Everything is possible, but when you can make your playtime more comfortable why not to do it? I played games where you was need to tap 1-9 + qwerty very fast to cast spells/skills, and it's take your attention from other things that you may enjoy. Personally i think Naga mouse make life in MMO more comfortable ( i mean comfortable and not simple the control mechanics ), so why not? Twisting prevented me from playing bard 15 years ago on Vallon Zek, now i can enjoy the class i always wanted to play.

i set up my xbox controller with joyToKey, and it is really quite fun to play on. i usue it for all of my kiting and if i am in groups where i basically am just auto assisting/attacking and 4-5 song twisting i use it as well. I don't use it for any of my charm/lull/pulling duties thought because the EQ targeting system and other small details make it clunky for that.

I feel like it was released during anguish xpac but maybe even later.

Twisting separates the bards from the posers.

No no no. Melody was added for Generation Y's instant gratification soloists. :D

What is so hard about making a few keys with:
/stopsong
/cast #
/pause #

No instant gratification? It's actually more fun to play a bard since you get to push more keys.

compared to just about any modern mmo bards aren't really pushing that many keys.

they only reason that i like melody on live was that it allowed to actually chat with group mates while remaining in full twist. before melody i usually felt like a mute in EQ because all i usually did was watch others chatting in grp.

melody isn't exactly easy either if you are a min/maxer actually working. if you want to play right you will have to set at least a few different sets of melody patterns, and in many situations have to turn it off or swap patterns on the fly to manually twist, especially if you are CCing, Charming, pulling, etc.

Didn't they say that anything like that is frowned upon?(a no no and bannable) I know they have said no to nostromos game pad and G15 keyboard with mapped keys for archery. Though the last time I asked about anything like that was 2 years ago so things may have changed.

I have to agree with this - on my WoW priest raiding with apx 30 players I had to have a "healbot" add-in with half a dozen spells mapped to mouse buttons, I had to buy a 5 button mouse just to play effectively, and I was literally spamming spells non stop.

Sorry to say this but maybe you shouldn't play a bard.
/melody was introduced on live for multiboxing and since P99 has a very strict anti-multibox policy...
And besides that /melody is a bad thing since it locks you into a song rotation, bards need to be dynamic and react to changing circumstances especially when you start MEZ and Charm. Depending how many mobs you have to MEZ will change the rotation; and one resist or fizzle will break any rotation, plus you have switch back and forth between targets every 3 seconds.
You can't script a bard; One key One Song, end of.

IMHO the absolute best way I've found to twist with a bard is to macro all the spell gems to your keypad on the right side of your keyboard. the 0 is my attack and then 1-8 are spell gems. It's really easy to click 0 to attack and then assuming you're twisting 1-3 or 1-4 you'd press 1, 2, 2 (to stop, then start gem 2), then 3, 3, then 4, 4, then back to 1. Really easy on the hands and wrist imo. I also use the keypad for general spell casting on other characters too.