Discussion - Bards - gear (augs) and stats (1 Viewer)

[BigDorf]

Hi Redguides

I'm building a Bard and seeking to understand what you all consider important stats.

To help explain the question, if I use knight tanks and the debates around HDex and HAgi etc. and how they give most benefit to the tank beyond HSta as an example, what are the thoughts for bards?


If I said my primary need for a bard is around the crowd control ( mez and snare ), then as a secondary bonus adding whatever it can for DPS and the downtime regen recovery does that impact stat choices?

Then the thought on weapon slots, bards can dual wield. Would that be the go-to norm, or is there a strategy that says a bard should have a good shield in the off-hand?




A piece of the level gear strategy I found useful is the TBM expansion, vendor sourced gear and augments ( type 5 & type 9 )

• Covers the 75 - 105 range
• Gear and augs can be sold back to the vendors when finished with.
• Gear slot mods applies is to level 110 and has good % improvement.
• type 5 augs can continue 106+ ( RoS, ToV, ToL ) until replaced by other expansion drops etc.

That's where i'll be looking to source the gearing from to start with.
If you've experience with those augs, then please shout out your preference for a bard!



Regards and Best Wishes

 

[Leo]

Hey, bards are awesome! Most just dual wield the best weapon ratios you can find and stack Hdex like the rest of the melee classes.

 

[Birdman]

Hey, bards are awesome! Most just dual wield the best weapon ratios you can find and stack Hdex like the rest of the melee classes.

That ^ 100% agree. Raided a bard end game, Focus on best ratio Weps, and stack HDex.

 

[No_Songs_For_You]

As everyone will say for heroic stats: go for hdex. It's the best all-around stat for melee. (If you ever feel like you should use hcha for mezzing or charming, don't. Charisma has been capped out for years, and the number is basically meaningless now.)

As for gear, if you can get yourself some raid gear for the song foci, that would be best. It doesn't have to be current gear, but if you can get the instrument mods with 35 or 36, that will allow you to use your songs to their (basically) max potential. If you can't get the raid gear, you could camp the chase/rare instruments that have the same level instrument mods as the raid gear. If you use KA it uses mq2twist, and then you can set up mq2bardswap to change out instruments automagically (mq2bardswap can be a pain to work with though). But in all honesty, the group gear is good enough for group content. Having raid foci just helps to eke out a little more from the bard and helps them be a bigger contribution to the whole group.

 

[Yama]

Raid focus won’t make any difference unless your using RK 3 songs.

 

[No_Songs_For_You]

Raid focus won’t make any difference unless your using RK 3 songs.

I just retested, and it makes a very small difference. I was a bit mistaken about how the songcaps work. Here's the data: rk 2 song with group focus: 129764 damage, rk 2 song with raid focus: 129786. Difference of 22 points. So in the end, it is not a noticeable gain like I thought. But hey, the more you know.

 

[v1ndi]

What kind of group do you run? You might be better served with a chanter over bard for your need.

hDex, use best ratio weapons you can with DD procs. You never equip a shield as a bard, even if you need to temp tank, you still don't. If you have a good twist, and are just grinding non-stop, then your bard should be OOM and out of endurance 100% of the time - its strength comes in the synergy and that requires insulting a lot. If mobs live long enough for your shout to fulminate, then you should also be using it on cd.

As an aside, I wish people would stop relegating bards to be CC bots on Live, they actually do insane personal DPS (i could parse close to 700-900k in ToL with minimal effort while still hitting my adps/mezzing).

Outside of Aura/Aria, bard ADPS songs are garbage and provide negligible dps increases over just using a dot twist.

 

[v1ndi]

I just retested, and it makes a very small difference. I was a bit mistaken about how the songcaps work. Here's the data: rk 2 song with group focus: 129764 damage, rk 2 song with raid focus: 129786. Difference of 22 points. So in the end, it is not a noticeable gain like I thought. But hey, the more you know.

For people that want to know why this is the case, it is because song mod for rk1 and rk2 is capped at 320, so the 350/360 raid mod doesnt actually add anything you wouldnt get from group gear. the 22 point difference is not due to focus but rather RNG.

RK3 let's the song mod cap at 360 and therefore you'd get much more gains.

 

[Jetanroth]

Hey, bards are awesome! Most just dual wield the best weapon ratios you can find and stack Hdex like the rest of the melee classes.

What he said!