Decided that I am too lazy to complete and then maintain a tamer bard so I am dropping animal lore and taming. What should I add to my build and why? Magery Resist ------- Hiding ------- Music Provo ------- I am contemplating med + disco or disco + peace. Feedback from people who have one or the other (or both) would be awesome. Thanks in advance! Cheers
My suggestion would be: drop hiding, add meditation, eval and wrestling. My second choice would be to add disco instead of wrestling, but hiding on a GM mage is a wasted skill slot, IMHO.
Just from the pk perspective, the most difficult person to kill is a hiding bard. Add magic reflect to that and you'll never kill them (Like Gorgio, Vlar's bard).
As far as PK's go, I am already a grand master at the recall macro tactic. I can press shift+esc (my macro shortcut) faster than the fastest red west of brit bank can target me let alone set off a spell. I like hiding because I usually only play from work and sometimes I need to get or make a call and its easy to just hide and come back to the action when I am less distracted. Remember, this is for a very casual and extremely lazy player (me) so the idea is to make the best bard built to suit my lazy farming needs. I am currently leaning towards med + disco or wrestling + disco. I will only use this character for farming gold.
I've just about completed a pure bard and am honestly thinking of dropping disco for resist. So far it's been mostly useless. My disco is at 96.x so I don't even think i'm getting the 5% provo bonus yet and don't seem to miss it much. I have hiding and it comes in crazy handy. I often get up and go afk if i'm needed and use it as a pause button. I always have reflect up but when it's needed most it always drops after 1-2 casts. I'm having a harder time vs casters because of it. I'll probably drop disco once another resist sesh rolls around.
The pithy answer is to have all of them because you have 15 slots. I fancy myself a bard pro. I've never felt like animal taming was for me. Random musings: I have a hard time making any pvm char w zero resist Finishing off the remaining monster with zero eval is miserable. Disco and hiding clash. My t hunter has no med and if you are only recalling or double bolting the remaining monster I could see dropping med and being fine. Hiding is incredible. Just wait until they wis quas and shift-escape. I prefer my full bard for group and my eval/hide/prov for solo work. Considering dropping eval on my hider for lock pick and retiring my t hunter from dungeon runs now that he is gm LP. Brewing a nasty champ spawn template of anat, heal, Mage, med, resist, music, prov
Discordance isn't what you think it is, then... Discord isn't enticement -- discord is what replaced enticement. Enticement worked like herding for NPC's and such, discordance reduces the stats/skills on a target until the bard is out of range, hidden, or dead from the disco'd mob. It is extremely useful; but its not used for what you think its used for at all.
You can make a pretty solid case for most things here. I would start with: Meditation Eval Int Reasons being: I found them to be the most useful. You cast spells a lot more frequently as a bard than as a tamer, so I found Meditation to be very important. And Eval Int is excellent at finishing off low HP mobs when you don't have a second monster around to provo it onto. Both of these skills train up to GM very quickly, with very minimal macro effort, and for free. If you decide you don't like them, no harm done.
the lazy is strong within you young one. So disco is a stat drainer? does it break provocation? I find myself failing provo on high level mobs sometimes and it can put one in a nasty bind on occasion. The extra 5% bonus alone seems worth it because this will mainly be a gold farming provo focused char. Paradigm: Making a second bard is of course the best idea but conflicts with my pre-set lazy programming. Your musings were very useful and appreciated! Cheers
Did some more reading, mostly here viewtopic.php?f=18&t=822 Question: Disco lowers stats/skills up to 20% at GM making things easier to provoke as well. You also get 5% bonus to provocation at GM. Are these two combined or is the 5% the result of the creatures loss of 20% skills/stats? I am guessing they are combined because if they werent you would get a 4.5% increase in provo at 90 disco (or somehting along those lines) and I have not seen that kind of info anywhere.
Music Provo Disco Vet Lore Magery Resist/med IT IS AWESOME! I have my own pet Terathan Avenger tearing up the Ophidians!
Correct; the 5% bonus for barding skills is independent. The reduced difficulty in barding after applying discord is due to reduced stats and skills, and is complimented by the 5% bonus to other bardic abilities.
Correct. The 5% bonus is actually an increase to the minimum chance of success. This means that you would have a minimum success rate of 5% to barding even against creatures who would otherwise yield a 0% chance of success due to their toughness (bosses, champions). Creatures which are immune to barding abilities are unaffected by the bonus to minimum success.
If I am using one monster to train disco, after i get the disco on, I need to break it by having the monster aggro another character? Can I just keep another character near by to constantly target the monster to attack?
You would need to use one of these methods to break the effect in order to attempt to apply it again.
So 2 boats ought to do it if I lure an ogre lord or something onto one and disco / hide / disco / hide from another one? Also, does it make sense to go for a dragon right away or will it not gain if the chance is 0% to disco?
For disco, I bought it to 30 and tamed a scorpion and brought it in my house. Used discord on it until around 67, then did nightmare until low 90s, then dragon. Doing it in a house is pretty easy, it's just use skill discord, target, wait 16 seconds, if successful, hide for 16 seconds, loop.
