What next for midlevel bard?

[WarpathEQ]

My favorite for 50+ on the bard is charm kiting geonids in WL. Incredible exp, very efficient, and great coin from all the vendor gems plus you can stock up on jewelcrafting and velious armor gems or sell them for plat too.

[Crede]

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

My favorite for 50+ on the bard is charm kiting geonids in WL. Incredible exp, very efficient, and great coin from all the vendor gems plus you can stock up on jewelcrafting and velious armor gems or sell them for plat too.

How long would you typically go before going oom? And would you say bard is the one class worth going prayer shawl for?

[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]

Thanks for the details on WL geos, I'm going to have to go check that out.

[Amhran Ogma]

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

I went with a dex/cha build (something like 170/130 with cheap EC gear) and a venomous axe of the velium brood, and although now I think going dex may have been a little suboptimal, the number of procs has made melee a lot of fun up until now.

If by some odd chance you see this, OP bcbrown, I'm about to roll a bard, but it's my first toon starting on p99 (gave away 56 rogue acct 20+ years ago), so I'll be lucky if I see a hand-me-down or two. I want to make sure I don't misspend/allocate a single starting stat.

I'm rolling Wood Elf no matter what. I planned on putting 10 to Dex (to start at 100), 10 STR (still low at 80), and the rest (5) in CHA (90)

Is there something I should know regarding your hindsight about "going dex being suboptimal"? Thanks

[WarpathEQ]

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

If by some odd chance you see this, OP bcbrown, I'm about to roll a bard, but it's my first toon starting on p99 (gave away 56 rogue acct 20+ years ago), so I'll be lucky if I see a hand-me-down or two. I want to make sure I don't misspend/allocate a single starting stat.

I'm rolling Wood Elf no matter what. I planned on putting 10 to Dex (to start at 100), 10 STR (still low at 80), and the rest (5) in CHA (90)

Is there something I should know regarding your hindsight about "going dex being suboptimal"? Thanks

I rolled 2 bards, first went STR heavy, second went DEX heavy (with the final points going into the other). I would concur that I had a much better QoL on the STR build. The Dex build had issues with encumbrance all the way up to 60 and only overcame it once I was raid geared. Even in that case playing for the ultimate late game meta build in hindsight I would say STA would be the stat for virtually all melee classes as the other stats are easy to buff up STA/WIS/INT are the stats that have the least buffs.

[busted]

Go dex build. Str items are easy to come by and getting 100% WR bags are pretty easy.

Dex is the most underrated stat in the game IMO. Proc city with high dex and supposedly fewer missed notes.

Bard with https://wiki.project1999.com/Essence_Mace + https://wiki.project1999.com/Silver_Whip_of_Rage + high dex becomes pretty beastly. Highly recommend this setup

[bcbrown]

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

I'm rolling Wood Elf no matter what. I planned on putting 10 to Dex (to start at 100), 10 STR (still low at 80), and the rest (5) in CHA (90)

Is there something I should know regarding your hindsight about "going dex being suboptimal"? Thanks

Man, I don't know. I recently rolled a second bard and went strength. The first dex/cha bard is only like 20-30 stone away from encumbrance and is constantly overweight after a couple hours worth of loot. The second bard has a lot more carrying capacity, but I'm getting more missed notes and noticeably fewer procs (at level 19 now). Obviously the lack of procs won't matter as much from 30-onwards as you stop meleeing so much, and probably the missed notes won't be as big a deal as my musical skills get closer to the cap.

I think 10/10/5 seems like a decent split. WarpathEQ and Busted both make good points. The first bard was 15 dex/10 cha. I guess I'd start by thinking about what your goal is for the bard. If you plan to swarm to 60 and raid heavily, sta/dex might be a good idea. If you just want to fuck around through the lower levels, dex/str might be the way to go. If you're starting from scratch without any twinking, you probably won't be able to afford a good proc weapon before melee starts to become less relevant, which imo makes dex less useful.

I guess I'd recommend 15str/10dex or 20str/5dex. Strength is especially useful on a first toon on a server since you'll want to be able to carry as much loot as possible to buy gear. I found it pretty easy to get a good set of cha gear: opalline earrings, gypsy medallion, mask of deception combine for +32cha. I've got 148cha right now and that's probably overkill. I've only noticed charm breaking early once, and that's not a big deal anyway since you're gonna get a lot of experience swapping charm between the two mobs. Lull, sure, but if you're pulling for a group a crit fail shouldn't be too big a deal since you can mez-lock three mobs with a bit of practice.

Are you planning on swarming your way to 60 as quickly as possible in order to raid, or are you going to level kinda slowly and explore as much of the world as possible without worrying about raid gear?

[WarpathEQ]

Definitely wouldn't worry about CHA. I've never added starting starts or focused on +CHA gear and its extremely rare that anything relevant to CHA works at less than 100% success for a bard.

[WarpathEQ]

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

Go dex build. Str items are easy to come by and getting 100% WR bags are pretty easy.

Dex is the most underrated stat in the game IMO. Proc city with high dex and supposedly fewer missed notes.

Bard with https://wiki.project1999.com/Essence_Mace + https://wiki.project1999.com/Silver_Whip_of_Rage + high dex becomes pretty beastly. Highly recommend this setup

Seems like a waste to me, by the time you have that type of gear you should be able to max out dex pretty easily without using starting stats on it. If you're looking at ultimate meta game min/max seems like STA would have been the choice at that level of gearing.