Bards post 40 are mana batteries

[Toxigen]

A bard + necro is all you need to heal 99% of xp groups too.

Its pretty wild synergy.

Hell, the best XP I ever saw across all my characters was when I was on my rogue back in pre-nerf hole. I trio'd with an epic bard and monk. All 3 of us had fungis...and I didn't stop backstabbing mobs that were being seamlessly brought into camp for about 3 hours.

[Karanis]

Could be wrong but didn't see this stated yet in this thread or in most mana battery threads, but pumping mana doesn't have to be leave on 1 mana song and nothing else, you get SIGNIFICANTLY more mana if you're twisting mana regen+3x mana pulse, or even just pulsing raw mana 4x. Songs you leave on trigger every 4 seconds, whereas your cast time is 3 seconds, so even if you're strictly a mana battery, you're being a lazy shit bard if you're turning on mana song and just letting it pulse on its own.

[Karanis]

Most people would be surprised just how much mana regen you can provide maintaining cantana and pulsing pure mana 3x between them, it's massive.

[Cen]

Bard stacking chant DPS is actually pretty high among all classes, but everything is a sacrifice, and when you do that, you don't do other things people likely want, or are more productive. If you have 5 people burning manabars constantly, you're better off with the mana job.

In a melee heavy group twisting hastes in can be very good. If your dealing with level 37 mobs and below, charming is free and easy and very high DPS.