The Bard Tamer

A bard tamer is an extremely powerful character, Barding and taming are enormously powerful skills. The bard pits tough creatures against other tough creatures, and the dragon power of tamers is amazing. In combination this one character can do things that half a dozen mages or melee fighters could only dream of.

Since this is such a skill point intensive character, most tamer bards carry little or no Veterinary, which means that you have to keep your pet healed with G-heal spells

And Cured by magic also

Its very difficult to be overwhelmed with this kind of character, there just are not a whole lot of areas that you wouldn't thrive in

The dragon is there first to draw the fire of the other monsters while you get them fighting each other...

Then he finishes off the winners :)

Tamer Bards can tear through areas of dungeons like Ice Dungeon, the second level of Destard, or the fire dungeon, and lay waste to everything in their path, almost nothing short of a lag pocket can stop a Tamer Bard.

Peacemaking, enticement, Eval int, and Veterinary are all good choices to round out this very powerful skill.

Provocation is what makes barding such an incredibly powerful skill, you can get two monsters fighting each other, could be orcs, could also be Balerons... There are very few monsters that can not be provoked.

When you move into dungeon with wall to wall monsters, you can start provoking them onto each other, not only does that amplify your ability to do damage to monsters, but it keeps them from targeting you if you have them Busy fighting.

A good technique is to go into a dangerous spot with your dragon, Invis, and let all the monsters in the room target your Pet, when they are all going for the pet, you start provoking them onto each other, in minutes time a high level bard can have 10-12 monsters dukeing it out, and be ordering his Dragon to finish off the survivors. It is especially useful against TOUGH monsters, like in shame dungeon, Ice Dungeon, Fire Dungeon, the Lich Lord room in Deceit etc.

I don't think there is a more powerful character template than the Bard/Tamer

Side note. My personal biggest problem while giving my bard tamer a work out is overconfidence. I Die fairly often, sometimes to monsters, but also to Lag I will get all kinds of things fighting, my Dragon is ripping things up, there are spells, blood splatters, terror and pandemonium....Heh :) But It can Lag the heck out of the screen and cause a macro jam, or a client crash easily, and usually in the time it takes me to re-fire up Ultima I come back as a ghost, with a my (well trained) dragon milling around a huge pile of dispatched monsters.