"Bard's W costs 100 mana to heal 70 health after 10 seconds."

LOL Ok, let's reduce his mana cost on W to 50. Then you'll realize how insane his mana regeneration is from chimes.

His problem IMO is that it takes too many chimes to scale to the point that your passive is useful. It does excellent poke damage but the important bit, the aoe large slow, is hard to come by until really late game. They need to reduce the thresholds of chime requirements and then slightly slow the spawn rate. Improving where they spawn is also ideal. They can often spawn in the enemy jungle at 12 minutes where it's super fucking risky to collect them. I'd like to see the chimes grant a larger MS boost and then decay so that they are useful to collect during an escape.

His ultimate is situational, but his Q range needs to be buffed a little bit.

Apart from passive tweaks and range on Q I find he's in a good spot.

Potential Solutions

• Increase Chime spawns/safety or reduce requirements for bonuses
• Increased Q range
• Make his W more mana efficient by increasing the movement speed bonus over the duration as well

These are just a few solutions I've thought of. I think overall Bard is in a good spot, but his weakness in his mana inefficient W is his biggest problem. It's movement speed doesn't scale, has shit base heal, and takes 10 seconds to heal for a half decent amount. The tradeoff of leaving it somewhere doesn't matter because past super early levels the heal amount is literally irrelevant. The main reason I believe the cost is so high is because otherwise he'd spam it too much because of the insane mana regen his chimes offer. However, they can provide additional incentive to let it charge by increasing the MS over time and buffing the bases a little. I mean really, there's ZERO reason to max it second because it's base and scaling is so shit. Sure the travel time on E is kinda nice but the main reason I max it second is because W is useless to put points into.

Edits:

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Riot could also have it charge quicker based on CDR. So if it's a 10 second charge, max CDR will have it charge in 6 seconds.

Just an idea.

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They need to change the shrines in general. Come late game, you either

A: Plop them on someone for a speed boost B: Put them down, and hope someone grabs it before the team shifts to a different location

Ain't nobody got 10 seconds late game.

These are both good ideas, I think the full heal should scale down with rank in W. 10 seconds at rank 1, 2 seconds at rank 5.

10/8/6/4/2.

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The flat heal on his heal for target casting it should scale better with AP IMO. Right now he's not really incentivised to build ANY stat, so people just go tanky CDR. Also giving the heal a different effect with target casted on an enemy would help him out a lot too.

I've been thinking about this for a while. I think his W should slow and reveal enemies if they run across one. That would make it useful to ward brushes with.

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Top suggestions I've come across:

W-give it %max health healing, lower the time to charge.

Passive-lower meep scaling increments to every 4th chime.

I do like these but changing too many things at once is a great way to turn Bard into Yasuo.

I think for now optimizing where chimes spawn (Don't spawn in enemy jungle until later in the game, chimes don't spawn until 1:40 but more of them spawn at once. This prevents chimes spawning top/mid if you donate shrines early in game) and fixing his heal mana inefficiency would go a long way. Give it a decent ap scaling, and reduce charge time either by rank or by CDR.