The Bard is the only class Game of Gods added to the eight archetypes the game already had, and it came with the update itself. The official class table in the snapshot from 11 October 2011 does not know the Bard yet; two weeks later it is sitting there, and the patch notes for build 3.0.0.13 — the build 3.0 shipped on — announce it outright: Kanians, Xadaganians, Elves and Orcs can become one. The developer diaries had presented the class as part of Episode II all along.
Who can play one
There are four Bards, two per faction. The League has the Kanian Skald and the Elven Minstrel, the Empire the Xadaganian Agitator and the Orcish Balladeer. Gibberlings and the Arisen have no Bard at all.
What separates them is more than the name. The Skald is a grim fighter and a loud singer, equally good at composing something vicious about the enemy and at putting the heart back into tired soldiers, and his blade can pin a man where he stands. Minstrels are reckoned the sweetest voices in Sarnaut, and their weapons shine so brightly that a hit blinds. Agitators are just as convincing from a podium as from a stage or a back alley in Nezebgrad, and the man arguing with one risks losing the power of speech for a long while. Balladeers sing street songs — freedom, thieves’ romance and a good brawl — take on shady work happily, and put people down with moves nobody expects in an honest fight.
How it works
The Bard wears leather and carries one-handed swords, maces, spears, axes, daggers and wands. Its real instrument, though, is the musical one: a Bard fights by performing, while the weapon supplies stats and comes into play in a handful of separate abilities. There is no special class resource — nothing like Combat Advantage or magic instability — and no dedicated interface for one either: abilities cost energy, and the damage is mostly magical rather than physical.
Its comfortable fighting range is about twenty metres, which is where most of its abilities are designed to work, and closer than that is exactly where a Bard would rather not let anyone get.
Its role in a group
The Bard is support. It is the only class that carries the complete set of blessings: health and mana, the regeneration of both, physical damage and magical damage. Individual effects of that kind exist on other classes, but nobody else has the whole set. On top of it comes a unique ability that raises the maximum health of a chosen target.
Handing out blessings is not the whole of the class, though. The Bard heals itself and its allies respectably, blocks control effects and strips them, and has a couple of tricks of its own: a pull that drags an opponent straight into melee, which is worth a great deal in team fights, and an area fear that catches several enemies at once.
None of it is hard to learn, which makes the Bard a sound pick for a new player, but in capable hands it turns into a genuinely unpleasant opponent in both PvP and PvE. Where the Bard sits in the full race-by-archetype matrix, and what to measure it against, is on the classes page; practical advice on groups and raids is collected in the guides.
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