Bard mains? Who dares? no box?

go back to COTF-forward, do the grind, get your hero resolution/vitality/(brain fart I can't remember.. but get them for each expansion.. they help you immensly

Fortitude

Thank you! I don't have to look through them all now for my 7th Hammer original. And... I am still on FV with my 2 bards and a few others *laugh*

FV is just to the left of Tunare now. It was moved about the same time as Burning Woods.

Technically, you mean "Burned Woods"

While I’m not a full-time player by any means any more, my main is a Bard and I recently got a message in-game that he turned 22 (I think).

I do have multiple accounts, but I’ve never been all that great at multiboxing. I do sometimes miss the days when charm kiting was a bit more stress free and viable—it used to be almost meditative.

I suppose the thing that is a bit irritating about playing a bard main in a (contemporary) raiding guild is that it rarely feels rewarding to get new gear. It has relatively little impact on your viability when compared to other classes and I don’t really remember ever feeling like it opened up many opportunities for my character in other content either. As a result, if I was going to return to raiding at some point I would certainly consider applying with one of my tanks (or maybe even a pet class). I have doubts as to whether that’d result in me actually doing so, but one thing for sure is that I’d never consider that “raiding character” my main. That’s my bard and it always will be.

My bard is a main but I'm somewhat weird/lazy and never really soloed or moloed much. I do have a box team now but still prefer groups most of the time. Bard is definitely easier to box than many classes though. I don't think that's bad; it's just true.

I did switch to a cleric main for a few years, but that was only for the purpose of raid necessity at the time.

Who Dares Wins

As with any class Bards defiantly function better in groups, however they are quite capable to molo and probably better than people think. For doing progression I usually run with a healer merc. The hardest thing for a bard to do is mitigate damage as bards are pretty squishy so my molo melody is very defensive. My melody looks something like: Stun proc, Slow, Heal crit, Heal focus, AC/Hate proc, and then I just fill in with any DPS for any slots left over. Your DPS will be low but this should give you sustained tanking ability so it may take a while but the mob will die. This gets a little more complicated if the mobs are not stunnable. In some cases you can get away without needed to stun to be able to tank but in most cases you cant. In these situations you can use pet tanks or your defensive AAs.

The second part to being successful when molo is to use your utility properly. The biggest reason bards are good even when molo is because you have all the tools and more to pick your fights. As a bard you never have to fight more than one mob at a time unless there is some heavy handed scripting to force you to fight multiples which is usually extremely rare at least in group content. Most encounters can be easily split into singles and with encounters that spawn adds you have mez/charm to deal with the new arrivals.