Bard's Winrate is 35%

Bard is quite different from most other "conventional" supports, and is not particularly suited to the Solo-queue playstyle. Leaving your lane partner to be a pseudo-jungler for a short amount of time causes a lot of havoc for your ADC, who is reliant on having someone else in lane solely so that they are not left to 1 v 2 and fall behind, or get dived and killed while you are away roaming. If your roaming did not gain enough, or had an unsuccessful gank, then you have put your team behind.

All of his scaling is wrong. Everything moderately useful scales off AP, but doesn't scale well with it. None of his CC or Utility Scales with AP, 3 of his abilities don't deal any damage, nor do they provide any CC.

To compare him to Soraka would be a huge compliment for him to say the least.

It's like his W, E and R were meant to have Passives or something and Riot forgot to add them.

EDIT: And why base a Support around roaming when he has no CC to even make use of it?

Bard's problem is that his kit is filled with potential that is only useful if you're part of some psychic mindweb controlling five champions at once with clockwork precision. Outside of that situation, his kit is basically useless on its own, scales abysmally, and requires an excessive amount of work to get even a moderate amount of applicable utility.

The biggest offender is his Chimes. Someone did the math and it takes an hour of straight collecting to max out on the utility of that ability. An hour. And you have to grab every single chime that pops up, including the inevitable ten inside of the enemy's fountain.

Its a mix of being a hard to support to use effectively while also being picked by way, waaaaay too many baddies that like trying new champs right away. Seriously, stop using new champs in ranked and feeding, people.

As stuartkn said, his play style is different from what people are used to, in a way which is similar to Gnar, who also has a unique mechanic. Its going take some more time for the koreans to figure out how to use Bard to his max potential and get him nerfed to the ground.

He is too much dependant on team mates, while this should be good, in his case is a damnation because he has 0 tools to make succesful (and meaningful) plays by himself.

Also he is kinda new so players, allies and enemies don't know how to deal with him much.

His winrate is also pretty low in team ranked, but that can be attributed to people figuring him out.

Bard can be wonderful, he can be really strong with communication, the biggest issue right now is that chimes just don't give enough for the amount of pressure you give up when roaming, I /love/ the rest of his kit, it's just that he doesn't get much for leaving lane and roaming around, something other meta supports can and do do better.

His winrate is low because people don't know how to play him yet. Give him a couple of fucking weeks would you?

He has a playstyle very different from what many people outside of professional play are actually used to.

I see him being a high pick/ban when he goes live for LCS.

**1. Bard is EXTREMELY situational. ** As a support, he falls into a generally "sub-par" category due to: a. Weak Heals (Shrines heal less than Kayle/Nid/Raka, and only slightly more than Alistar/Sona - who heal multiple targets) b. Lack of RELIABLE escape c. Lack of RELIABLE CC (Short range slow 9) d. Lack of damage ( Soraka: 101 at 18, Sona: 101 at 18, Bard: 97 at 18) e. Poor lane presence (due to a need to gather chimes to compensate for low mana regen (13.7 at 18) and only an average mana pool (1200 at 18) ff. Poor scaling (with the exception of 100+ chimes)

2. Bard isn't fit for solo-queue Because of his kit, unless your team knows when to expect an ult/tunnel - your hard work is mostly self-serving. There is a good chance that your shrines/tunnels will go unused. This means your two "bread and butter" spells are wasted on solo-queue. Attempting to use the Bards ult in solo-queue is also problematic and due to lack of communicated positioning - leads to more deaths than kills. Furthering these issues, is his "weaknesses" that are the penance for having such powerful "gank potential". These include low mana regen, low health, and low damage. Also, he's surprisingly slow - only 5MS faster than Sona/Soraka/Lulu (325MS) and 5MS SLOWER than Kayle/Leona/Morgana/Thresh/Janna, AND 10MS *SLOWER *than Taric (340MS).

3. Spell issues In addition to the aforementioned problems (low scaling, lack of reliability, lack of damage), Bard is just plain awkward (or what LoL Scholars are calling awkBard). This is because his spells cause him more trouble than they're worth. Consider the following: ** Q** - has a very slow projectile (compared to a Lux Q, Morgana Q, Thresh Q) and is short ranged - putting a squishy support in a precarious situation for a "potential" stun (but more likely only a 60% slow). For this reason, other supports with longer range and more reliable CC are eating Bard alive when he goes in for a stun (Taric, Leona, Morgana, Thresh, Blitz). ** W** - has a wait time for maximum heal effectiveness (up to 45% heal after 10 seconds). Because NO team-mate is 100% predictable (nor should they have to be) you're often forced to use your heal "instantly", dropping your W scaling from 45% down to a measly 20%. Unless you're~~ building AP Bard~~ planning on feeding - you're not going to have enough AP to make this heal worthwhile - and your teammate will still probably die. ** E** - There are a number of "unexpected situations" you'll encounter with this spell. For starters, you're not immune to ANYTHING while you are in it. Basically you're silencing yourself to travel through a wall. Enemies can still AA you, CC you (or pull you if they're skilled enough, after-all you're moving in a pretty predictable path). You're also still susceptible to AOE ults (Lux, GP, Ziggs, etc). Additionally, it's enemy-usable and fairly obvious (bright gold warning prior to becoming traversable) ** R** - On the subject of bright gold warnings, the stasis ult is an EXTREMELY awesome spell. But with it's long cooldown, slow projectile, and BRIGHT GOLD WARNING - you'll have a hard time landing it against anyone who's not "standing" directly in the center when you cast it. Timing it on moving targets can be done, but they still have an opportunity to react, and will often stop/dodge to evade it.

Anyway, this is just my 2c about Bard - and why I believe he'll receive a buff of some sort in the patches to come. Best wishes to you all! And have mercy upon you!

Edit: Just type first! and put the correct answer, and I shall sing your praises as actually being an intelligent person on the forums.

Edit 2: Put what you voted for next to first!

1. He has high potential to be OP so Riot was careful with him and released him maybe little less stronger than he could be.
2. He is out for 5 days. Hardly enough time for to master him. (unless you play 24/7)
3. People playing with him and against him have to learn what he can and cannot do. (similar to thresh and his lantern)

I'd appreciate some little buffs to his Q or/and passive. But otherwise he is decently balanced.

{quoted}

Wanna take a guess why? +1 interwebz for the first person that doesn't give me a bullshit answer.

If you put something like, "+1 interwebz for the first person that doesn't give me a bullshit answer." Then everyone who answers different from you by definition who puts a different answer than what you want is a bullshit answer. It's a subjective pre-arrived plan that you won't accept answers that you don't agree with.

Aside from that, he's not been out that long, and he has a high skill cap. However, I would say that his w shouldn't have a cap, because it's extremely situational, and you basically have the choice of placing 1 in each of the 3 quadrants of the map for it to do anything if you're roaming.

His r should silence enemies for a short time upon exit, and speed up allies on exit. Because right now if the enemy is immobile, they get destroyed by it. If they are mobile with dashes so on and so forth, your team has to have time to stack up on that person if they don't want that person escaping.

It just seems like his strengths aren't strong enough to make up for his giant weaknesses.

His late game isn't that bad, but seriously 330 base movement speed for a squishy support with a big size, avarage/long cast times, low range, lame heal scale, and low base hp makes him one of the worst champions in the laning phrase. Balance heal , and give him +10-15 base speed, and longer speed buff from shine (i'd recommend 2,4 sec instead of 1,5), but 10%lower (~50% instead of 60), or just simply make his shine buff speed lenghten his passive chime buff speed.