All I ever wanted was the truth. Remember those words as you read the ones that follow. I never set out to topple my father's kingdom of lies from a sense of misplaced pride. I never wanted to bleed the species to its marrow, reaving half the galaxy clean of human life in this bitter crusade. I never desired any of this, though I know the reasons for which it must be done. But all I ever wanted was the truth.
I think Bards absolutely could be serious. They don’t need to be an edgy “Grr im a soldier created for nothing but war” to be serious.
The earlier concept of using the radiant song to generate memories/echos of past heroes & events works well with what’s been established in-lore with the radiant song and can be taken seriously.
This from the guy that once said the D&D's dragonborn race is popular because furries like to sexualize them.
But, as usual regarding bards, you're wrong. The class design is not tongue-in-cheek at all, and is quite serious, actually.
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Can you show us doing that in the game with our characters?
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It has not. There is no "ETC-style bard" in WoW. All bards in WoW follow the traditional fantasy trope of the concept, as demonstrated to you many times over.
"Torturing someone is not an evil thing to do if it is done for good reasons" by Varodoc
"You sit in OG/SW waiting on a Mythic+ queue" by Altmer <- Oh, the pearls in this forum...
"They sort of did this Dragonriding, which ushered in the Dracthyr race." by Teriz <- the BS some people reach for their narratives...
Monks aren’t as silly/whimsical as you’re trying to make them to be.
I doubt Bards are going to be starting at level 1-10 when the expansion launches. There’s no point to doing such now that every expansion comes with a level boost. Blizzard will probably do what they did with Evokers and have them start out going in the expansion they’re introduced in & lower them down to level 10 after that expansion.
Bards being empowered by Azeroth and using the Radiant Song to conjure images of heroes (for example) is plenty to be a hero class either way.
I can see Bard NPCs like Russell Brower show up in the class. Lorewalker Cho can work for the storytelling side too.
Whatever blizzard wants their rotation to be. Unlike you I’m not going to pretend to be a class designer when I’m not.
A cool idea I had on paper would be for Blizzard to give them a different take on the empower mechanic.
Perhaps one ability to start the cast and other abilities that’ll either set the empower level and/or add effects.
Thematically it’d be starting a song (or story) and the abilities are different “notes” in the song or parts of the story.
And there it is. There's the admission this entire thread was basically just bait to dunk on Bards and people who like Bards versus Tinker. This was never an actual class concept, it was a bait thread to get people to argue with him about why Bards are really stupid and since they're stupid they should be a weird cow with a guitar because since it's all stupid we should go with the stupidest version. Good lord.
Maybe auto shot/auto attack could play a steady rhythm pattern of chords (the harmony) and then when you use your abilities it plays the lead with single notes on scales (the melody) on top of the rhythm. It would then be up to Blizzard to design the abilities in such a way that your rotation would play an actually pleasing tune rather than a cacophony of nonsense sounds.
For example, if it is optimal to use certain abilities in a certain order (as per most rotations) then they could assign the notes to those abilities with the advance knowledge of what order you would be playing those notes in, to produce an actual piece of music. If ability 1 produces an A note, ability 2 produces a B note, ability 3 produces a C note, and so on, then they could design that rotation to match a sequence of notes. Due to there being 7 notes, the bard would necessitate 7 ability rotations. Different music would be produced by different builds, specs, and hero talents, since those will usually modify your rotation.
A bard class would be cool. In FFXIV there are music events and guilds