Luck of Heroes is the single best defensive feat in the game. It's only available at first level, but it should always be taken.
Anyway, I played a bard. I had 2 levels of blackguard (for the charisma saves.
I played as drow and maxed my starting dexterity, then kept pumping points into dexterity. I was able to get Perfect Two Weapon Fighting by level 21 or 22. I had Weapon Finesse, of course, and I used a rapier in one hand and a short sword in the other, both enchanted as high as possible. I was doing 10 attacks per round with something like +12d6 total elemental damage on each weapon, so I was doing hundreds of damage per round.
Bard is ludicrously overpowered. Get curse song as soon as possible . . . by the time you hit high bard levels, you're knocking off huge amounts of the enemies' AC and saves. It's the best debuff in the game, and I had 26 uses per day. Your courage inspiration is always on, and by the end of the game it's adding quite a bit to your damage and "to-hit" -- this is important, because that damage gets added to each attack, so w/ Perfect 2 Weapon Fighting a +4 to damage is actually +40 per round.
Plus as an epic bard you can get Song of Requiem and Hymn of Requiem. With the Lingering Song feat, Hymn of Requiem is just obscene . . . every single round, it does 15 damage to every opponent you can see and heals all your party members and yourself by 15 points. Moreover, it does sonic damage which doesn't get stopped by magic resistance and practically nothing is immune to. You can kill almost anything using just your songs.
Plus, you have some decent low-level spells (mirror image is wonderful, and you have lots of save-or-else spells that wouldn't be too useful except that with your curse song most enemies will have quite low saves).
The best thing about the bard, though, is that you have quite a few skill points, and lore, bluff, diplomacy, and spellcraft as class skills. These skills get checked very frequently in dialog, making the game much more interesting. The one downside for me was not having intimidate as a class skill, but I just saved up skill points and bought big chunks of it on my blackguard levels.