New Bard Questions

[Ishrin]

Rolling up a polearm bard. I have no idea what I'm doing.

1. Should I be keeping my spells going while resting or restarting each hunt?

2. The guide emphasizes telepathy lore, and then going for MnE after 20 - both based on limited mana pools. Is there any new common wisdom around this post-the mana changes?

2.Any other basic training tips?

3. Any basic quality of life scripts I should be using for... song management? loresinging? that gem spell? anything else?

[Menos]

I am 100% no expert. I would however recommend you either avoid ranged creatures (Vaalor is lousy with them) or use a shield for the first 30 levels or so. Death to arrows and thrown swords caused me to abandon about three different attempts to play a bard.

(full outside spell tanking would probably also work)

[Ishrin]

Thanks. I can definitely be easily talked into shield/sword - particularly as long as I don't need to buy the actual shield. I'm really just looking for the path of least resistance and was attracted by the TP advantages on polearms.

[kutter]

You can stay poles and still use a shield. I recently began using shields on my pole bard in Kraken's Fall since the ships launch volleys of arrows before you board so I use a sung shield and trident until we board then normally switch to my naginata. As for keeping spells up, as you get older you will be able to keep more and more up, at this point my bard is 50 and he keeps up 1003, 1006, 1007, 1010, and 1019 all the time, mostly because I am lazy and do not want to restart them. The mana changes have made it a lot easier. As for which spells, I was kind of a mish mash, I mixed them up until I got 1020 and 420 at around 38 then switched to elemental to get 425 and now I am back to bard until I get 1040 then I will go back to elemental. That is me and there is probably a better way to go about it but he was a GSIII baby so he is an odd duck.

[Viekn]

The info I'll give is for levels 1-20. You can read any number of other bard posts in this forum to get a sense of what you should do after that. I've gotten tons of characters to 15-20. I just got a bard to 13 and working on building him up. Most everyone wants path of least resistance at least for early levels, which for me and my current bard means...

1. Consider using brawling. It's light on training points. The round times are shorter than swinging a sword and definitely shorter than swinging a pole arm. You can buy 0x gauntlets and boots from the weapon shop in the Landing. You can have a wizard put an edge on those gloves and boots (spell 902) that will make them 3x which you can hold even at level 0. And most importantly, I've found how UAF (brawling equivalent to AS) works more to your advantage at lower levels than does relying on your AS. 4x uac gear is available in back room in a shop in solhaven I think. If you don't want to worry about getting back room access, some people sell that back room UAC gear for 100k each on player shops. Just before you hit level 20, switch to whatever fighting style you end up wanting to use for the long term.

2. Songs - Some of this depends on whether you're getting outside spells or not. If not, then I'm no expert on that. If you are, then you can likely attend a Dreavening and never have to worry about your AS in thee early levels. If you do that, I only made sure to get song 1003 to give me an extra +10 DS. You can go all the way up to 1010 for some helpful spells, but I generally only used 3 spell songs and keeping them all going didn't hurt my mana one bit. I am 1x in harness power.

3. Lores, scripts for song maangement, gem purifying, loresinnging, etc - I don't bother with ANY of this until I"m past 20. Remember that up until you hit level 20 you can freely adjust training as much as you want. In my opinion it's not really worth worrying about any of this stuff until you're post level 20, going on 30.

[wetsand]

If your end goal is the cheapest weapon skill, UCS(UAC) wins. Extremely effective attacks as well. My UCS hybrid pure bard is very deadly.

Max brawling skill
1 rank of two weapon combat

Don't worry about training combat maneuvers. MM is more important than UAF.

[Maerit]

If your end goal is the cheapest weapon skill, UCS(UAC) wins. Extremely effective attacks as well. My UCS hybrid pure bard is very deadly.

Max brawling skill
1 rank of two weapon combat

Don't worry about training combat maneuvers. MM is more important than UAF.

Train CM to get CMANs, and learn dirtkick. Using dirtkick on a target will increase your MM. Anything that lowers EBP on a target, impacts your MM in a positive direction.

If you got the UCS route, just get to 1035 first. With the mana changes you can keep 1035 up pretty easily, and then you can have 1s dirtkick which adds RT to the target, and easily wreck them. 1005 also drops their EBP massively for the 1st attack boosting your MM substantially. Targets cannot evade/block or parry UCS attacks, but EBP is what reduces MM.

[beiowulf]

how does one increase MM, i.e. how would you spend the TP's instead of on CM's?

[wetsand]

how does one increase MM

The primary factors that determine the MM value are the attacker's stance and the defender's evade, block and parry ability. This value scales up as the attacker moves from defensive to offensive stance. The MM value has a significant random component, possibly determined by the defender's statistics and condition.

As Maerit posted above, Dirtkick reduces the targets EBP, as does 1005. 1002 is really great as well if the target has a weapon/shield. Lots of stuns.

how would you spend the TP's instead of on CM's?

MoC, air lore, manipulation lore, and more spell/song ranks.

[Maerit]

Bards do get a disproportionate amount of UAF, so you're not going to struggle to hit things as much as a profession that has only 1x brawling and fewer AS boosting spells. However, I would recommend 1x CM until cap for the sake of the added UAF, abilities that provide defense and offensive options. You can split your skills and get more spells earlier, but the benefits are limited when maintaining 1035.

I'd do 2x Brawl, 1x Dodge, 1x CMAN for life until you decide to switch to pure (as most bards do eventually). Of course, that's if you plan to move away from polearms. Polearms are still plenty good for bards. They tend to be just slightly slower in swing time, but equal or rival UCS in kill time due to their excellent DF. UCS is just easier in the early game when you have less than 75 ranks in air lore, and can race to 1035 vs going to 425 before getting 1035. With the mana changes, going the UCS route works very well since all your attacks are 1s RT except for kick until you have 75 ranks in air lore. Using a sonic cestus with no gloves gives you maximum sonic flare rate for all your jab/punch/grapple attacks and you can pad some boots for extra umph when you kick.

Polearms might actually be better from a DS perspective, however, which is an area bards struggle with until later in life.