Elf Bards have really good cultural armor choices. Half-elf can also wear Dark Elf cultural, and if you roll RZ, you can also wear human RZ cultural and then you can have lots of fun playing dress-up to mix/match the gear sets. Lol.
Bard STA to HP is better than any other caster, and it's as good as Monk/Rogue. I'd dump starting points into STA. Str/Dex/Cha is easy enough to find on gear (particularly
Mystic Koada`Dal).