Bard class design - how and what? What armor/resource/combos?

I'm sure this topic has been started billions of time already, but this one is mine.

EDIT: I originally thought bard should be a mail class, since they are kinda like hunters, but then someone pointed out they will probably make Tinkers mail class, and Bard should be leather, so I have to agree, and it does make more sense for bard to have no metal parts in his armor, for clanking not to mess with this audio performances..

Weapon preference - I believe bard should be a dramatic flamboyant and expressive MELEE fighter, making him more distinct from the ranged hunter / evoker and mostly-ranged shama. It should be a style not unlike Outlaw - swashbuckling with mace or blade, like a self-taught duelist and tavern brawler. As the long running joke goes, bard also does the cooking and cleaning for the party (meaning, they're the least useful one in the group, so the chores are routinely dumped on them). Them being good in a brawl would be a justification of sorts for actually having him among the heroes. He can not only string two verses together, but also can pin a spider down with his rapier and knock an ogre out with his mace.

Then, I believe he should have Inspiration resource - it would act similarly to rage, but it would gather up slower than rage, and be spent entirely on his next inspiration spending attack. The point here would be that they could use ALL of inspiration, but there is no minimum requirement of inspiration to use the abilities. To make abilities truly strong, he would wait for more inspiration and then use it in one big oomph.

Another big point of mine is to make the Inspiration resource different from Rage by making it gather significantly slower. You have to ACTUALLY build it up, before you spend it. To that end, I believe a bard should have VOCAL lines ingame, like NPC text lines, to say when the character is feeling inspired "I'm feeling INSPIRED" to give other players the queue that a big inspiration spender is coming, so that they may have a moment to prepare.

Similar to Evoker, the BUFF side of things for Bard would be to provide boosts to the party - The more inspiration the greater the effect. I really like the idea of having very short but very noticeable buffs - such as, restoring half resources to full resources several times over, depending on inspiration amount. Imagine retri paladin getting 6 holy power at the same time. A bard cannot restore his own inspiration with this buff, instead, his cooldown abilities that generate inspiration don't have a cooldown for a set duration, helping them to build up some of the inspiration resource.

In terms of abilities, bard would heavily favor showy and good looking abilities, that look almost impractical compared to rogue who is all business, and warrior who is all SMASH. I imagine striking a pose during abilities, or immediately after them, skipping the next autoattack, would be totally in Bard's style. I also imagine parry being Bard's main defensive focus - parrying and riposting like a true showman. To the point about sound effects, i envision when bard strikes a pose in one of his moves, there is a sound effect of the crowd cheering at some point. Big cooldowns for bard would have him stop attacking, take out his preferred instrument and playing something energetic which would give a party buff at full strength for the duration of regular dps cooldowns, or a defensive buff that gives a multiple different effects, but that are smaller than, say, a specialized party max health shout from a warrior. So while a warrior's party defensive cooldown may give everyone 15% health for 10 seconds, a Bard's defensive cooldown, gives the party 5% max health, 5% damage reduction, 10% dodge chance, making everyone immune to slows and roots for 3 seconds, like a mini hand of freedom, and recovering 5% max mana/15% energy/giving 15 rage/15 runic power. So it's a salad of weaker versions of dedicated buffs.

Needless to say this class would be a repeat of the disaster of the augmentation evoker, which completely broke everyone's expectation of dps and broke the game in terms of what is possible, and would give blizzard nightmares to implement properly, and have the effect of your efforts being visible ingame. Maybe someone needs to finally evolve the addons that calculate DPS to show who is responsible for providing that boost - if your boost provided the party extra 15% of overall dps, there should be a metric showing your contribution. Another big nightmare is how this class would work solo. A bard without an audience is a sad bard.