Mirror Image is defensive, shouldn't need it on your Bard.
There are melee bards, you know.
there are only melee bards.
yosharian just doesn't getit, probably thinks bard is some useless dude standing in back plinking crossbow and giving song bonus; not a brutal 1.5 bab gish multiclass capable (although even that is not necessary) machine throwing buffs on everyone and packing best defensive spells in the game to the boot + all the feats from combat tricks and so on so on
I also used to stick to standard archetypes (and honestly prefer to, since unlimited multiclassing just leads to retarded looking character builds) but in the end it's all just adding numbers together and bard has some great numberz.
Bard is really the only class I personally consider mandatory for a perfect balanced highest difficulty party.