Battlebard?

[Nedjen]

Can it make barding more interesting? =S Currently with a 51 bard spec I feel like.... unless there's something special in the fight for me to do (like Shovel digging in GP), it's rather bothersome.

I'm considering a Battle Bard of sorts, with a good amount of support capacity (except VoJ) (36ish bard points for the ress) and some Dps or AoE in the meantime, when I'm not buffing or debuffing.

I was just experimenting with 36 Bard/30Sabo/NB. Keeping motifs up was rather easy, and I went with a bomb-heavy (Frag, Annihilation, Chemical and Time) plus Charges detonating on Anni Bomb, so I could charge stuff up whenever I was doing anything and just bomb them later. Obviously, it's not the holy mother of dps, but at leats it's some medium AoE for trash and stuff.

While it's interesting on the dummy, I haven't tried Bardoteur on any dungeon yet, and might never try.

Does anyone have any suggestion of a good BattleBard builds out there (PvE only) and maybe some guidelines to go along with it?

Or is BattleBard really utopic and they can never be useful?

[Fencers]

It's a fun spec. Good for dungeons with an over geared group. Not for serious play though, no.

[Tarien]

Read a few interesting threads on bard spec a week or so back, will link more as I find them but here is a start:

http://rift.zam.com/forum.html?forum...213023822&h=50

I would honestly suggest getting to know the souls well, and then create your own build, test them, use them in real scenarios, see how it goes. That's a big part of the fun in RIFT, creating and experimenting with specs.

[Nedjen]

Thakns for the link. I've been thinking of going for a BattleBard spec for a while, but never bothered enough to do it. Currently 36 Bard, 5 Sabo and 20 NB. I hope it works out well. I did use the Deadly Dance bard spec a while ago, but having to use Deadly Strike too much wasn't very helpful when I needed the fast CoR (even tho I rarely needed it that bad, lol).

I really like the idea of a Bombing Saboteur Bard, but there aren't enough points to do that if I wanna grab the Bard ress. Hopefully it will be more viable next patch when bombs get buffed up!

[Yvaelle]

If you spec like 30 bard, 30 marks you do pretty legitimate damage - the other option is saboteur for dungeons since its all AoE anyways and you just bomb spam them.

[Primalthirst]

Battle Bard was a big thing about 9 months ago.

It pretty much died out from serious raiding when the power of VoJ was properly realised.

[Tarien]

I really like the idea of a Bombing Saboteur Bard, but there aren't enough points to do that if I wanna grab the Bard ress. Hopefully it will be more viable next patch when bombs get buffed up!

Do bards have a combat res? If not don't worry about it, since you're only ressing out of combat it's easy enough to switch to a full bard spec after a fight, res, and switch back.

[Azuri]

Do bards have a combat res? If not don't worry about it, since you're only ressing out of combat it's easy enough to switch to a full bard spec after a fight, res, and switch back.

No combat res atm.

[Nedjen]

Do bards have a combat res? If not don't worry about it, since you're only ressing out of combat it's easy enough to switch to a full bard spec after a fight, res, and switch back.

I only have 4 roles: Tank, DPS, Bard and Grinding/etc. I would do that if I had a 5th role, so I could use the 5th slot to experiment/etc.

The build I'm using now is rather good actually, specially for trash, I could peak up to 2k dps in a large pack. Besides all the "Increases damage done/non-physical damage done" stuff in Nightblade tree, Heat Retention makes Coda of Fury actually interesting, even more if you debuff for 7%+ spell damage taken. Was critting for 1.6k-1.7k AoE. Too bad Heat Retention doens't affect Coda of Restoration, 30%+ healing would be rather nice.

Anyway, I have half Experts and some T1 gear on me, and it was doing rather decent. It was harder on boss fights, since keeping Motifs really dumbs the dps down. But I think I was doing around 700+ish dps in fights where I didn't need to use Coda of Restoration too much. Thath's a big improvement over my previous stupid DPS in a 51 bard tree.

On VoJ... I guess it's useful in progression raids and hard fights, and I don't think I'll be setting foot in HK any time soon, so not too worried about that. Didn't need to use it in any of the T1s I've done so far, so I can live without it atm.

This is the spec I've been going with: http://rift.zam.com/en/stc.html?t=0M...z.ihxMh0x.V.-5

It's really just for fun and to make dungeons less boring whenever I'm barding =)

[Weiland]

the whole bard b-rez is something i've been wanting for a long time... but it would be nice to see our combat debuffs rank higher than other classes bring more flavor and diversity to the rotation than spamming cadence and coda o resto.

[soniqboom]

you could try this build:

http://rift.zam.com/en/stc.html?t=0M...dqiqskqz.VMRou

im sure your raid will more than happy to have you keeping up "Piercing shot" which is the best armour debuff in the game whilst also keeping raid buffs going

use this macro to dps with while keeping up your motifs etc

#show crippling shot
cast piercing shot
cast shadow fire
cast Splinter shot
cast crippling shot
cast quick shot

headshot finisher for beastial wrath

[Nedjen]

Gonna try that out later, thanks =)

But why use Crippling? Isn't it weaker than Quick?

[Primalthirst]

Saboteur will also provide the same level of Armor Debuff as Piercing Shot in 1.8 (forget name of sab ability)

[wrists]

nice macro soniq

*edit
shouldnt shadow be first?

[Fencers]

Saboteur was fun for like the 2nd week of Rift. When 1 charge took out an entire wave of Guardians. Then it was like, Sabodancer4life and everyone got sick of that nonsense.

[Tarien]

nice macro soniq

*edit
shouldnt shadow be first?

Depends whether the armor reduction from piercing gives a bigger boost to shadowfire's damage than shadowfire gives to piercing shot.

[Nedjen]

But whyyyy do I need to use Crippling? =p

[Tarien]

But whyyyy do I need to use Crippling? =p

If no one else is, it's worth it on a boss/mob that needs killing quick.

[soniqboom]

Gonna try that out later, thanks =)

But why use Crippling? Isn't it weaker than Quick?

Crippling is higher dmg, 371-377 phys dmg for cripple and 335-339 for quick shot (cripple is on a 10 sec cd anyways) but its nice to nuke adds with so they cant run off to quick and spank a healer or something before a tank has time to grab em
Also in my guild I solo the balcony on the "Matron" in HK, its also really nice on "Zilas" for the mages that spawn.

also regarding the question about why not use Shadowfire first then piercing in the macro is simples:
your job is to debuff the boss / mob so you want piercing armour debuff up ASAP so the raid will benefit from it on the get go, unless your using the ranger crystal (which you wont be as bard) Shadowfire has a 2 sec cast time

[Nedjen]

Urgh, tried Gilded Prophecy with that spec >_< so clunky and weird, I couldn't track shit and got so lost with tracking Shadow Fire, Bestial Wrath, Motifs, Piercing shot and Codas. Not doing that again!