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Spoony Bard: Difference between revisions
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{{quote|''spoony \SPOO-nee\, ''adjective'':
1. Foolish; silly; excessively sentimental.
2. Foolishly or sentimentally in love.''
|'''Dictionary.com'''}}
Ah, the much-maligned bard class... For some reason, bards are very frequently unable to ever become anything useful. They are the butt of jokes, they are often [[Final Fantasy IV|beaten by old men with canes]], and sometimes their friends [[The Gamers|use a mountain of bard corpses as convenient cover]].
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It rarely works as intended. Bards usually become spoony when they run into one of two major problems:
* First, bards can often be an attempt at being a [[Jack of All Stats|jack of all trades]]. This may seem nice on paper - they can back up the powers of their specialized compatriots whenever a [[Plot Tailored to the Party|certain role is critically needed]]. If the party is undermanned, they may need someone who can fill two roles at once. Unfortunately, because [[Crippling Overspecialization]] is often not crippling in these games, [[Min-Maxing]] is implicitly encouraged. Even worse, because [[Linear Warriors, Quadratic Wizards]] means different classes progress at different rates and the monsters are built to be a challenge to those characters of the basic four specialized types, the bard is often [[Can't Catch Up|struck with abilities so underleveled by comparison as to make them completely useless]]. The '''Spoony Bard''' fails to become even a "jack" at all trades, only managing to become a [[Master of None]].
* Alternately, bards can be built to specialize in status effect abilities. This ''can'' often be a wonderful way to add a new role to the game, it's in [[An Adventurer Is You]] as "Buffers" and "Mezzers" for a reason. In games where enemies can have powers that disable your own characters, having a character that can disable them first, or provide your teammates immunity to their tricks is a great boon. This often falls flat, however, because the status effects in many games are actually [[Useless Useful Spell]]s. This problem is often exacerbated by having fairly short fights in many games where the standard [[Mook]] enemies you mow through are only meant to turn the game into an endurance match, anyway. A spell or song that gives a +30% attack bonus is only a useful bonus if you are actually going to attack at least four times with that status effect on - if not, congratulations, you just wasted a turn. Even if boss fights are fairly long, if the bard specializes in nothing but debuff spells, the enemy may be [[Contractual Boss Immunity|immune]], and the buff spells may simply not be useful enough to justify using a bard instead of another character.
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