Please devs, bards need a lot of work. I'm glad to see you fix the song of heroism, but making the Sustaining Song single target, while maybe wai, was not necessary. With the combination of the shorter duration of songs, or rather the loss of song duration enhancements, the song doesn't last very long. (between 3-4 mins between my pure and multiclassed bards) Making it single target means that with 3 casters in the group, (typicallly a cleric, arcane, and myself) I'm singing the song 3 times to cover everyone every three minutes. Combined with some of the other songs, that means I'm singing constantly. I can't do anything else. Please consider making Sustaining song multitarget, and please consider giving bards the means to lengthen the songs.

Other suggestions include some sort of boost to cha, or even a short term cha based boost to myself and members of the party for damage or saves. Clerics get cha boost to damage in Warpriest (tier 1!) but Warchanter doesn't get anything anywhere near as useful. Even my PDK knight can rally everyone with bonuses to saves and "For Comyr!" gives the cha bonus to damage *to the entire party* making him a darn sight more useful than the bard's Inspire song which gives +4 (or 5, I don't remember offhand) to damage in epic levels. (As opposed to +20 or more from a cha based PDK toon. But even a dumped cha PDK knight can manage +8 or so) Skaldic rage is nice flavor, but +4 in epic levels is essentially unnoticeable, especially to a class with no other real melee bonuses. Perhaps skaldic rage could scale with level, but I think a cha based boost makes more sense overall as it would scale with advancement automatically as the player levels and increases cha. It would allow melee bards to still be bards in respect to other cha based skills like charms and umd that are based on cha.

Thanks also for shortening the singing time on some of the songs. That was a great idea and much appreciated! I would suggest also shortening the cooldown however, as it's much, much longer than the singing time and there's really no need to have any cooldown on songs at all.

The two biggest frustrations right now other than just being overall so much weaker than every other class, is the constant singing of songs, and the large amounts of broken songs.

Thanks for considering this.