[mmiles8]

Missed notes are essentially fizzles by game mechanics. I can't say with certainty for p99 without looking at the code, but it should take the higher of your dex or charisma, and every point of dex or cha will reduce your chance to fizzle by 1%. You can never have higher than a 95% chance to fizzle or lower than a 5% chance to fizzle. So, at best you're going to miss a note one out of every 20 songs.

So on a sliding scale spanning 90 percent, a sufficiently high charisma or dexterity would overcome a low instrument skill, or vice versa.

I went through and looked at the spell data for every song. Everything below 38 has a 15% fizzle adjust attribute, 39-40 are 6%, 40+ are 0%. So lower level songs will have an increased chance to miss notes than higher level songs. (I believe the fizzle_adj attribute was implemented in Kunark, to overcome the problems with increased chance to fizzle spells close to the level cap, there will be a patch note mentioning this somewhere)

I don't know what point in the math the fizzle adjustment is calculated in here. But if you took a large sample of song starts, you could probably identify the point of error, if there is one. (If you eqclient.ini:LOG=TRUE, they're great for data gathering)

I don't have a high level bard myself. But if you want, I could help you get some workable diagnostic statistics on this in a matter of probably 30 minutes.


Edit - Found the patch that I was talking about, and its addendum:

Misc Changes:
Reduced the casting difficulty (fizzle rate) of all spells over level 56. Spells have always previously been set up so that it's usually more efficient to use a spell from a previous circle than the current one. The formula did not take into account the fact that everyone stops at 60.

Casting Difficulty:
The patch message mentioned that the casting difficulty for spells above level 56 was reduced. The actual value is spells of level 51 or above. These spells should fizzle less than they did before.