[Faerie]

I remember this being a seriously heated discussion back in the day on live, and my information may be wrong (going from memory, waaay back when), but what most of you are saying seems wrong to me.

First, wasn't the general consensus among bards that instrument/singing skill level mattered absolutely not at all? I maxed all of mine for the sake of it, but remember that many bards never bothered to because the skillups didn't do anything, beyond the initial skill point. And it was thought that both dex and cha were factors in determining missed notes, though the exact math and importance of either were up for discussion.

Many bards argued that we should stack both dex and cha for this reason, though others (with whom I agreed) countered by saying that missed notes weren't a big deal anyway, because we didn't lose mana for it like casters, and they always happened at the very start of a song so their impact was always hugely minimal (lol); so long as you were fast on the recast.

Cha was also thought to affect the DURATION of charm (more likely for 27 charm to last close to 18 seconds; and 39 to last close to 1 min), but not initial resist rate or anything. Which made cha close to useless for bard charming, because when swarm kiting the charm would need to be broken with invis 90% of the time as it lost hp so quickly. And it has such a short duration anyway, even in pvp having it break really early was never a huge deal because of selo's and stuff.

Cha was also not a factor in determining initial mez resist; that being determined exclusively by NPC level, NPC level in relation to bard level, and MR of NPC. It may have been a factor in average mez duration (don't remember), but I never went for cha gear and never had issues keeping multiples mezzed. I always thought it was funny that equipping a flute did nothing for initial mez resists either, and just increased the amount of mr lost once it landed. The Pied Piper could have just sang, and used his swords to murder those kids. Guess modern bards are just better at multitasking.

I don't remember if it affected lull resists or not. As I never grouped with a monk until 55+, I did the majority of pulling for a bunch of my groups and didn't have tooo many issues (lull seems pretty unreliable here compared to my perhaps spotty memory, but here I'm lulling as a gnome cleric). Vaguely remember something about lull being effectively nerfed in Kunark by increased mr on NPCs, and then improved a ton in Luclin; didn't Thott make a huge whiny post about monks taking over as pullers when bards were originally best at it?

Bard gear always had plenty of cha and dex anyway. If you're epic, extra dex is a big boost for that proc. Also good for pvp procs.

My advice, as an oldschool bard:

Starting stats all sta, or maybe dex if you're big on those procs and down on yourself for small gains with sta. Maybe human bards would want to go dex, but who the hell makes a lame human when you could be elvish? With gear, go mr > other resists > hp > sta > dex > everything else

Stacking mr and other resists for pvp obviously (also raids), and sta before dex because dex is simple to get up as bard. I never felt a need for carrying around different sets of gear for tanking or whatever, because it seemed safer to always be as pvp ready as possible. And when taking on those tough solo mobs, less tankiness just meant longer fights with mez/regen.