Bards gear dependence?
 

Hi everyone. I just started here and was trying to figure out what to play, after thinking about it for a while I decided a bard. I love melee classes, casters do not interest me in the least, and bards offer me a nice bit of melee but still keep a lot of the utility of the casters with lulls, mez, buffs, charms, and Dots.

My questions is about gearing up. Being new I dont have access to anything as of yet and was wondering would my best option be to stick it out and level the bard now or make say a necro or wizzy, sucking it up, and use them to make plat to twink out the bard? I remember on live my bard needed a bit of gear to be decent and im guessing here is not exception.

Play what you want from the beginning. Don't get distracted by a slightly more difficult beginning. Why waste the 6+ days played on a mage/necro (Wizards aren't even close in terms of twink/farming ability or raw power, believe me) when you could just spend that playing the class you prefer?

Plus, from probably 10-50 or so you can swarm kite quite easily (Others are posting screenshots of 30+ mobs killed in a single swarm, i've personally killed 25+ even at only level 11-12) and effectively. A Mistmoore battle drum and Gypsy Lute are very cheap to pick up nowadays, although those aren't even an absolute necessity for doing it.

If you're a careful, studious player, you can probably level faster than anyone else during that time because of how good swarm kiting is. It's very dangerous if you make mistakes, but that's what practice is for ;)

Later on, you can quest your own lambent and know you built your character from the ground up. Much more satisfying...

Honestly, if you don't mind the tedium of slow (but steady) kiting, bards can start kiting at a very early level as long as you can get a sow. Later, the kiting efficiency speeds up significantly as you get a 2nd AOE dot for aoe kiting, charms for charm kiting, and single target dots for normal dot kiting.

Consider that bards' melee is NOT effective dps, and you will frequently not want to use it. In raids, you often need to stay near the casters and play manasong, because going into melee range will often put you out of song range for the casters. In groups, you may need to be on crowd control / heal over time duty, in which case you will be busy mezzing mobs every couple ticks as well as twisting in regen songs with your lute equipped. Bard melee dps is less than 1/2 a warrior's dps - maybe 1/3. You make up for it with utility, but I personally lose over half my hp if I try to melee down a level 35ish sand giant. It just becomes more efficient, and arguably more dps, to wear a drum and dot targets if you are interested in dealing damage.

Also, if you are going to play a bard, be prepared to deal with extremely tired fingers!

The only gear a bard needs is their epic, and that won't be attainable for a few months so you have time!

Bards are probably the least gear dependent class in the game (in later levels). I played a Bard on live up through PoP and found that unless I was fighting something with an AOE, I could do my job just as effectively naked + instruments as I could with my elemental raid gear on.

Your DPS is negligible once other classes start to get their DPS abilities. Your AC doesn't really matter since you won't be taking melee damage. You don't really need int unless you do a lot of charming which isn't particularly often if you spend most of your time grouped. Some people swear up and down that unless your CHA is capped you're the worst bard on the server but I didn't really notice much of a difference back then. Maybe 2-3 extra resists over the course of an evening.

Bards barely need gear at all, beyond instruments (which is funny, considering how much people seem to like buying full sets of Lambent on this server), and the dirt-cheap instruments from vendors are totally acceptable until well beyond the time that you can afford to buy the MM drums/lute.

You will want to get yourself a set of banded (most reasonable AC/WT ratio), and put some starting points into STA, just to give you a little buffer, but most of what you do is largely independent of your stats.

So would someone happen to have a list of places to swarm kite and at what level?

Deajay's AoE bard leveling location guide:

• L7ish: The bandit sister camp in GFay (location #3)
• L10-12ish: The orcs in LFay (locations #6 & 11)
• L13-15ish: The derv and orc camps in SRo, lulling the casters and taking them out solo afterward. I usually also went in the desert and grabbed some extra roaming undead/dervs. (locations #3, 5, 6, & 10; although more locations in the southern portion are orc camps. I just found those listed to have fewer/no casters.)
• L16-19ish: LOIO fields. (I did 17 off the skellies/lower level sarnaks between locations #4, 5, 7 & 9. I did 16-20 off the non-caster wanderers between locations #9 and 13)
• L20-26: I did this portion between the Iksar outcast camps in WW and the lower level field portion of OT. (WW locations #B, 9, 10, 11 and OT field between locations #5, 6, 9, 10). OT is off-the-charts exp at this level range. If you can gather up the whole area, you are looking at ~45min/level during this range.
• 26-28The EXP really started to slow down in OT, so I headed back to WW and continued on the iksar outcast camps there. Was slower, but I didn't have to spend half my kite gathering up LB mobs.
• 29-30: I am doing this portion on the Drolvargs in FV. I have to admit, this range is by far the most dangerous I've done so far. The drolvargs are larger than most MOBs I've kited so far, and therefore have a larger hitbox, while I still have to be within 35 measurement units to hit them with my 18 dot. I have really perfected my distance/selo's speed, while also dieing much more than I would have liked in this level range. I gather up yellow/blue drolvargs while avoiding froglocks (especially casters) and other red dogs. It's actually not that hard to do. On this map of FV, I gather drolvargs from the area surrounded by points #3, 4, 5, 6, 8, 9, and A on the map, and then I take them back towards the NorthEastern Swamp of No Hope zone line as there are no wanderers back there. I'd recommend only pulling a few until you perfect your skills, as I have gotten stunned and 1-rounded (or even not stunned and one-rounded) more often than I'd like to admit. These dogs can take me to probably 35 or so, but I think I may try to find some MOBs to kite that aren't quite so deadly. The good news is I can sell/bank without zoning.
• 31-46 (maybe 47): I went back to OT and started kiting the Western/Southern areas of the zone. Basically any blue-red mob (besides dragoons) between the Outpost, SF, FM, the center valley and location #10 on this map of Overthere is fair game. I do recommend you pull only cockatrices, tigers, and cacti. They all move at the same speed. Rhinos move faster, but selos is much faster and a rhino-only kite would certainly work. Some Sarnaks cast, and I'm moving way too fast to check names to see if I'm about to pull a caster or not. This post shows some kites where I had probably 50+ mobs in my kite (figuring 1-2%/kill, and I know I made 100% of a level for each of those 2 kites). You can make some pretty awesome pulls. I've pulled so many that the dot spam insta-crashed EQ to desktop (creating a crappy CR).
• 47ish-55+: The Burned Wood. Once you've found where the devs have located it this week, find all the gorillas, skeletons, and hornets you can gather and kite em down. Avoid sarnaks as a lot of them are casters, the wyrms have much larger hit-boxes than everyone else, and also keep an eye out (read: avoid) for the ape "Gullerback" (he summons). Note that I have not AE kited here, but have heard reports from many-a-bard that this is the next step in AE kiting.

Do note that I've pretty much done all of these camps AE kiting. I'd love to group more, but soloing is retarded exp, good money, and I don't have to wait for the rest of the "holy trinity" to decide to show up. And yes, it does get MUCH easier at 18 when you get a new AE that isn't teeny-tiny range, but that doesn't mean that it's bad exp prior to 18.

As far as HOW to AoE kite, I suggest reading the amazing guides by Hmotzart and Cribanox and then just trying it out and figuring out what works for you.
Hmotzart's Hmasterpiece of Hmass AoE Hmurder
Cribanox Bard AoE Kiting

This makes me very happy.

is overthere that much better than FV? Having song merchants right there seems like a good deal for the 20-30 crowd.