Bard Guide for p99. part 1

[Teeroyoyort]

havn't seen specs not camped, and i stay way from guards for faction reasons. I like banking in any city

[Tealia]

It's seriously not worth having hand, finger, wrist, wrist, and elbow pain just to be a bard. I know most americans nowadays are fat and could give a crap about their health, but don't ruin your fingers so that you can barely play video games again.

I was a 60 bard through velious. I wouldn't touch them again unless they implemented some sort of auto-twisting. It's not worth it.

[Tork]

I've played a lot, I did not experience the wrist pain out of twisting many are bringing up - I think a lot of it is avoiding rapid double tapping, but instead slurring the key presses, and trying to spread the twist over whole hand to reduce binding on adjacent fingers.

For example, to twist 4 songs, I'd do


13
42
14
41

I rebound my assist hotkey to s, have tab set to toggle targets, r to closest mob, f to target self. To switch instruments, I set up a hotbar with a L shaped layout:

[main weapon]
[inventory spot][secondary]

Then I can kind of click through in a pattern to switch out weapon and instrument, or multiple instruments by holding one on my mouse - situationally, a hotkey with /autoinventory helps, as it both auto-equips or auto-inventories whatever you've got on your mouse, in that order.

I also off load my movement to the arrow keys, so there's not much going on with the other hand - making it easier to reach over and hit screenshot. In addition, if you rearrange your bags so they all tile, you can use the open/close all functions, which I rebound to ] and [.

Having your open inventory was something I did my entire career, and having that spot hotkey'd is also useful as it allows you to activate the many, many inventory items you will accumulate as a bard, and can quickly grab and swap from collection of open bags.

Hope this helps.

-Tork

[Savok]

The values on the instruments is a mod to increase the value of your songs. The higher the value the better some parts of a song will be. Haste and slow never increase with instruments.

If you were to sing Psalm of Warmth with a drum you would have more AC and more resists (you can try this yourself and checking your resist/AC values).

The real power of a bard is being able to maximize each song by swapping out instruments to match the song that is about to land. If your a really experience bard you could melee for 2 seconds, swap to a drum just before the psalm song hits, swap back to a melee weapon, swap back to a brass horn for the next song, then melee, then a lute for regen song and then back to melee etc. Then you can try to do it for four songs.

You can also setup macros for each song gem:

/stopsong
/pause 1
/cast X (where X is 1 - 8 for the song gems)

This will half the amount of keystrokes needed to play a bard in one swoop.

[Lazortag]

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

If you were to sing Psalm of Warmth with a drum you would have more AC and more resists (you can try this yourself and checking your resist/AC values).

How can this be true, if Psalm of Warmth is a singing-song?

[Lazortag]

If, for instance, a Stringed song's base effect was to heal your party by 10 hit points per tick, then with the MM lute equiped the same song would instead heal for 21 hit points per tick (keep in mind that the instrument only needs to be equiped at the instant you finish casting the song; once the song buff is up you may remove the instrument and keep the bonus until you sing the song again).

This is largely not true for most songs. From my experience Bard DOT's will do the same amount of damage whether you have a lute or a gypsy lute equipped. Why is this?

[Lazortag]

Cool, I use MM drums/Gypsy lute anyway and I haven't exactly compared to the other instruments recently, so it would be interesting to know your findings.

[Hurnal]

Indeed, as of level 32 the base damage of CoD is 10 and it hits for 21 with LoGP. I see the same rounding effects with the level 30 chant and using hand/MM drums.

[qwrtish]

Can someone post a leveling guide about bard-friendly places to kite? Staples such as SK and others are often too crowded to really take advantage of AE Kiting's efficiency, but finding viable alternatives can be equally hard. Most guides just list group locations, but when one kite pull can give 7-10% of a levels XP that seems like an unattractive option with this server's ridiculously slow XP.

[Lazortag]

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

Indeed, as of level 32 the base damage of CoD is 10 and it hits for 21 with LoGP. I see the same rounding effects with the level 30 chant and using hand/MM drums.

Yeah, I was on a corpse run and so only had a hand drum from the bank, and the chant spells did way less damage than the mistmoore drums! I didn't realize how beneficial the mods were, I always thought they meant something else because of some stupid alla post I read. Oh well.