EQDiva

Many guilds I see require IM3 as a pre-requisite. It seems to me that since most bards have decent instruments but little (if any) singing mods and singing is used is so many places (PoV, SSoQ), that SM AA would be more useful. Comments?

The reason they emphasize IM is that more of our songs rely on instruments and the most important songs for raiding guilds are AE songs -- and for resists as well as mana/regen, they are instrument based, not singing based.

IM hands down. 3/4 of your songs are instrument based. You will get MUCH more out of IM than SM. Actually it not uncommon to see bards with 150aas and still not have SM3. That alone should answer your question. Also note that with amp, vots, and puretone you can easily hit the 3.6 mod max for singing without SM1.

SM3 would be good for Veeshan if you are in MT group though. If we have more than one bard on a raid (rare) we have one in MT group playing veeshan and the other does the AE for the rest of the raid... Although sometimes I am put in MT group and twist veeshan for us, ae resists for rest of raid and mana. Its sad that lag means I cant do Muse as well but resists are more important in PoP big fights I guess. I just got IM3 and only have SM1 so far. As soon as I get a few more AA I will finish off SM so that my veeshan will do the max it can do (another bard in guild with a gazillion AA - and therefore SM3 - has her partys resists around the 500 with veeshan and mine are only around the 400 with SM1). It will be one I plan on maxing. (I dont have VOTS or anything either...just epic and amp/puretone for singing mod).

I have 148 aa atm IM3 SM 2 Why.. that last point of SM does nearly nothing for your song amplifcation and its not a prerequisite for anything atm that is significant. Buy your instrument mastery first.. it will go further in increases your overall effectiveness than SM will.. Singing mastery will augment you but not enough to justify spending your first points on it.' In fact I didn't buy any of my singing mastery until after I had combat agility 3 .. personally i decided I'm 90% of the time in melee.. and dodging out of the way of a blow so it doesn't interrupt my singing is more important than 1 point of DS.