What next for midlevel bard?

[WarpathEQ]

I was doing a rotation of 6 geos (3x2), with a short med break before repops, and would go at least 3 hours on a full mana bar before going OOM, could be extended to 4-5 hours if you really min-max the crap out of sitting in between each song twist (I put sit on a hotkey and twisted it in to stretch mana bar or when I was running low at times to get through the end of the cycle). Took about 1 hour to med back to full so great for taking a food break, ect. Alternatively you could easily do 8 or more geos before repops if you wanted to burn your bar faster and condense your timetable.

I was using a 6 song twist with selo's drum equipped.

1. Charm (switch target)
2. Fufils
3. Chant of Flame
4. Chant of Frost
5. Fulfils
6. Chant of Flame
1. Charm/repeat

If you keep your twist semi tight you will start over at 1 and charm will break just slightly before you land a new one, charming the mob that you were previously DoTing (if you twist close to perfect you can actually complete the twist and land the charm before it breaks so sometimes I had to recast my charm on the repeat so it didn't land too early).

You can do this without ever taking any hits from the geos with a little bit of practice. I prefer the middle of the back 3 caves as there is a perfect round of 6, pullable in 2s with a ton of room to move around and not run into others).

I decided not to pursue a prayer shawl (hoping for CT brains some day) for a few reasons:
1) The exp I got using this method is the best exp I've ever experienced both grouping and solo'ing accross multiple classes (a high skilled enchanter is probably the only class capable of exp'ing faster)
2) Because I was gaining so fast I determined the amount of time it would take to obtain a prayer shawl would not be recouped by the time I would hit 60 doing this without one.
3) Outside of this specific use case FT1 isn't really that useful to a bard.

The only way I could see prayer shawl really paying off here is if you wanted to use this strat to power level others and therefore would be spending much more time here than just leveling 50-60. Based on my efforts to min-max sitting at times I suspect you could go non-stop killing atleast 8 geos before repops with little or no sit time and an effectively infinite mana pool. I intend to go back someday when I have drums of the beast and CT brains to test that expectation.

[bcbrown]

Originally Posted by busted [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

I call this the "battle bard" setup

Gearing up to be a battle bard looks fun as hell, but I'm still a ways away from that.

Originally Posted by WarpathEQ [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

You can do this without ever taking any hits from the geos with a little bit of practice. I prefer the middle of the back 3 caves as there is a perfect round of 6, pullable in 2s with a ton of room to move around and not run into others).

I checkout out the geos on my druid, was able to find them easily enough, but it was a little confusing to navigate and I'm not sure what you meant by "middle of the back 3 caves".

[WarpathEQ]

Originally Posted by bcbrown [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

I checkout out the geos on my druid, was able to find them easily enough, but it was a little confusing to navigate and I'm not sure what you meant by "middle of the back 3 caves".

The 2 main entrances people use are the North and East Entrance. Inside the caves there are 5 rooms with a hallway that runs in a big circle that leads to each of them. The furthest North room is the largest and includes a named mob (Phenocryst (sp?)), there is a small room to the east just off the hallway.

On the south end of the cave there are 3 seperate rooms each with 6-9 mobs in them. I was referring to the middle of these 3 rooms which is the most spread out, it has a group of 3 mobs you can see from the opening into the room and then 6 mobs along the back wall as you follow it around. Including a safe spot in the very back where no mobs spawn within line of sight, often a place where people camp out or med.

[Vivitron]

Originally Posted by WarpathEQ [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

The 2 main entrances people use are the North and East Entrance. Inside the caves there are 5 rooms with a hallway that runs in a big circle that leads to each of them. The furthest North room is the largest and includes a named mob (Phenocryst (sp?)), there is a small room to the east just off the hallway.

On the south end of the cave there are 3 seperate rooms each with 6-9 mobs in them. I was referring to the middle of these 3 rooms which is the most spread out, it has a group of 3 mobs you can see from the opening into the room and then 6 mobs along the back wall as you follow it around. Including a safe spot in the very back where no mobs spawn within line of sight, often a place where people camp out or med.

Thanks for sharing this, it's a nice spot. I tried it; a rotation of 6 geos gave me about 5% exp at 52, and maybe a 4 or 5 minute break before respawns if the clear was smooth. (14:30 Respawn timer in WL.)

I was able to do about 14 CS wyverns per cycle when they were available. I forgot to note how much xp that yielded. (20 min respawn timer there.)

I also did a few TD raptor aes. Those gave about 10% exp per. It takes me roughly 10 minutes to do the pull + the kill. (12 min respawn timer in TD.)

I felt a little silly trying geos at 52 knowing they are still blue at 59, but it worked better than I expected. The shamans felt dangerous at this level and I avoided any double shaman spawns. Cash and armor gem loot seemed pretty solid. Subjectively heavy on mana use, but that's fine for short sessions with mixed afk. Raptors are easier xp if you can ae consistently without dieing; but I die sometimes, don't like the lock-in of having to kill a pull before I can afk, it gets boring, and no worthwhile loot there. I'll probably do more of both camps.

[WarpathEQ]

Originally Posted by Vivitron [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

Thanks for sharing this, it's a nice spot. I tried it; a rotation of 6 geos gave me about 5% exp at 52, and maybe a 4 or 5 minute break before respawns if the clear was smooth. (14:30 Respawn timer in WL.)

I was able to do about 14 CS wyverns per cycle when they were available. I forgot to note how much xp that yielded. (20 min respawn timer there.)

I also did a few TD raptor aes. Those gave about 10% exp per. It takes me roughly 10 minutes to do the pull + the kill. (12 min respawn timer in TD.)

I felt a little silly trying geos at 52 knowing they are still blue at 59, but it worked better than I expected. The shamans felt dangerous at this level and I avoided any double shaman spawns. Cash and armor gem loot seemed pretty solid. Subjectively heavy on mana use, but that's fine for short sessions with mixed afk. Raptors are easier xp if you can ae consistently without dieing; but I die sometimes, don't like the lock-in of having to kill a pull before I can afk, it gets boring, and no worthwhile loot there. I'll probably do more of both camps.

Yeah I did the Geos starting at 50 so definitely very viable, shamans can definitely be a bit risky at first until you really dial in your twist timing, eventually you get to the point where they rarily even cast on you. Additionally once your base resists (with gear) start to exceed around 100 you will resist a lot of their spells (the blizzard - cold resist seems to be much harder than all the poison based stuff). To your point the camp probably shines more as you get closer to 60 and still get awesome exp from blue cons where the other camps probably start to die out.