Spell upkeep help

[Alashir]

Hey all, first post in this area so be gentle!

#1) I was curious and wondering not only which spells other bards keep up, but how they do it. Do you bring them up right before you hunt? Do you augment them with society powers such as sigil of power or sym of mana?

#2) As a member of GoS, keeping up full sigils is completely impossible at the moment. Are there any other GoS bards out there? At what level was it possible to keep those up without them interfering in your other spells?

#3) At what train is it possible to keep 1035 up?

Those are my big questions for the moment. I'm a 25 bard and I currently keep 1003/1007/1010 up without any issues. Adding mirrors brings it to 25 a pulse which is what my mana pulse is at with sigil of concentration. With a short enough hunt I can manage it via keeping sigil of concentration and sigil of power, but that's a lot of micro in order to keep up another spell.

Any help would be appreciated,

-Naraz

[MrMortimur]

1. One thing necessary to answer your question would be to see how close to the multi-song penalty you are. First put up just 1003 and type song status, confirm your renewal is only 1 mana. Next add 1006 to the mix with another song status (Renewal Cost: Half of the base Mana Point (MP) cost), add 1007 (Renewal Cost: 2 Mana Points, +1 for every point of AS boost over +10. ), add 1010 with another song status, and finally 1019 with another song status. Figure out at what point, adding another spell adds more mana cost to your renewal than the sum of its parts should be.

Personally I'd run 1006,1007,1010,and 1019 constantly and use ;1003 to get the benefit of 1003 without contributing to the penalty.

2. My bard isn't gos, but my warrior at level 47 with 47 ranks of Harness Power can finally power all his sigils without slowly running out of mana. For the last 30 levels I've had to sigil power to keep the mana coming. I expect you'll need to be about the same level since frying your nerves from a bard renewal is bad news.

3. Nearing level 70 I started to use Tonis fairly routinely. I'd choose to use it if a swarm came at me or I had a grizzled task. Also depends too, at what level can you afford the air lore required to make Tonis really amazing. I think I was able to afford 30 air lore at around level 60 but by 75 I was able to have the 75 air lore required for the -3 seconds off.

Lochiven

[Ricer]

Using ;1003 and also ;manasong for running 1018 during hunts will help with your mana upkeep. Manually ;pause manasong and stop 1018 while in town to prevent any unnecessary head explosions if another bard is singing it.

Also I think at 25 using 1006 is a waste of mana. You shouldn't be having issues with critter maneuvers at that train.

Consider only using the offense and defense sigils. Save the major/minor bane and protection for grizzled tasks or if you get in a jam.

Something that helped me out in younger trains was to make a script which would renew all of my songs when I was ready to hunt and trigger it just before a mana pulse.

[Whirlin]

1) At 63, I keep 1003. 1006, 1007, 1010, 1014, 1019 up constantly, with renewals running about ~50 mana.

Depending on your spec (giving us your SKILLS will give us huge insight), you may want to bipass 1006 and 1007 at lower levels. Or if you're sword/board, you may want to keep 1007, and bipass 1019 for the interim. Or maybe your training just sucks and you've only trained in Harness Power like, twice, I dunno!

2) Depends on the bottleneck of keeping your sigils up. If it's purely mana, then using ;1003 and potentially ;manasong can alleviate a lot of these problems. But Manasong can be deadly if you don't have any mana controls, and keep it up through a renew cycle accidentally, or on login or something. Again, would help if we knew your SKILLS.

3) Like I said on #1, I just hit 63 with my bard. I use 1005 and occasionally 1002 as an opener on critters. I can't keep 1035 up 100% of the time by a long shot. Especially if I need to keep reserves of mana for spell renewals (and eventually a reserve for 1040).

If you review my super extensively long Bard Guide, for those reasons, I recommend grabbing 430 before going beyond 21 ranks in Bard circle (21 ranks nets a couple benefits from rounding). You simply won't have the mana at that low level to use 1035 enough to outweigh the benefits of MnE.