[cd288]

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

Eh. Chants will tick for 56ish each w/epic, which is something like 30 DPS if you maintain three of them. That's if you can maintain them all, because while they do apply a resistance debuff, it's not exactly huge and plenty of things in the endgame will be immune to one or more of magic, fire and cold. Add the shitty melee on top and it might amount to 50 DPS. No, bards do not do real DPS. It's marginally higher than a paladin, and that's if the bard is doing nothing other than DPS, which is not a scenario that ever actually happens in reality. Ask a level 60 bard how big a percentage of his time is spent in DPS mode. He'll probably chuckle at you and recite a dirty limerick.

As far as tanking goes, bards are on par with rogues. They get marginally higher HP and they can wear plate, but their parry and dodge skills cap significantly lower, so it's about equal. If you take a fully ToV-geared bard to tank the Hole, I'm sure it'll probably be fine. Under real-life conditions, it's not a thing. A ToV-geared cleric could probably tank leveling content with a slower. Shamans tank guardian wurms all day and they don't even have any real defensive skills. This is not a measure of viability in conventional gameplay settings.

Maybe you can come up with some fantastical scenario where there's a group in which the bard is forced to be the tank, and then it's probably better than having the fucking wizard do it. But in reality, it's not a thing that happens with any sort of regularity, and it certainly isn't good. Bards are certainly useful in the one role that they inhabit, but they don't have the kind of versatility that lets them fill more than one role. They're pullers with mild CC and haste/resists/manasong. Stop pretending they're also DPS and tanks.

When was the last time you had a bard in your group and then invited another one, when it wasn't the only option available? Yeah? Yeah.

I like how in some ways you moved the goalpost to they suck because they can't do a certain role as well as another class of that role, when the whole conversation is around being a jack of all trades master of none