opinions needed. smn or brd

[pandabearcat]

I got both to 50 and geared, and here are my thoughts.

DPS wise : don't kid yourself, and don't worry about it. Both are solid.
Bard: the most boring class ever. Just, so boring T.T
Summoner: Sucks butt when in a group with other summoners. You will kill your eyes looking for your dots, but experience will go a long way alleviating dot annoyance. You get used to it

Utility: manasong + rain of death vs instares + eye/virus + aoe LB
Kinda a toss up. Bard is boring utility, summoner is more reactive fun utility. Bard also goes out of TP quickly keeping up rain of death. Needs another bard to TP song.

Mobility: bard is still king here. Summoner loses SOME, but a very small margin, at the tradeoff of mana use, when on the move. Not a big issue for either.

AoE: Summoner has much better AoE and AoE utility (bind), along with the ability to do 100% dps to the boss while still pumping out their AoE dps. Not shabby at all. Bards can AoE 8 times before they're complete out of TP. Realistically, that means 4-6 times, minus procs.

Final thoughts: People will ask for bard more often than summoner, because manasong is very nice. However, super unbelievably boring. Summoners are fine dpswise and utilitywise, and more people are wising up to the fact that they're a great class.