I am thinking of dropping my enchanter once I hit 60 and rolling a bard for raid purposes since my guild is in need of one to show up to the majority of our raids. I would however keep my enchanter for dungeon crawls because of all the utility they bring. Would it be possible / worthwhile to box ranger / cleric / bard on a raid?
If you play all three of those on a raid one of them is going to fall behind. You'll forget to postition/dispell rebuff/melee on Skratching, you'll miss a CH with Barrel or your bard will be ignored in the back singing mana song and not being able to twist the resists you need. I have been trying to 2 box more on raids in one part to make things less hectic and in another part to reduce reliance on my alts. It's been pretty nice. If I were you I might try to just 2box Ranger/Bard on raids and 3 box your others when grouping.
Bards are one of those classes that unless focused on, don't provide the utility needed by the raid. If you two box like Lenas said, you can twist resists + mana easy enough with a macro while switching to your ranger to position. It will be hectic, though. The beauty of cleric/enchanter boxes are the ease to cast and swap back to your melee.
Come Luclin and PoP, there's room for both bard bots and bard mains. A bard bot that sings only drums AE Resists or lute AE Chorus or drums HoS/OoS on your target, or PoV for a main tank group is a large benefit to the raid. Even though they're only doing that one thing. Granted a main bard can twist AE Chorus, AE Resists, HoS and PoV if they were really dedicated to it. Replacing 3-4 bard bots. In Velious, having 1 bard per group for Group resists or group cantata is even helpful. Enchanter bots, while incredible in dungeons, are basically useless on most Velious and Luclin raids.
This was pretty much my reasoning. I am going to use the heck out of my enchanter while leveling and dungeon crawls but he does not do much in raids. Currently we have one bars that is a main but he is not on all that much. Giving ourselves that extra resist song would help our melee group tremendously.
