Why have people considered Blade kit Bards so great?

[Endarire]

Greetings, all!

Why have people considered Blade kit Bards so great?  I haven't seen a great point in putting a dual wielding Bard in melee.

Thankee!

[rigidjelly]

Spins provide modest situational boosts.

Dual wielding is useful to increase applications of on hit effects (FoA slow) and without a backstab multiplier like thieves is a reliable way to boost damage output.

Bard xp/level table (at least in bg2) means they will cap mirror images much earlier and have 1-3 more stoneskins per cast.

Higher level means much less likely to be dispelled due to punishing dispel mechanics. Suck it F/M stans.

Can use simulacrum helm to have a song active without sacrificing action economy.

Use any item. God tier HLA.

Only lose pickpocket vs. unkitted bards which is only ever useful to steal (some people think any stealing at all is cheese) and can be buffed with stacks of thievery pots.

Haer'Dalis is probably most peoples first introduction to blades which may skew perspective since he gets extra illegal proficiencies and some resistances for being a tiefling.

Big flute.

[jmerry]

A lot of people are big fans of the arcane melee archetype - defending with spells, attacking with weapons. Blades are the best single-class implementation of that, with Offensive Spin for bursts of attacking power and dual-wielding potential that other bards don't have. I don't care for the style myself, but it's definitely a thing; a properly buffed arcane melee character is just about the strongest possible combatant for short bursts. Then those buffs run out, and they cost you daily resources, so you don't have the sort of endurance a conventional warrior has.

[Thacobell]

Blades are the best single class magic tanks that can also dish out damage in melee. You need multiclasses to do most of what a bard does, and its spins are fantastic.

[InKal]

bard levels very quickly, so he can cast high level remove magic much earlier than actual mages which makes him really quite cheesy in my opinion and very popular choice for "powergamers" soloing the game. He is actually a fighter mage more then bard, coz its easier to implement spells then cap the spells at level 5, slower his spell progression, give him much less spell slots and instead give him a couple of different songs to learn like they were trying to do in IWD 2 something like this, I mean make bard to be the real bard.