My point about a song dropping though - some songs are useless unless they are up all the time. If a mob aoe lands on the tick the resist song was down because I was trying to get a bit more AC/Haste/Regen onto my group, there was no point in having it up at all. It's risky and inelegant to twist songs that are dropping continually IMO. The effect you point out about server ticks just makes it all the more inexact. We never really know when this is until it ticks - despite the tools that help us guess. Mix in lag with this - both yours and others' - (I'm on a constant 250ms which is not bad compared to the 500ms+ I had on live) and it's a total crap shoot.
My experience has been it's better in the long run to have 3 songs up permanently and surely, than to be guessing with four. My UI says the song icon is up, but the server says otherwise when that AOE lands = trouble. Actually, I've wiped to those exact situations more than once enough times to resolve to keep a solid three songs up (not including BoH clicky). Not criticizing others to go for the four or five, but it's risky, and that needs to be understood by other classes who get the idea 4 songs is the minimum a "good" bard should be singing. I had this conversation constantly on live:
"So and so had four songs up all the time".
"No, he didn't actually, one was dropping at the end of the loop continually. You just didn't notice or it didn't show on your UI. On the server it was dropping. It's simple math - 12/(3+time between keypresses) < 4, and that doesn't account for resists or missed notes and lag. With those you can be stretching to keep even three up without something dropping when RNG goes bad."
"Good bards can do four."
"*sigh*".
Re. aggro dumping, with high damaging mobs I've found it counter-productive to be the puller if I have a tank who can't grab aggro. Body pulling can be terribly inexact (I've run over mobs and stood on top of them and still not gained aggro on p99, while the mob 5m away immediately aggros - something is definitely different to live), so it's usually necessary to land a Bellows or something. I've also been hammered into paste multiple times because my group couldn't regain aggro no matter what they did after I've done that. In the end it was more efficient for the tank to pull. The caveat is that this usually hasn't happened with SKs and Paladins.
Not to dispute your comments on pulling, because as I said, I've never majored on it and only once or twice done it in raids, and always outdoors. I would however say that FD is *the* premium tool for splitting mobs. The proof of that was that in Velious, every single raid I went on had a monk puller. Past Luclin I never once saw a Bard pull for a raid either (though my raiding diminished a lot before I quit). Actually the proof for that was Thott's constant whining
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