Most Effective Way to Solo a bard?

Been what seems like a 100 years since I played one. I understand bards have been nerfed hard. My play times vary but grouping is really not effective due to my limited play times so I mostly solo my Necro. I want to tinker around with a Bard, but will be soloing almost all the time so .... whats the most effective way to xp a Bard solo?

Played when Phin was new, took an alt Bard to 28 but left the game afterwords. So level 28 whats best way to solo? Charming?

There are groups on Agnarr going at all times. Just group and save yourself the hassle

If you are continuing on phinny then idk, I guess charm kite with your dots

Fear, Snare, 2 dots. Can do blues all day long with zero downtime.

First find a time machine....

your not gonna have much fun trying to solo level a bard tbh. its doable but soooo sloooooow. you can do as ultrazen says and fear kite, but its slow as hell (not to mention risky because of likelihood of adds) you can also charm later with the higher level charm, but it costs mana, and once you're oom, you're in for a half hour med before you have full mana again.

Painful does not begin to describe leveling a bard solo at this point.
Maybe worse than a rogue if one ever experienced how great playing a bard once could be.

Why would you choose fear instead of a 3rd dot?

And for what its worth ive solod griffins and hg randomly in EC and it is brutally slow. Bards in a group are powerhouses i wouldn't want to punish myself using the slow dots they have.

Meh. Wait until Kunark and you can quad kite stuff.

Why are you guys talking about dots? He is level 28. He has zero dots.

At level 28 charm is your best (only?) bet unless you are massively twinked. But save yourself the hassle and look for groups. Soloing at low levels as a bard is miserable, and it only gets marginally better once you get dots.

They nerfed bard kiting long, long ago. If a mob if moving, the bard dot does not do damage to the mob. Sadly, that's what happens when enough people whine about another class's ability to do something they can't do. It gets nerfed.

Roll another class. Not to be mean, but if you aren't grouping, roll another class. Bards cannot solo.


You can solo from 1-8 in the newbie yard. You can still out melee some things with health regen running after that, for a while, but stuns stopping your song will get you killed eventually.
Your AE dot will get you killed eventually.
Your AE dot dropping every time the mob flees at low health, and you chasing it, hitting it with your pathetic melee, WILL GET YOU KILLED. Period. Dot.
If you are really hung up on it, try befallen undead, they don't run. You can rest up between kills and get to the teens without too much trouble.

It does not get better.

You get a charm at 27. It lasts 18 seconds. You cannot recharm until the first charm completely wears off. None of this crap about "timing it to land as it breaks..." you literally cannot start the charm cast until it breaks. So, you are running around in circles with Selos, aggroing how many... charming every 18 seconds. If you mistime charm and let Selos drop, you die. If you get stunned by a mob that aggros and has a good line to you, you die. If a ghoul gets a root on you, you die. If you fail to do any personal dps, you get no xp.

You get a DoT at 30. Now you can at least reliably get XP from the charm kiting. It is safer, and slower, to Snare and DoT. You can get one kill every 4 or 5 minutes.

You get a better DoT in the 30s, and a final DoT at ~42. You can go to Seafury Island and kite the north side. You can get 1% xp every 15 minutes.




If you are only going to group when your friends are online, play another class.
If you are never grouping at all, why the hell are you playing EQ?

Swarm kiting was an unattendend exploit that disrupted game play (sometimes dominating zones all day) and gave Bards too much exp for the time. That and everything like that being removed makes this game better not worse. You can go use a lot of old the broken BS on p99 -- that dead server people left as soon is there was another option.

I am so glade there is no swarm kiting atm.

No Sh#t, Sherlock.

The part people have trouble with is that whatever foreign coders SOE paid 5 cents a day for their "Development" post-WoW had the task of fixing a wagon with a wobbly wheel, and their decision making paradigm was to knock off the wheels and call it a sled.

AoE kiting has been nerfed.

Swarm kiting = getting half a dozen-a dozen social mobs in a train, charming one of them, having them all gang up on the charmed mob, breaking charm, and then chanting down the broken beaten former pet. I haven't seen anything that says this no longer works.

...

Actually, AE kiting is Swarm Kiting, and Charm Kiting is Charm Kiting. This is as it was since the 99. This is as Sensi called it in her(his?) guide that most people learned it from that was reposted to the bard sites of the time.

I realize that at some point in the past 15 years, some confused individual started refering to Charm Kiting as Swarm Kiting, and that the name stuck. We move on...

But if you are going to correct someone, actually BE correct.

If he's 28 then he should be able to get Solon's Song of the Sirens and start real swarm kiting of mobs. It's tricky but very doable.

Happy to look at a link.

http://thedruidsgrove.org/archive/eq/t-251.html

A discussion on the definition of swarm kiting.

This is a guide for the level 95 song but the basics go like this, round up your swarm, charm one and sic it on another mob. The when you'r pet is near death you break charm with an invis. It's most effective to work through as many mobs as possible until the entire swarm is very low health. At that point you finish them one at a time with chants.