My bard observations...

[Neplak]

hehe well true...
Of course you can melee and heal, but if melee and heal you either do it with ballads and do it even worse damage, or you do it with melee songs up and miss out on mp regen to be able to heal better

[SyNapSe]

I rarely melee anymore. I do if I can melee w/o hurting the group.. just for skillups mainly.

CN: Exorays and Hornflies - It's an awful idea for me to melee against either of these.

Quicksand Caves: Anticans I can melee against, but they use an annoying area silence effect, so I normally don't. Beetles can be melee'd with no worry, but they have the highest natural defense EVAR! I honestly probably contribute more TP for the mob than I do damage.

Also, most of the time I've got too many songs to melee for more than a round or two. Unless it's Beetle's.. which fights can last a while if you don't have a BLM.

[Severian]

I had another question that i didnt really feel was worth a whole new topic.. so imma ask in this thread..

I have a brd/whm who is taru. i do very low damage with a sword now. I do see myself doing melee from now on till im useless with that. But would changing to say a Stave or a Club for the status boost be a bad idea? maybe the extra +mind from the club or the +hp/mp from a stave? Or should i just stick with sword?

[xarddrax]

If you keep you skill maxed it isnt hard to melee and heal. I was in Garalige basement fighting Beetles with a party, and even with those beeltes and thier high evasion i was still able to build TP up to preform SC. We were able to do 3 SC in a row with 4 people. I was using my AF dagger since my dagger skill is maxed, but i would switch to shellbuster to build my club skill too (when i got bored) Now since my club skill is so low, id only hit about 2-3 times per battle, but id get .3-.5 increase in skill when i was lucky.

[Talonus]

As of lately, I've been meleeing more often than not. My set pt has a blink tank, so healing is not incredibly needed. The only reason we group whms is for haste really. If we grab a rdm and a whm, I'll normally end up with nothing to do after songs.

In that case, I'll just normally start attacking the mob. The way I setup songs, I'll always have ballad+madrigal on me, so I can hit and gain mp. I don't do great damage, but neither do I expect to. In fact, I use a lower level dagger specifically because it procs defense down. Monks get so giddy when they see defense down hit the mob, especially since our ninja dual wields two katanas with that proc.