I just picked up the game again and have been running SK Berserker Shaman. Right now I'm lvl 70 and was thinking of dropping the shaman for a bard. With defiant gear, buffs don't really do much. So I've only been using shaman for dots, and the periodic slow/heal here and there. But for the most part merc's are OK (running tank heals dps for now). Right now it seems bard would bring more utility. Would this be the case later on in the game?
If you keep the shaman: 1. you're stuck without any form of mez, 2. you do have a backup healer that can function where mercs aren't allowed. 3. You only have 2 melee classes to keep in range and focused on the mob 4. You have the basic elements of Tank, Heals, DPS with mercs for backup 5. Shaman can be relatively simple to hotkey and box but don't add much without player input If you swap to a bard: 1. you gain mez but it's shorter than ench and more of a pain 2. you have nearly no healing 3. 3 melee classes to keep in range 4. permanently dragging a cleric merc to do much of anything. 5. melody will at least add to group something while attention is on other characters. I personally would keep the shaman but both are viable options.
Go shaman, especially if you'd be tempted to melee with the bard. Melee require more button pushing at a faster pace. They are also just harder to play. SKs have easy win agro buttons, so right now you can easily keep agro on the SK With minimal effort and focus on the berzerker. The shaman will be more bottable than a bard.
I box a war/mage/bard. Most of my advice is specific to level 105 and may not be true at lower levels. SK + Berserker + either bard/shaman is a great three-box and you'll be OP either way. But to make it more confusing I'll disagree with the above posters and recommend a bard because: 1. With SK/berserker you'll want to have minimal usage of a third class in combat. You'll have to focus on SK/berserker while fighting. The berserker does so much DPS you'll want to keep him engaged as much as possible, and keeping aggro on the SK when the zerker is fully engaged requires a lot of time so you'll want to use him as much as possible. So having a cleric merc healing instead of a shaman is probably better in most cases, and a bard can just be put on /melody and contribute a lot. 2. Bard's bring selos and track. Track makes your life much easier if you're doing named hunting, questing etc, which is most of the time you're playing. 3. I think a bard's ADPS is much higher than a shaman. 4. Once your group is setup, your typical cycle will look like this: A. Bard pulls a group of 3 mobs and runs back to group B. Switch to SK, then get AE aggro on them. C. Switch to berserker, dumpster the SK's primary target with dicho and other abilities. D. Switch to SK, build up aggro on a second target. E. Switch to zerker, start attacking second target. F. Switch to SK, attack third target G. Switch to zerker, kill third target. Depending on your skill/comfort/recklessness and distance between you and the next group of mobs, you'll be moving your bard to pull the next group of mobs before the second or third mob is dead so the next group arrives right after the last mob dies. During this cycle, it'll be difficult to be able to switch to the shaman or bard to do anything useful like heal, DPS, slow etc. Under these circumstances the bard sitting in the corner pumping out /melody is doing quite a bit, but the shaman would be doing nothing. 5. At 105 with a geared SK, CC is basically a waste of time, but being able to easily single-pull named mobs isn't. I know SKs have some tools (FD, snare) to single pull, but I'm pretty sure bards are head and shoulders above them with fade (much better than FD for pulling), an aggro drop knock back, mob gate, pacify, mez etc.
As someone who boxes SK, bard, zerker - shaman really probably would be stronger but I main/raid on the bard.
