Can somone Teach me how to Bard AoE Kite

[Trinidy]

I am looking for a nice bard who can teach me online how to aoe kite properly.

I have read about 10 different guides on this site, and I guess I just cannot get the mechanics down.

because of my play time, soloing is must for me.

If anyone feels nice enough to explain it and show me online, please send a tell to Doremifa

Thanks!

[ManticSquee]

How much time have you spent practicing? It can take awhile to figure it out and a lot of deaths. You can try starting out small by just kiting 1 or 2 and work your way up from there. If you've watched lots of videos already there probably isn't too much more you can learn. Keep working at it.

[Tecmos Deception]

If you can't figure out how to do it by reading the MONSTER thread about it, then you're almost certainly not going to figure it out ever.

[Trinidy]

Well i have died probably about 100-150 times. my issue i think is with my technique. It may be just that my lvl 2 song is not big enough, but I cannot seem to ever land the dot with the size circles that im doing. I kinda just looking to maybe shadow a bard to see.... i dunno.

[Tecmos Deception]

Watching it be done in game isn't very helpful, I don't think.

It is much easier with the 18 dot than the 2 dot, though.

[Harmonium]

I don't run in true circles on my bard. When i start casting the dot I hold the turn button down longer when tapping turn key this results in lowering the mobs transversal angle of approach and they get closer.

Timed correctly their closest point is when the song finishes. Once song lands I immediately increase the turn tap tempo (think rapid fire) this very gradually opens up my circle and increases transversal.

This is just my method, I've seen plenty of screen shots where all the mob corpses were in a perfect circle.

I didn't even try mouse steering, so I have no tips for that approach.

[gotrocks]

trin, i think most bards start to really do this around lvl 18, i've heard doing it with the level 2 dot can be difficult. I wouldn't worry about it too much just yet, leveling from 1-20 normally is not only fun but simple. If you need help message gotrocks in game, i have a shaman (thats usually anon) and i usually play around your time (but im not in europe).

goodluck!

[Arrisard]

There's a few things going on when you're trying to "mouse drive" AE kiting.

In my example, I am going to use a WASD setup. W for forward, S for back, A for turn left, D for turn right (I have no idea if these are default, I'm still using the same install when I first started here two years ago). You can use the strafe keys if you want, but I prefer to use the turn keys as my primary setup since when you're in mouse look mode, the turn keys turn into strafe keys.

For the mouse drive technique, you need to run forward, turn in one direction, and strafe (side step) in the opposite from which you are turning with your mouse look. So, here's how it goes down.

First, scroll out to the chase view with your scroll wheel as far as it will go. You can do it from first person or other third person views I guess, but, the mouse-scroll chase view is the most practical for me.

Press and hold W to keep forward motion.

Press and hold Mouse 2 (or whatever your mouse look is bound to) and you're now in the "mouse driving mode". This also actually turns your turn left/right binds into strafe left/right binds. If you use the strafe binds as your primary setup that's fine, mouse look doesn't make them turn keys when used, oddly enough.

Move your mouse left or right to steer into a circle.

If you're turning clockwise/right, press the A key to strafe left "away" from the center of the circle. If you want to go left/counterclockwise, strafe right - really doesn't matter just remember you strafe the opposite way from the direction you're turning.

If you've done this correctly, you are now running in a circle while facing an angle slightly inwards of your actual travel path that is offset by your strafing motion away from the center. How big the circle is, is controlled by how fast you move the mouse and your mouse sensitivity setting. The faster you turn, the smaller the circle gets.

A lot of people I talked to about this turned up their mouse sensitivity to have to drag their mouse less in a 15 or 20 minute kite, but I preferred the opposite. Keeping the mouse sensitivity low let me have a lot more control over the precision of the distance my kite was away for me at the expense of having to move my mouse faster and pick it up more often. It just worked better for me, and if you have the desktop space it's the way I recommend - it might be frustrating if you're limited to moving your mouse the size of a standard mouse pad, though. But it's up to you and how well you think you can control it.

That's technique I use. Even with a lot of practice, landing the level 2 DoT requires absolute precision. If you cut that circle just a hair too tight, it's over. But it isn't impossible. I don't think you'll find much value watching someone because, well, from an outside perspective you're just running in a circle. The correct margins are just so tiny you're not gonna be able to discern them like that. Not to mention getting used to the proper distance to keep the mobs will depend on so many factors I'd say it's different for everyone. Resolution, aspect ratio, latency, there are so many variables to account for. For me, I'd turn right/strafe left, and in OT the tigers' heads would be just barely visible in the bottom right corner so when the DoT cast landed I cut the circle to there and it'd hit most/all of the mobs in the stack, Once you get a feel for it, you don't have to keep the circle super tight every second and then you just "cut in" the distance timed with the DoT.

This is also assuming you've actually gone through the rest of the guides and have already done the standard stuff such as setting the clip planes, sky, DoT messages, names, etc either off or down and getting your client set up in general for AE kite runs and stacking the mobs properly before going for the DoTs.

[Trinidy]

Thank you. That was a bit helpful. I am not very good with the mouse look. And I think what i am going to do is put aoe kiting on hold until i get to lvl 18 when i can use the new dot, which to my understanding has alot more range on it.... of course with alot of practice.

[Droog007]

I much prefer mouselook over tap-turning .... but I keep getting video lag hitches that mess up the radius of my turn, often causing me to get slapped silly. Does anyone know how to cure this? My machine was built for SWTOR, and ran it well on high settings - but somehow this 14yo game engine is putting a hitch in its giddy-up.

[Droog007]

Setting far clip plane to minimum seems to have a small effect, but the hitches still happen. I got a similar small improvement when I tried kiting in Neriak - probably because the clipping in that zone is artificially limited since it's like, an evil forest.

I messed with the max FPS slider, the only effect I got from that was making things much worse when I dipped all the way into the 30's...

My brother built this machine, and I think he may have skimped on the HDD. I'm wondering if an SSD will improve texture fetching... or something... It does seem like I get a hitch when another player cruises into my field of vision.

I also get the rare BSOD on this machine. I don't think it's overclocked, but I could be wrong. Maybe I just need to start changing out drivers, starting with video.

[CapersL]

I had a problem with fraction-of-a-second hiccups that was driving me nuts, no amount of settings would make cure it. I have 16GB of RAM and an i7, but on a laptop where the disk I/O isn't the greatest. I wound up downloading a RAM disk utility and running EQ from a RAM drive, haven't had a single hesitation since.

[seitil]

I have only started up again but AOE kiting is a lot easier if you have a mouse with buttons on the side. I have a G600 and I bound my aoe dot to the 2 button and selos to the 3 button. It lets me just hold my up and right key without having to contort my hand to hit the 2 and 3 button on my keyboard. I am not sure if this was brought up in the large thread but it helps make it a lot easier to manage!