Bard Starting Points

[Regular]

How should one spent the bard starting points during character creation? I never really understood the actual key stats for bards back on live.

I am leaning towards human or half elf, for sake of preferred starting area.

[Brynnag]

should reroll Halfling rogue, put points in str

[NegaStoat]

The big answer would come back to - "What gear sets will I be wearing pre-planes?"

A bard will focus on two different "every day" gear sets in my humble opinion. A group might need you for Crowd Control duty, so you'll need to consider what Charisma you want to shoot for and what slots are best suited to provide it.

In other instances you might not need Charisma based songs for your tasks and would really prefer a heap of strength + stamina with some dex to just plow through things (assuming you're not swarm kiting here).

Deity becomes a BIG factor if you're thinking of stamina gear for more durability. Bards gain slightly more than 4 HP / Sta point up to 115, so Rallos Zek or Brell Serellis chain both look good for numerous slots. Even past 115 stamina, the gains are big.

honestly... You could just dump it all into Stamina and not make a mistake. If you are absolutely stressing over trying to reach a 200 Cha for charm / mez, then I guess you'll have to look gear choices over and review the "all sta" decision.

Edit - My wood elf bard went Rallos Zek back on old Fennin Ro for role play reasons initially (I wanted to be a D&D Warsinger bard) and ended up loving the hell out of it due to the later implimented Cultural smithing. That plate armor was damn burly. It was handy for Kael faction in Velious later on, too.

[Colgate]

agnostic
stamina or dexterity, depending on whether or not dexterity actually matters here, not sure myself

[Stinkum]

The way Uthgaard explained it a while ago, the stat modifier for your chance to fizzle on songs uses both CHA and DEX on this server. It doesn't take only DEX. It either averages both your CHA/DEX or takes whatever one is lower.

For that reason, split between CHA and DEX.

[dhoushi]

In my case I dumped into Stam, but that has more to deal with end game goals of raiding on my bard. In that situation you want high resists and health, so stam allows you to min/max for raiding. However bards do many different things and while I have slightly more health leveling, it is probably the weakest way to go throughout the leveling process. Dex and Cha is better in groups, when resists and health are unimportant. Str also has a place for grouping, but if you plan on kiting solo for exp, str isn't going to help much except to avoid weight penalties.

Starting points don't make a large difference for bards, you could dump into dex/str/cha and it would make it easier to level, but endgame you would be marginally weaker then bards that dumped into stam. Taking into consideration end game buffs (upon velious release), are going to allow dex and str to max out easily enough, that dumping creation points on those stats may feel wasted unless you gear correctly to avoid it. Stam is going to be harder to max out for bards, so you get more mileage.

At the end of the day, what matters is how you want to focus your bard; kiting, groups, or raids, endgame or leveling.

Bards do it all so don't stress too much on creation it's not as vital as other classes.

[zanderklocke]

I did the following for my half elf bard:

5 points in strength, 5 points in charisma, and 15 points in stamina.

Dexterity and charisma were always my primary stats as bard, so I wanted them to be above 90 starting out. 75 seemed low for strength, so 80 felt more rounded out. The rest was put in stamina because more hp always feels more useful at times...although bards don't get the best return on hp for each point of stamina.

At end game I am over 2000 hp with my gear...and that's without the bard epic.

Furthermore, if you're worried about stats on your bard, half elf really is the best option for a most balanced bard in terms of dex, cha, sta, and str. However, humans do get some nice gear in current game they can wear that half elves cannot. I've never really seen a reason to ever make a wood elf bard.