What kind of support should bard become?

"Bard is a great roamer" - this is what you will read on the pro's list of pretty much every bard guide you will find right now. And I have to agree after having played several games with him. He roams, he grabs his chimes, then he roams harder. Awesome. But what does roaming really do for your team in the long run? Well, a few things...

1. It grants vision through warding, and champion sight.
2. It may give you the opportunity to help out a jungler or mid laner early game.
3. If you know your wave science, you can quickly set up a pressure wave in a lane with his meep passive.

But in general, I think having a champion that specializes in roaming might be a bigger problem than benefit, and here are my reasons why:

1. Squishy + Roamer = bad. Bard is SUPER squishy, and if you run into anyone in the jungle with more base movement than you, or any kind of hard or persistent CC, you're not making it away from them unless you land your tricky stun, or you make really good use of your magical journey somehow. I won't say I'm the best player NA of course, far from it. But IMO, randomly walking about the jungle face checking bushes on a super squishy champ = feeding.

2. If you're not with your ADC then your ADC has to 2v1. If your ADC is ahead, this is fine. And maybe even a good thing since they will soak up solo lane XP. But as a general rule, you can't just be absent from lane roaming all of the time, your lane won't win that way.

3. You aren't getting as much gold as you could be. Chimes don't give any gold, and no matter what gold item you've got, you're losing gold by not being near minions and your ADC. This also goes for the gold per kill mastery skill too.

4. "omg we lost team fight, where the hell was bard?" Late game in team fights, you are less likely to be where you need to be when you need to be there.

Those problems aside, I still feel like bard has another major issue. It seems that he is a new kind of support. He isn't a mage, a tank, or a healer. Which are the three general classifications for supports right now.

Why bard isn't a mage His AP ratios are very low, so building , , and on him at the same time still don't give him relevant damage late game on his meeps, or his Q. Also, it is difficult for him to poke in lane with such a small HP pool and low def base stats.

Why bard isn't a healer Once again, he has low AP ratios, and his only healing spell's cooldown is far too high, and positioning too unreliable to make him known as a healer like .

Why bard isn't a tank He doesn't scale well off of tanky items either. I've seen a few people try it, it doesn't usually work out that well for them. They die just as fast as one without tank items. He also lacks any kind of tanky abilities or passives as well. I just put this here, for completion, it was obviously not riot's intention to make him anything like or .

So what kind of support is bard? Well, I think riot's plan here was to make his relevance pretty much 100% utility. The first in his class i think. The core items on him seem to be , , and . None of which really bring a lot of raw power to a team fight or to a laning phase. His main focus seems to be mobility, and small to moderate CC.

Why I don't think this is good enough The lack of being either a damage absorber, or a damage dealer in a team fight, coupled with the very real possibility that he may not even be present for a team fight makes for the distinct feeling of the game being a 4v5 fairly often.

What could be done to make him more relevant? First of all, those chimes need to appear much more often on your own side of the jungle than your enemy's. And they need to appear way more between bot and mid rather than top lane in the beginning. Other than that, I have four ideas for directions to take him:

1. Make his AP scale harder This would make him more of a magey AP support like a or . Now I know what you're going to say... "But should a champion that mobile really be able to deal damage too?" and my answer to that would be "."

2. Make his Meeps scale harder I think they could do a lot more. They could extend the range of his Q, increase the movement speed buff from his shrines, increase the healing on his shrines, scale harder off his AP, just have more damage in general, have a lower cooldown to spawn in (maybe based on CDR).

3. Make him scale into an AD/AP hybrid support If the meeps spawned faster based on attack speed, and he had slightly higher defensive stats, he could be more effective at poking/engaging in lane and would be more relevant in team fights.

4. Take his utility to the next level In keeping with the idea of having a purely utility/roaming kit, I think I like this set of ideas the best (pick a few of them, not all of them of course):

• Allow his shrines to grant vision. • Make the meeps placable like wards (but not count as wards. What good is all that roaming if you can only place a standard 3 wards + vision ward?) • Leave a vision trail behind him after collecting a chime that lasts for say 30 seconds. • Make his Q range longer • Make his base movement speed slowly scale off of meeps too • Make the temporary move speed buffs from chimes last just 2 or 3 seconds longer. Sometimes you lose that buff JUST before you hit the next one. • Allow you to assign a meep to your ADC similar to how can assign her pixie, allow it to perform CC with autos for several seconds. This may allow you to leave lane a little easier. • Use a meep to turn invisible, break/prevent a CC, spell shield/mitigate damage, or leave a clone like in case you run into some unfortunate circumstances while roaming. • Use a meep to grant vision in a bush or around a corner so you don't run into enemies in the jungle in the first place. • Collecting a chime could grant you X-Ray-vision for a short time so your vision can see into bushes and around walls (like 's ability) • Increase move speed buff on shrines with champion level, or on skill level, or on meep level. • Reduce travel time on his ultimate. It's very difficult to protect against other global ultimates if you have to throw it within half of a second of the other global starting for it to reach in time.