Melee Capabilities?

[FinalPhantasy13]

I've seen several bards around my server and can't help but notice that they can equip swords and other types of decent weapons. So how is their melee ability? Can they sing a song at the beginning of a battle then go and fight with the rest of the fighters or are they treated as whms and kept beyond the bounds of battle healing nonstop even though their songs last a certain amount of time? If there is another post describing this post the link because I couldn't find it. Thanks in advance

[{Pug}]

Bards can't be viewed at as a WHM if anything other than the fact that they need to be near the melees and the mages at different times casting spells. From my understanding, Bards can melee (I do) until lvl 24~25, when they learn mana songs. At that point, by the time you actually give 2 songs to the melee and 2 songs to the mages and debuff the enemy with threnodys, etc. then giving the melees a paeon near the end of battle, you really dont have time to fight. Pre mana songs, though, I have time to debuff and give melees buffs and whack the mob a few times before paeon. Hope that helps, but Teffie really is the one to be answering this.

[kino]

You do need to train your dagger skill, when your WS reach 125, you have the ability to suck mp. That is very important, release the WS when the mon about to release it's WS, you can suck about 60MP.

But your melee is not the concern of the party, make sure you finished all your job during each battle before you pull out your little knife. Normally, you will be very busy that you might not even have time to cast lots....but sometimes you do find opportunites to do a few hits during each battle. As long as your teammates each getting 2 songs they need and their HP are okay, don't forget to train your dagger skill.

[Malachite]

Bard melee damage is pretty much nonexistant from what i've found. Your melee skills basically fall back into our main role: support. That is if you're meleeing you have two choices(at higher levels):

1) Opening up another opportunity for magic bursts.

example: Your frontline consists of a Ninja tank doing Tachi: whatever and a thief doing viper bite for a renkei. You also have a 3rd melee, the monk, doing raging fists on his own.

So you'd have something like..
Monk readies Raging Fists.
Bard starts casting Wind Threnody.
Monk uses Raging fists for 250dmg.
Bard readies Cyclone(or gust slash if theres non-aggro enemies near).
Blm begins to cast Aero II.
Bard uses cyclone for 120dmg(hence why we're not a dmg job :p )
Skillchain: Distortion for 50dmg.
Magic burst! Magic burst for 300 or whatever it does.

It's just basic skillchain stuff, all we can do is open up another opportunity for magic burst.

2) MP Drain skill WS.
I'm not sure about the 175 dagger skill WS but the 150 one can drain about 70mp assuming they have enough mp(or any at all). This is great for when you want to cast curaga or cure 3. Though, with ballad 2 & 1 stacked you'll regain mp quickly. What I do is after i'm done singing i'll try to accumulate some TP so that if i'm below 50% MP i'll use Energy Drain to get my MP back quickly.

You can also use the drain move to take away a monster's MP but that doesn't work for everything. Sometimes the monster will have a ton of MP and 1 drain isn't going to do much. This tactic is mostly for monsters that run out of MP quickly. It's not something you really want to rely on either.

I'm partial to using weapons that enhance my bard skills(AF dagger, shellbuster, Monster signa) but there are many decent weapons we can use.

[Pilsbane]

I've only tinkered around with bard a little bit, but from what I have noticed the equipment they can use in the early levels is very similar to what a thief can use. They can use some swords, daggers, etc. and leather, bone, beetle armor.

They also get parry which helps a lot in the lower levels. The big difference between bards and thieves is thieves continue to get skills like evasion up and sneak attack to make them better fighters and all bards really get is songs.

So to picture the melee capabilities of a bard, imagine a thief minus all of his special abilities and attacks...which is rather lame. Their songs more than make up for it though. Bards are wonderful. I wish more people played bards.

[FinalPhantasy13]

Ok so melee for a bard is pretty much unneeded because they don't really have the time. Ok I have another quick question . Is it really bad for you to sub a fighter-type job instead o a mage-type with bard? I mean you don't get ANY Mp from bard so subbing mage would be like being a war/mage-type right? You wouldn't have a lot of MP and it would run out before you know it if you're acting as a healer. So why not boost melee skills along with def and hp with monk or war instead of barley getting enough MP to where you need to spend bunches of money on MP boosting accesories that are REALLY expensive?

P.S. Don't flame me for this just a question.

[KingTonberryIV]

aside from a thief's abilities like sneak or trick attack a bard has the same stats as a thief or a redmage. they are not as weak as mages. of course after a while they without sneak attack they become as weak as a redmage later on. but they can still fight. its not like they are summoners swinging a staff around.