So I’ve asked this question a few times over the years each time I come back to the game. I always want to play, and RP, a D&D style bard.
The build I like is a melee support build with buffs, debuffs, and illusions/charms.
The classes I think about are
Holy Paladin
Catweave Druid
Holy Priest with Hymn of Hope
Enhancement Shaman with earth shield and off-healing
But I’m not sure which I like best. Like priest mind control is close to dominate person and hymn of hope is literally an AoE healing song.
Druid is a jack of all trades and catweaving let’s me melee dps while healing.
Holy Paladin has the auras I want and I believe there’s a disc style “damage to heal” build.
And finally Shamans were the bard playstyle in classic but the pruning of buff totems kind of ruins that.
So thoughts? I also take transmog into account in which cloth and leather has the most stylish gear and I have necromedes which is a 2h mace guitar. And also thanks in advance~.
I would think a bard couldn’t wear mail or plate while playing an instrument effectively. Maybe a drum. Maybe. But you need dexterity to play music and singing requires breath control. So cloth and leather make more sense.
My first thought was rogue. But yeah priest makes sense and there are lots of neat cloth outfits, too, and they have flashy spells.
You could really make any class work depending on the nature of your bard, right?
Yeah, that’s how it was. Guilds would camp a place and, if you needed to kill things there to do a quest or something? Tough. But it was the precursor to WoW and really all MMOs and made mistakes so they wouldn’t have to, lol.
It was all true. Plays partly into why I defend things like LFR and LFD, and general accessibility in this game so hard. Because I remember what things were like back in the day.
I’m tossing in my vote for priest. From what you described it sounds ideal for a bard. Rogue would work but doesn’t have the casting you want and I’d say that would be a pretty big part to what a higher level bard would have.
lol You reminded me of the first Order of the Stick comic in which all the characters got “upgraded” to D&D 3.5. Elan got a chain shirt.
In a modern mmo, i think it’s okay, people should be allowed to experience the raid in someway.
And as i recall LFR does not even reward the top tier crap anyway. It’s a stepping stone mostly.
I like having populated worlds with everyone running around. But i rather not have to deal with getting people together only to be blocked off by the top guild in the server.
I’m still wrestling with the desire to see certain things in old EQ. There are some bosses that I looked up to as a child, thinking they were the best villains ever, but I never got the levels nor the connections to good guilds to ever experience them.
Weirdly enough, in the live EQ game, it’s still almost impossible to see them as they’re either never up, they have a level limit (two dragons will just port you out above a certain level) or they have unavoidable insta-death mechanics that will kill you no matter what your level is. So I can’t really scratch that itch even today. It eats at me.