Greetings prospective musicians of Britannia. The Bard is a noble profession, one of the two best PvM builds on the shard. There are four core barding skills: Musicianship, Provocation, Peacemaking and Enticement (aka Discordance). Before I show you my way to become a grandmaster, I'd be remiss if I didn't give a shout out the other fine guides and fine authors who got me started. You should read these before you read mine. Provocation Provocation Peacemaking Peacemaking Enticement aka Discordance Now, my method may not be better than these. It surely isn't faster -- it'll take about 7 days. But it's easy. So easy. Barding for Dummies First, you can complete your training entirely on Ocllo. If you train all four skills, you'll fall out of the new player program when your skill total exceeds 500, but other than that you could complete it entirely as a "(Young)" player. So head for Ocllo. If you're still new, this is as simple as typing "[young" and then joining the new player program. Step 2, pay the musicians in town to train your music, provo, peace and enticement skills up to the highest you can (about 30). This'll cost about 1200 gold. You may need to adventure a little bit first since you only start with 250 that's usable for training. Then: macro your musicianship up at least 80 or so, just like the other guides say. Buy 60 or so tambourines from the music shop. Other instruments work fine too but tambourines only weigh 1 stone, so you can carry a bunch no problem. You'll wear out most of these instruments on the way to GM. Let's pump up your Musicianship skill. Record a Razor macro: Double-click tamborine Pause 3 seconds loop And let it run overnight. You can move on as early as 70 skill but it doesn't hurt to go to 100. 80 is a good target. Step 4: get a house. You don't need much of a house... a Small House (43800 gold) or a Small Stone Tower (88500 gold) will do nicely. This is the hardest part of this easy guide. Unfortunately, every house spot on the island that anyone has found already has a house on it. Fortunately, there are some older players who might rent you a house for a couple of weeks for a lot less gold... and if you have plenty of gold houses there sell for 2xDeed or less. If houses on Ocllo just aren't to be had you can do everything except the final run with pirate sailors in a house anywhere in the land. For pirate sailors you might be able to substitute a pair of boats. Depending on other players' generosity there may be a public house you can use as well (more on that later). So, you own or have acquired access to a house. Your skills are 80/30/30/30. It's time to croon to some orcs. Go find some basic orcs wandering about the island. One at a time, allow them to follow you home. Once inside, run around behind him (put yourself between him and the door) and then beat him up until he runs. He'll run to the corner of the house. Drop some crates (or another impassible object) and lock them down. You'll need to be *at least* co-owned to the house to lock the crates down by saying, "i wish to lock this down" and targeting a crate. If you don't lock the crate down, the nasty orc will bust it up once be regains enough hit points. Why orcs? Why not Mongbats or Rabbits? Well, if you check the bestiary, Orcs have a barding difficulty of 41. With your musicianship where it is, you'll get optimal gain for the barding skills around 15 points below and 5 points above *your* skill number. You have 30. His difficulty is 41. You can ride him to 45ish skill easy. When you're set up, it'll look kinda like this: Note where you're standing: not just anywhere. Stand at least two tiles from any wall. Griefers may come by and kill your orcs. If you're within 2 tiles of the wall, they may kill you too. In the center of the house you're safe: worst case you have to get some new orcs. So, you have your two orcs and they're locked in the corners of the house. What's next? Razor Macro! Provoke (#1 on #2) Pause 14 Provoke (#2 on #1) Pause 14 Entice #1 Pause 14 Entice #2 Pause 14 Peace #1 Pause 14 Peace #2 Pause 14 Hide Pause 18 Loop Easy, right? An astute skill gainer will realize that the skill cooldown on failure is much shorter than 14 seconds, so you can make the macro run faster. I'm going for easy, and easy is you just wait the full 14 second or so cooldown between using barding skills. But you hide at the end! Why? Well, the orcs will stay in discord until they can't see you for 17 seconds or so. You can't entice them again until they no longer are. Hiding allows them to forget about you so you can sing them another song. Alas, it's not quite that easy. Monsters in a house will despawn after 24 hours unless sheared or tamed. You can't tame orcs and you can't shear the either. Oh well. When they vanish, almost exactly 24 hours after you brought them into the house, go get more. Whohoo! So you have 45 or 50 in provocation, enticement and peacemaking. What next? Go ahead and kill off those orcs. Then lead a pair of orc lords to your house. You can find them in the Orc Fort in the northwest part of the island. According to the bestiary Orc Lords have a barding difficulty of 61. You can work with trolls (51) for a while first if you want to, but it's probably easiest to jump straight to Orc Lords. Lock em up in the corners the same way you did with the orcs, retarget your macro and macro away to 65 or 70 skill. The gains will slow down after 65 but let it run until you get impatient. Make sure you're using store-bought tambourines here -- GM crafted tambourines give you a bonus to success and the closer you get to 100% success the slower your skill gains. If jumping straight from Orcs to Orc Lords yields gains which are too slow for you, here are some more Ocllo monsters you can try: Orc - 41 Grizzly Bear - 46 Troll - 51 Orcish Lord - 61 Pirate Sailor - 104 Now for the final leg of the marathon... pirate sailors. You'll find "XX the sailor" at the