is provoke and music a good way to startout ?

[Hades Grimm]

is provoke and music a good way to startout ? ive got a gm provoke and and musicmanship character ... just looking for a way to get moneys to startout a hunter

[dvs]

You want magery to go along with it at least for recalling/e-bolt/cure etc.

It can be very profitable at the correct server times. Just make sure to have an escape recall macro on hand for sticky situations/PKs.

[Boondock_Saint]

I started with a fencer thief, while macroing all the skills for my provoker. Saved up the gold from killing liches, then I used that gold to macro magery. I never had magery on my thief, and rarely died to any pks. Be good at running and hiding, most just run right by you. Unless of course they have tracking, which is rare because the pks here are terrible.

I think taming is the best money maker, but it takes time if you don't read Rose's guide on the forum.

[morgan1109]

Yes a Bard is a cheap and easy build to start out on and has great money making abilities. Music, eval, & provoke are free to raise. meditation (about 500 for a properly set up rune book) is dirt cheap. Wrestling is 1000 in npc fee's plus a couple thousand bandages so total about 3,000 to Gm that skill. Magery will cost you. You’ve got a good starting build that can make some great money. Finally you can change skills at any time and the template can be easily converted into a PVP template pretty painlessly. That’s the short answer.
The long answer…
So far we have:
Music & Provoke (these two give you 100% chance to provoke so no failures)
Eval (gives magery a lot of strength) & Meditation (allows your mana to regenerate much faster to cast more often) & Wrestling (to prevent interrupts in mage casting). These three supplement and support your magery abilities
Start with 50 magery, +50 in whatever skill you want to specialize in.

At this point you’ve barely broke 5K in expenses for five GM skills. You can control pretty much anything in the game outside of other players. You have enough magery to get around the world to those hunting hot spots and earn some great coin (which you will use to invest in even more magery, heh heh).

You can make your bard into a treasure hunter. You would likely drop eval/wrestling for hide, cartography, and lockpicking. Lockpicking is hard and takes a very long time to GM. It pays well popping those level 4 chests from 95-100, but it’s painful and it’s long.

You can make him into monster of PVM crowd control by adding animal taming/Lore. I think it’s a bit duplicative as both taming and barding are both perfectly adept at crowd control for the most part. You definitely can become a one man wrecking crew though. If you do this use your extra 49 points in animal taming (you will want to use 1 point at starting screen in music to get a newbied instrument).

I personally have a general tamer as mapped out above with the extra skill in magic resistance. I basically went all in on the magic side, after getting the provocation skills. I’ve also got the treasure hunter. Both are very fun to play. Both are great money makers. Both pretty much have to recall when a red shows up. The treasure hunter recalls right away since he only has 100 points (magery) in a PVP skill. The regular bard has 500points in PVP type skills, so he’ll usually stick around for a bit to see if the red knows his stuff. They usually do on this server, so it’s time to scoot because you have no melee to match his Halberd.

A quick side note. This can be your starting character and starting build. If you follow the general template above you are pretty close to the vaunted PVP hally mage build. Once you are set up with a house and a nice slush fund you just need to drop your provoke/music and pick up the remainder of the PVP skills. They cost you nothing to GM them, so you don’t lose anything but some time when you drop them.

Or you can be like most and build a totally new character to PVP with once the cash is rolling in, heh heh. Or a crafter, or a dexxer. I could never play just one character. I have to have all of them. One last note. That is A LOT of macroing up front to start. Macroing isn’t exactly fun. I’d make a crafter to start earning a little coin while the bard is macroing. Or you could make a dexxer (take 50 healing and probably 50 magery if you actually plan on building him out later) and hit some graveyards for some fun. Do not hit brit graveyard (PK’s). Any other city graveyard is usually fine. If you created a 50 blacksmith/50 tinker crafter about an hour of mining will produce enough ore to make a couple 26 AR suits out of the ore mined, and a couple weapons of choice for your dexxer. See what I mean about not playing one character? I need three to start!

[Mens Rea]

This is all nonsense. Here's the real ticket to victory:

1) Get to 100 str
2) Get to 100 hiding
3) Get a teleport scroll, a heal scroll and a cure scroll. Place in your back pack.
4) Go to terathan keep and lure ophidians to terathans then hide.
5) Loot the corpses.

[morgan1109]

heh heh heh. Nice!

Mens makes a solid point though. Hiding is a great tool for a bard and most characters. Certain spawns require you to hide in between Provo's. Casting the invisibility spell is usually good enough, but hide is still a good place to put some points and free to raise (and then drop later if you want).

Hide's main advantage over the invis spell is it's infinite timer, where invis only lasts 2 minutes. Hide provides more protection against the detect hidden skill (PVP) while invis really doesn't.