Mid Range Farming ideas (Solo Bard)

[dethbringre]

So this is my first toon on Red99, made it to 30 so far swarm kiting, recently able to do some grouping and gain some decent melee skills as well. So my question is, what or where can I farm for drops / vendor items at this level for some PP or decent gear to continue my melee skills?

I'm doing pretty well in S. Karana but its seems to be like ~40-50pp an hour.

Is that about the max I can expect at the mid ranges?

[Robdukes]

Your getting near the range for ancient croc in upper guk. He's a level 30 mob so maybe wait 2 levels before giving it a try. It's an easy camp because the crocs don't aggro each other if you stand back and pull. There are also enough croc spawns that stay blue for long enough that you gain really good exp here.

[dethbringre]

Another bard question I've been trying to figure out is, how do I minimize the minor lag glitches I get when swarming? they are very minor yet just the smallest lag spike gets me rolled on.

Is there anything I can do to try and fix this?

Things i've done so far are:
/showspelleffects off
turned off PC , NPC names
turned sky to simple - tried on none and makes it dark and hard to see
tried single processor but that didnt seem to help alot..

[BiscuitBandito]

Are you on wireless or a wired connection? Some people have reported in the Bard AoE thread that going from wireless to wired made a difference.

[dethbringre]

I'll have to try Wired connection and check on that, if its raining in a zone I don't even bother with Swarming at this point lol

[nabsev]

I know on red99 you get small hick ups from people zoning into a zone you're in so that may be part of the problem. At 30 you could do Misty thicket guards for pp or just level up some more and head to rathe mountains and swarm Hill giants.

[Silent]

I used to swarm alot in OT on a bard I rotated back between 31-50 all over again to swarm kite players up in lvls, If your computer can handle it I would look into running RAMDISK and using the EQLite Batch file to strip your eq folder of everything but kunark/velious expansions. Then Ramdisk to significantly speed up zone times among other in game things. I used to get those little lag spikes occasionally, Sometimes it was after I had started a big kite I could get a small video lag when someone zoned in etc. Though the sky/clip plane never effected me so it could be possible you need a better video card but im not sure. Only thing I ever did was flip sky to none, particle effects to low 2-4%. It was very doable even though you would take the occasional lag death every 1/10 kites, But after ramdisk/eqlite I have never lagged like that again.

As far as plat goes, Stick with south karana until 30-31 whichever. Gnolls will be your best bet for any platinum/fine steel and aviaks for gems. Once in OT you start kiting cacti and such, You can easily get 80 cacti in a pull of the skyfire/fm zone areas. They almost always drop 1-2x succulent sap that stacks and vendors for a bit more then 1pp. I used to STACK these up into the 4-5 bag fulls and then wait it out and vendor them in another town since overthere vendors give you 50% of normal. Aside from that though, They also drop various gems, Beaks work 1pp etc too on the cockatrices. Be sure to try and snag a DE mask from lguk before you hit OT up.