A Bards point of view.

[ispano]

Well, number 2 is fairly irrelevant, as the only people who can tell that you DPS has dropped by whatever small amount are those that run DPS parsers, which you can report anyway if they start calling you on it.

What? Ballad and Paeon both reduce your outgoing damage by 20%. No one needs a parser to know that the bard who is playing Ballad or Paeon, good reason or not, is reducing their dps.