Originally Posted by
treehumper
Why try to give potential Bards their own buffs? Why not make their songs enhance already existing buffs? Give them a repertoire of abilities like this: One that enhances flask potency, one that enhances beneficial buff potency, one that enhances DoT duration, one that enhances healing effectiveness, etc. All of these could be set up to be done within a certain range of the Bard or as a forward facing cone. Give them the ability to have three active at a time, something like this: one vocal and two instrumental, say melody and harmony, and the instrumental are interrupted by movement. Weapons would be instruments, and it wouldn't be so much pew pew as tralalalala anyway. Make it all stacked and DoT-based, where the more ticks you get in a period of time the stronger the buff/ability would be (this would apply to both beneficial and damage song combinations). You could get critical ticks and haste would definitely play a role. You could even base this on either attack power or spell power, or one for either spec, take your pick.
For specs, you can have one that centers on melee survivability, with songs centered on enhancing melee and tanks (enhancing heals received, melee-only haste, etc) while you could have another that helps ranged... slightly more haste, mana regen, healing effectiveness, DoT duration, etc having better ranged survivability (slightly enhanced run speed and possibly ranged mitigation). I don't know about a third spec, maybe a mixture of the two? The class's DPS could count as DoTs themselves (WoW bosses are known to hate hair band rock ballads).
Give them a Hero/Lust equivalent: Rock Band. The raid benefits from the Hero/Lust haste ability and the Bard's abilities would stack more and be more potent during the time the ability is active.