I play my bard in raid doing the usual roles (cleric mana battery or DPS buffer) but one fun thing is to play insurance. Bard insurance comes in two types, single target and AE. In hard encounters, there is often a speed bump in between tanks, but the nice thing with a geared bard is that you can speed bump or straight out tank it if a main tank goes down (really, this is only up to vindi as tougher velious targets simply hit too hard).
Ive somewhat often finished tanking vindi (once from about 20% to kill) if the tank eats enrage on accident or other issues occur (every so often pump an aggro song in, but balance it so that you never steal it whil MT still alive). Bards also just make the best enrage tanks as they dont need to attack at all to generate massive amounts of aggro.
Breaking into planes (PoH specifically) is fun as a bard if a swarm comes in or even in places like hot or where mobs can swarm in. Keep 54 ae aggro song up with disc, as no other class can generate AE aggro and stay alive for any decent period like a bard can. Especially if a PoH pull goes south, you can use song to aggro 25 mobs and hit up your frontal disc to tank 25 mobs at once for 10 secs while everyone else camps.
Just, be aware you will never show up on DPS boards if you're into that.
Raiding rangers will fall into DPS (great if geared), speed bump, CotP buff, or DT eater basically.
|