I will preface this post by saying that I have been raiding on an off for a long long time. Lead them, ran the raid tool, DZ, yadda. However, I was off for 3 years and recently came back last Winter, so some things have changed, thus my question below, perhaps born of ignorance. ___________________________________________________________ I'm almost embarrassed to ask this question, but very recently, one of our casters convinced our raid leaders that caster group and especially Necro's should be prioritized for Bard use. As a matter of fact, it seems that the melee groups have priority UNDER DD casters, necros and some tanks. We'll have 3-4 bards in a raid with only one of those in a DPS group, while two other or more melee DPS groups go without. My question: Has something changed where Necro's/casters are focused much more by bards vs. melee. Our raid parses seem to point differently, but I was curious if I was missing something due to my long absence. Thanks for your responses in advance.
Not done raiding lately so I can't say for sure but melee got a huge bump this expansion but bards got left off the dps alot compared to most other classes. I would say casters get more dps bonus from a bard in their group then melee do since alot of the abilities bards adds to them are near max without them in the group for alot of melee.
No, while Necros/casters do benefit significantly from Bards, melee will benefit more all else equal. There are some technical points between classes (warriors likely see the largest % benefit because they have such high autoattack DPS and fewer conflicting self modifiers, for example). That said, player quality also matters. I've been in a lot of raids where one DPS group has output multiple times that of another, at which point class is a less relevant factor.
In my opinion, 9 bards in 9-group raid is a good thing. Meanwhile, when one compares melee vs caster group benefits in bard assignment it is a subjective comparison. A dps melee group usually has a beastord, a ranger, a shaman, a zerker aDps. Bard's aDps does contribute, of course. Meanwhile, caster's group rarely has that luxury, so adding a bard seems to benefit caster group more. Also, it is somewhat raid dependand. Boosting casters' AE dps will show on parse, of course, but does it really improve the raid that bunch of meaningless adds drop dead quicker? In absolute terms - yes, but in relative term? Depends on a raid. In my experience, single target raid parses like Zlandicar, Sontalak and Shei (if people still remember those) would clearly show what should a bard assignment be. A disclosure: I have a max level raiding bard on all of my accounts. And at least another bard persona per account is in the works.
I want to say there was a bug with bard synergy not firing off spells so it could be that after it was fixed it made bards in higher demand. That being said, I feel like they have better synergy with melee groups, especially if there is a beastlord and zerker in it.
