What skills compliment Barding

My bard is GM and at level 140. I going to raise some of the skill higher, such as Savage Sonata, Alacrity. What about the 3 inates? Also, what other skill trees (Focus, Tactics etc) will complement a Bard? Currently I wear bandit armor and use shield and bludgeon

 

Barding is mostly a supporting tree, and it supports many different options out there. The main ones are mostly every Physical classes out there, if you use Melee weapons or a bow, The 2 songs that buff attack speed, movement speed, crit damage and strength are more than useful. Meanwhile, an Air Mage, or any class that requires extra focus will want the song that regens focus, Air Mages will love this one a lot considering it acts as a Healing over Time for them. Pets can get buffed by most of these songs as well, so a Tamer will appreciate these songs.

All in all, the majority of the bard songs are not really affected by other passives or skills/spells, but most other spells/skills will benefit from bard songs, so you have to look at it the other way around. The only one I remember being helped by outside sources is the Canticle that will see its damage depend on your focus pool, so the higher your focus, the higher it hits, meaning anything that gives focus directly (passives in the focus tree, Aetheric Feedback) or anything that gives focus as a secondary effect (anything that buffs up intelligence or adventurer level) will benefit Canticle, but it is (or was at least) the only one.

 

It depends how much you play in group and solo.
I think that Bard and Taming is a good all-around combination, you can focus on bard skills while your pet does some damage and gets aggro.
Bard and Focus may help slightly with some skills. Or perhaps you want to be awesome support character and go for Bard and Life, though the bard skills are long casts, so it is not always easy to sneak a heal in time.

 

Well, bard was added in for group support, but then Atos turned up the aggro so far that you either need a group that kills everything instantly, or every few rounds you will have no choice but to die to aggro. So - as usual the group support is forced to go find a group that can do well without him or her and then make them even more awesome. More backward SotA logic.

So go the solo route with it. Grab a pet and it becomes the group you buff all to hell and kill stuff with.

If they ever revisit the aggro, bard will be useful to the teams that need help again.

 

or you can get group with capable healer and be tank and bard

 

Still ruins the concept of normal tanks and of a support character, a support character usually sits on the backline, buffs up the others so they fight even better, now the support has to sit on the frontline and take a beating because of the agro bard songs generate, its simply a poor solution to a problem only Chris had with this skill tree.

 

Chris was under a lot of pressure to make changes from a group of players that were blowing bard skills out of proportion and claiming that with only bard skills they could solo ERG. They were not able to solo ERG, and there are many skill sets that look OP in the endgame. Not really fair to judge a skillset on how it looks after an uncommon amount of EXP has been poured into them.

 

I have a few ways i incorporate barding into my my builds. focused to solo play mostly.

Mainly to either add max crit dmg to range/melee builds or to add the slow song to mage builds.

Sometimes i add the focus recovery song.

Barding complements a main build in my case.

Adding savage sonata to whatever ranged/melee/tamer build will just make it that much more strong that it is totally combinable with about whatever weapon you pickup.

 

I think the main issue here was the combination of Strength, Dex, Attack Speed, Crit damage and crit chance all in 2 buffs, and some of those outclassing the other buffs in the same department, which are single target or passives, while bard songs were all party members... Or the Song of Mending that healed for 50 points of damage every 2 seconds, outclassing any other DoT with such minimal requirement, or concussive canticle that could deal 3k+ hits with relative ease, as a multi target skill. Bard skills were broken, but the true issue lies in a very bad habit Chris seems to have with his nerfs, he over does them. The right solution was the shortened timers like he did, cutting the effect considerably at the same time. If he had done just that, without touching the aggro generation, I think bards could actually fit in their role of support, but Chris went on and did multiple nerfs all at the same time, going overboard a bit too much, making these skills at the same time weaker but also much more dangerous, going for the usual SotA approach of Huge Risk vs Terrible Reward. Bards are still strong for some things, and I think numbers should still be tweaked, but the aggro generation is where the true issue with bard lies.