kiting, Charm kiting and (my least favorite) swarm kiting are all viable and efficient soloing tactics for a bard.

1) At 40+ its rare that you would be the puller, I find that is usually requested of a bard at lower levels (1-40) where pulling most often falls on whoever is the best player in the group regardless of class. You will be the person that makes everyone in the group the best version of themselves. What you will do will vary based on the make up of the group. More melee heavy groups will benefit more from things like haste where casters will want mana song, you may need to be the one that is slowing the mobs or you may need to assist with crowd control when multiple mobs come in with the pull. You'll end up with a staple of go-to songs that you use most often but you'll also find yourself making adjustments for each group or camp that you're in.

2) For raiding, similar to grouping, bard roles can be extremely dynamic. At the lowest level/simplest form of raiding, bards group with the clerics and run mana song while often assisting the slow team by landing OOS on the target (this is likely what raiding will be like the first month or 2). At the highest form a bard can be one of the most important raiders in the guild helping secure FTEs on high valued targets, establishing large zone wide kites to expedite kills, making raid saving heads up plays to get unexpected mobs out of camp, and DAing the entire group to avoid vicious AoEs just to name a few key things bards are known for doing at a high level.

IMO the right class for you is the one you enjoy playing the most. That's what will encourage you to stick with the game and see your character through to the end game while materializing high level skills that.

If you do choose bard working on being the best you can at twisting songs will be one of the simplest yet most valuable things you can do. Inherently everything a bard does lasts a very short duration so bards benefit from landing as many songs as they can before the first song duration ends, and then repeating those songs over and over (known as twisting) to maximize the amount of song effects you can maintain through a fight. A low quality bard might only be using 1-2 songs at a time whereas the best bards in the game are capable of keeping up 5, 6, sometimes even 7 (with item effects) songs at a time which can make an absolutely massive difference in the outcome at any level.

[Toxigen]

A standard 4 twist with CC abilities at the ready is totally fine and nobody will ever know the difference.

If OP doesn't like the sound of having to constantly press buttons, then bard isn't the choice.

[sajbert]

Bard doesn't have to pull much, rarely any advanced stuff either. In raids you mosty just twist songs, that's it. In groups you just afk-sing or twist. You can do amazing shit or sit on your arse, depending on your ability but expectation is low.

You can solo or group to 60, swarm for fastest leveling in the game if you want.

Epic is hard but not impossible.

You miss nothing starting a bard today instead of classic, other than maybe the gnome mask which almost no one has or ever will, it's nifty but that's about it.

Only downside with a bard would be no real ability to solo big cash camps and no ability to gate or port. Not sure if a VP-keyed veeshan bard who hasn't killed any relevant dragons could hammer to OT and travel to VP and sing the mobs to non-KOS to access the portals there for access to sky, freeport and swamp of no hope. Then if you are ToV bound you could get around the world quite well.

[Vivitron]

Originally Posted by sajbert [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

Only downside with a bard would be no real ability to solo big cash camps and no ability to gate or port. Not sure if a VP-keyed veeshan bard who hasn't killed any relevant dragons could hammer to OT and travel to VP and sing the mobs to non-KOS to access the portals there for access to sky, freeport and swamp of no hope. Then if you are ToV bound you could get around the world quite well.

An interesting idea. If you drop the non-kos idea, the question becomes whether you can eyeball through any of the locked doors without catching aggro. I think you might be able to get through PD (Sky) but probably not Druushk. For Swamp, I think it would be easier to run directly from Overthere even if you could get through Xygoz.

[Ripqozko]

Originally Posted by Keebz [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

Eh, most races SoW speed? Kael and Sleeper's I guess. Sev too (but who cares).

When limited to sow speed, Ranger is good if you have LoS to max range shoot something (MOTG comes to mind), but there's not a lot of those. They also get Bind Sight and can WS their train to buy 18s, which is solid.

On the other hand, bards get better run speed in VP, planes, non-sev/tal kunark targets, get bind sight, get DA, get Deftdance (like WS), get illusion spells to change size (hfl/gnome, barb is huge) and moreover can cast said illusions while mid-race to fit through/over obstacles (kael races come to mind).

Bards are solidly S tier racers. Rangers B+. A Windstriker FTE is pure hype, though.

they said for FTE races, there isnt any on blue in VP, all the ones that matter are sow run speed, kael, sev, dain, ST etc. idk what green does just sayin

[Vivitron]

Originally Posted by Ripqozko [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

they said for FTE races, there isnt any on blue in VP, all the ones that matter are sow run speed, kael, sev, dain, ST etc. idk what green does just sayin

SoW-only really isn't an issue except when it pairs up with one of the bards disadvantages (mostly no bow -- which does ruin bards for part of your list). I wouldn't get too heart set on running a particular race on a particular character; who knows when the raid rules will change either entirely or on some small detail giving a different class an advantage. Both bard and ranger toolkits give them a pretty good chance of staying usable on multiple races imo.

Unrelated to your point, but when VP dragons are unraced pulling them is a nice opportunity for bards to get out of camp. PoG and Fear are other good places where you can run around even if you didn't sock for fte.