pirates den on the west edge of the island. Their names are in red instead of the usual blue or grey. Red means a murderer. This is a big jump in difficulty, from 61 to 104 so your gains will slow way down. I suggest taking just one sailor at first and keeping one Orc Lord. Provoking seems to take in to account the barding difficulty of both monsters in some way, so you'll get faster gains to 80 or so with just one sailor. As before, lure one down to your house and lock him in the corner. Change up your Macro a little bit for the sake of only one sailor: Provoke (sailor on #2) Pause 14 Entice sailor Pause 14 Peace sailor Pause 14 Peace target #2 Pause 14 Peace target self Pause 14 Hide Pause 18 Loop If you couldn't find a house on Ocllo, try using boats instead. Lure a sailor on to a boat and take him a little ways out to sea. Then take a gray animal with you on a second boat and use the separation between the two boats to keep them apart. It's not as safe as a house (you might get PKed or attacked by a sea serpent) but it should work. Once you hit 80 or so provoking, switch to two sailors. Keep going to 100% provoking and 100% enticement/discord. It'll take about 7 days total from when you started with plain old orcs. It'll actually speed up a little towards the end as you hit the sweet spot for gains from the pirates. Peacemaking will lag behind the other two. Finish it off by targetting yourself with peace instead of targetting a monster, as described in Poor Richard's Guide. Congrats, you've GMed barding and are done with this guide! Now build up your stats (str/dex/int) and either casting or melee to finish monsters off. Then go serenade some mobs in the dungeons!
related info Here are some more advanced tips for those willing to put a little more effort in: First: Insert a doubleclick-by-type tambourines somewhere in your macro. Then replace all the "wait for targets" with "pause 100 milliseconds." This way when the tambourine you're playing wears out, the macro will continue running until it selects the next tambourine in your pack. A good place to stick the tambourine double-click is about a second after you do one of the barding skills. You're still in the cooldown for the skill so it costs you no time to do the tambourine double-click. You don't have to lock down boxes in your house. Instead, build stairs to a trap in the corners of your house. Create "foot stools" with your carpenter. When locked down, you climb them like stairs. The outer foot stools should be 1 above the floor and the inner should be 3. You can use a design tool to move them to those elevations or you can drop something underneath and stack the stools on top (e.g. 1 uncooked steak or 3 uncooked steaks dropped one above the other). Here's what it looks like: Draw the sailors in and beat them up as before. Once at 16% health they'll run away, up the stool stairs and into the traps. As of this writing, Wodan maintains a barding school just east of the pirates den on Ocllo. Here's the house: It's open and as a "(Young)" player you're safe from griefing. You don't even need to be powerful enough to beat up the monster: have it follow you up the stool-stairs and into the trap. Then use the recall spell to exit the house. Once you have two monsters in there, set up the macros and what not as listed in the main guide. Beware that once you leave (Young) status at 500 skill points, you risk someone wandering up and killing you since you can't lock the door. Just make sure you don't have anything valuable on you so the griefer can't gain anything. Wodan will also lend it to you and lock it. See Wodan's post below for details. At the end of the run when you're finishing the last few points to peacemaking... try keeping one of the pirate sailors and running this macro instead: for 3 peacemaking target self pause 10.5 seconds end for peacemaking target pirate sailor pause 10.5 seconds loop It remains harder for you to Peace a pirate sailor than to peace in general, so you should gain faster. It takes 30 to 40 seconds for the peace on the sailor to wear off, so peace-target-self while you wait.
Hey, great to see my sailor hut in this guide !! Some well known players from this shard are actually friended to the house you mentioned and can LOCK the house upon request ! This is a public / lockable house - Thanks to Jupiter for the instructions on getting this to work. I want to keep it open for anyone to use but in case someone goes through the trouble and asks one of the House Friends, it can be locked for a certain time. Asking one of the house friends over is also VERY helpful when trapping mob in the two cages. Have the House Friend "Remove Thyself" your char from the cage as soon as you trapped yourself and the sailor. My original idea for the 100% standalone functionality is to trap the sailor in the cage and then quickly LOG OUT and instantly log back in. This SHOULD get you removed from the house. You might very well die in the process and should drop your belongings into one of the crates before and just get a res form a nearby healer. Any more questions - ask me. List of house friends Jupiter Atraxi Corruption Send me a PM if you want to be friended to the house. Be aware that you can not be "Remove Thyself"ed from the house as a friend and the Log Out/Log In trick also doesn't work for friends.
I also have a small tower on Ocllo so if anyone ever needs to train their barding send me a PM and I will help you set it up then lock the house until you are done.
you can use it at same time. If you need in ask in IRC! One of my deputies can get you in and restock saliors as needed. Just ask in IRc channel!
Awesome! The door is unlocked.. Ill practice peacemaking while that fellow provokes EDIT: My Peacemaking is in the 30s. No chance with a pirate so Ill wait then bring in some orcs.
Go to Moonglow zoo till 70ish then back to provo house for sailors with Gm instruments to 100 from 70ish
