Bard

[Dervy]

Also I'm tired of this anecdotal regurgitated 2.0 Bard crap. People were not stacking Bards because their output was better then every other job. Post the math on 2.0 Bard vs 2.0 Melee/Caster potential. I don't want to hear a I saw this, and I heard that. Prove it, don't sit there and regurgitate this crap that you have no proof for. If you're not going to prove it don't bother bringing it up.

Clearly someone never raided Hardcore back in 2.0.

People stacked x3 Bard, x1 DoM, or x2 Bard, x1 Monk x1 DoM, or x2 Bard x2 DoM in 2.0 because:
1) Bards only dealt 5% less than a Melee in a vacuum (No songs)
2) Melees had a lot of difficulty with mechanics due to the insane animations on Jumps and Monks only had one Cap Closer every 90s
3) GL3 only increased damage by 23%, Heavy Thrust was 10%, along with other abilities being very low Potency. Their DPS on paper was extremely low and due to their lack of mobility, people only ever ran 1 Melee at max.
4) SMN was broken as hell and easily top DPS if played correctly
5) Song Rotation. You stacked x3 bards because you could rotate each bard to play Foes, keeping it up 100% of the time making SMN DPS insanely high. And each Bard is rotating their songs, the lost DPS was very, very little.
6) T4 Speed-Clearing. Made it easier to AOE burn the Packs and was impossible to do it without a composition with x2 BRD x1 BLM in i70 DL.
7) T2 Allagan Rot. Before people discovered you could brute force T2, having a lot of Range helped spread/organise Allagan Rot much easier.
8) Bards scale the worst with gear each patch, due to their low WD. So back in 2.0, this wasn't even noticeable when people were pulling 290 DPS on content.

Remember, this was at HIGH-LEVEL, where people were dealing with content in Dark Light, not i90. This was September/October 2.0 Meta. Running x2 Bards to cycle songs along with their very good DPS (They had Blood for Blood, 20% IR) trivialised a lot of Mechanics for World 1st/Server 1st groups. It was after the 2.1 buffs/nerfs to classes, where people dropped stacking and went with x1 Melee, x1 Bard, x2 Mages as an "Optimal" composition.

Pls.