Bard Template Tips

[Mikanele]

MatronDeWinter gave me some great tips on bards so I thought I should post it for new players:

If you want to farm monsters, you simply must have about 80+ wrestle. It's more important that resistance. I have since changed my mind on what I consider the best barding template.

Magery:
90 is plenty to cast anything you would want to cast as a non-pvp character.

Meditation:
70-80 is plenty to get by with considering you are only using it for healing and recalling typically. I always ran 70 on my thieves and I could stand toe to toe with 2-3 pvpers and stay alive without ever running out of hp. Just don't cast offensive spells, they cost a ton of mana.

Wrestling:
80-90, and I would lean towards 90 myself, or even 100 if you can afford it. It doesn't matter whether or not you plan to PvP or not. Unless your character is a crafter, merchant, or dexer, there is no excuse not to have at least 80 of this, and sometimes in those cases you should have it still.

A character with those three skills can live through just about anything when played right. Naturally you want barding skills too I imagine:

Provocation:
GM the skill, it's your bread and butter.

Peacemaking:
Entirely pointless unless you are using it to grief. Since you can spam attack last, (and it's almost necessary to do so in modern uo pvp/pk), peacemake is almost entirely pointless to have. It's only good for ruining people who are macroing, or disturbing player-ran "dog fight" style events or general griefery like forcing dragons to stop fighting so they attack a nearby bard and so on.

Enticement:
Only good for stealing peoples followers. No other useful purpose after a patch about 2 years ago.

Music:
You obviously need to GM this one.


So what other skills might you consider?

Hiding:
Pretty nice to stay hidden while monsters kill themselves. This allows you to get the jump on would-be pks and thieves in the event you are attacked.

Stealth:
I like to stay hidden entirely. But then again, I never use a mount and am really used to playing that way.

Eval:
a few points here could help you get the final shot on the last-standing monster. Might be worth investing 50-70 points into if you have it but it would really only help you save some regs and mana.

Resist:
If you find yourself being attacked alot, and just aren't quick with the recall or escape, this can come in handy for sure. But as you get more experienced at the game, it really doesn't matter outside the realm of consensual pvp. I don't even use it on a pk. Only "tournament" style fighting characters... boring. Versus one character, it should be trivial to keep yourself healed without this skill. Versus two people it is still relatively easy to stay alive if you can cast harm and prevent them from synchronyzing their spells on you or utilize breaking their line of sights. Versus 3 you can still do the above technique, but you had also better use magic refect and stone wall like an expert. Anytime you are up against 4 players, just run away, you don't stand a chance.

Item id:
Entirely worthless. ID wands cost practically nothing and don't have a delay. If anything put this skill on a mule character to macro ID-ing things if you must.

Cartography:
Worthwhile to have if you like doing tmaps, but it's not as profitable as it used to be. The loot has been patched so that it's not nearly as lucrative as it was during 1999, and to complecate things, the market for maps is just silly. People want 14k for a map that will get you 20-25k in loot and consume a half hour of your time? No thanks.

Lockpicking: It's almost a must if you want cartography, however, simply doing dungeon chests can be quite profitable, but that requires a different character template.

Tracking:
It's the bees-kness of uo skills. You can find monsters, people, hidden pks, whatever. I really like it. However, you should NEVER have more than 70 of this skill if you plan to farm or operate anywhere near a town. Otherwise it will fail since it tries to detect too many targets. I would do GM if you are like, a tamer trying to find a rare pet or something. 70 to find monster spawns and hidden pks and the like (just spam using this skill while hidden and you can often detect a pk approaching). Or 50 if you are just using it to follow a player once you have already found them, or find them within only 2 screens or so.


So, for a monster-killing bard. I would say go with something like this:

90 Mage
90 Med
90 Wrestle
100 Music
100 Provocation
70 Tracking

540 Points used, leaving you with 160 to do whatever with. You might consider GMing wrestle, getting some eval, or whatever. Even healing can be pretty decent (Gm heal + 60 anatomy), but that really only helps you save regs and mana, so it's not too helpful. Personally, I would use those 160 points for 60 eval and 100 hiding.

If you do hiding/stealth, you must GM both. 9 steps (less than gm stealth) is not enough to get out of the range of detect hidden and it forces you to stop and wait too often to walk. Hiding is a stats game. You want it to be reliable exactly when you need it, otherwise it's useless.


You might consider a different template though if you aim to earn gold AND magic items to support another character. I used to run this template:
http://my.uosecondage.com/Status/Player/91213

I would stealthily pick level 4+5 dungeon chests earning a ton of gold and loads of reflect/invis/teleport items. There is not so many high end weapons in level 4 chests (since the tmap loot is not accurate to the era), but that doesn't matter. There are tmaps in the chests that you can do all by yourself with only a handfull of energy vortex scrolls ( buy them in bulk), and those have the vanqs. So pick chests, when the chests are all picked, do your maps. If you don't have maps and all the chests are open, then go farm some blood elementals with your EV scrolls (staying stealthed) while you wait for the chests to respawn. Blood eles also drop level 5 maps which can can solo depending on your skill level. Also, their loot drops to the ground so you don't even need to unhide except to cast a quick ev (which is 100% chance with scroll) and hide again.


Hope that helps,
mdw

[iamreallysquall]

i would not waste 100 points on hiding with how cheap invis items are and plus you can use the invis spell. i like the standard resist,wrestling,med,mage,eval,music,provo personally. i agree with most of the above and i have that template for a stealth picker.