How I Play My Level 50 Bard

hello and welcome to how I play My Level 50 Bard and uh let’s see how this goes so this is my level 50 Bard I mostly play it as a box but everything here should be uh usable by anyone playing a Bard at level 50 we’ll talk about the Spells I use we’ll talk about the hot bar buttons I have extended Target and how I use that uh and then there’s some some holes in my UI that I have here that are from my level 120 bar uh but first and foremost so The Bard to me is one of the greatest classes in the game I do not play The Bard to the fullest this is just what I’m able to do and this is what I do at 50 if you want to see it in action and stuff like that watch the Hobs and Friends Series where this character exists with Hobs and his friends as we go through uh the game so we go so uh the first spell we have here is rona’s Embers this is a not a classic spell so if you’re on TP you won’t have this spell until let’s see I think it was Buckland me find that spell those are level 60 arizonas the levels is 45 all right we’re Arizona zers lost Dungeons and orth so uh this is later in the TP you’ll get it but um I play on live so I have access to all the fixes they’ve done to all the classes over the years so this will increase your damage of your companion’s direct damage spell by 15% it’ll Decay over spells over 52 now why is that important uh I run two Mages with my box group here I run a beast Lord I run a shaman and I run a shadow Knight all of which are doing direct damage spells except for the shaman uh so that’s 15% extra damage to everybody in the group fantastic uh next up I have Katana of soothing now this is the Mana song regen song stamina song I run this at all times no matter what uh next up I have AOS accelerating chorus this spell comes from uh uh luckland I believe it is uh yeah level 49 luckland spell this turns cellos into from a 17 second you know pulsing Speed song to a 2minute uh Speed song so I have it for 2 minutes I don’t have to recast it for 2 minutes so this makes it a lot more convenient in fact lets me get another spell into my melody which we’ll show here and in a minute and Katana soothing comes from vas uh versus of Victory is the haste song I’m going with right now I am going to change it up shortly as soon as we get to the next one uh this one gives haste attack rate and all that stuff we look here it’s about uh do I have any other haste it looks like it’s about like 70 30% haste I don’t know I’m I have 4 % haste on so 30% it’s not the best but it is uh it’s enough to get the job done and then I have a melody of ir irar ravage I don’t know how you say that but this is over haste uh which is you’ll notice now like I I am over hasted I am hasted so it’s both stacking right now just due to like I’m in Guild and muffs don’t wear off but you see there it’s you know I’m I cap about about 75 haste right now 175 I think it’ll max out at two like 20 210 something like that at the end U maybe slightly lower so you know we’re going pretty good here with haste and stuff like that I I we kind of like I have two melee classes right the shadow Knight and the and the Beast Lord uh The Bard I don’t really melee with as much if she can get in range she’s in range I know it just matters but uh at a point in the game like here we go like on the Mage right they’re going to get a spell uh it’s one of these Companion ones right here suspension maybe uh one of them the one of the ranks of that will allow Buffs that hit the group to hit pets and when that happens all the pets will start getting all the songs and uh things will start to become magical and we’ll do even more damage but uh we’re we’re I think we’re like 10 20 levels away from that maybe maybe 30 uh I don’t know exactly when that AA hits but when it does it will be fantastic uh you’ll see some serious damage there next I have elemental rhythms uh this is not necessary right you can see here my my my all my characters are all in velious raid gear so their resists are pretty good as they get Defiant gear they will still have good resists um but but I am casting uh fire and uh rain magical nukes on my Mages and they take a little extra damage so I something I’ve testing testing with I’m not 100% sold on it yet uh throwing that in there fire ice and Magic to increase their resist slightly to see if that gives them any kind of uh relief in that but it’s not really uh this that’s more of a a positioning problem I need to resolve but uh Watch the watch the series you’ll see how hard it is to position when the Shadow and I can’t keep aggro off these two Knuckleheads here uh and then I have uh son’s dreams which is the Mez spell so this is level 50 three MZ uh I don’t MZ in the series but I do have MZ macro set up and that is because if I need to MZ I want to be able to MZ and I have three hot button or two hot buttons I’ll show on mesing and then another one for charm when we get to that and then I also have the uh salons bitching Braava this uh bewitching Braava uh this is the charm for level 39 we get a new one at 50 something now I haven’t I haven’t used this macro yet but I’m planning to try it out in the uh the next video I make I just made it a few minutes ago so this is kind of experimental this is a uh I’m I’m going to try to charm with The Bard and then send the pet in whenever we have multiple ads if possible we’re going to try it out uh just to see if we can get a little extra mileage out of The Bard but I don’t think it’s going to be as fantastic as I’d like uh in place of the elemental rhythms I would use the calm spell wo uh this one’s kind of low level I don’t really do it that much but this will hit up to level 60 creatures so it’s something nice to have just in case I do need it and that would be what I would keep there and I would just single Target do that if I’m pulling with The Bard but uh if you’ve watched the series I don’t I don’t pull single targets ever uh but that’s you know that’s that’s the songs I keep I don’t really switch out anything else out of this as we level up to 55 the spell set will change uh eventually I will be moving to chants and stuff like that to get more personal DPS out of The Bard and see how you know what is the great balance that I need to do to you know one provide adps to these these characters uh I I mostly consider these three the the Mages and the Beast Lord who I need to adps uh the shadow Knight and the shaman they’re just there to get jobs done and they will uh they will do it no matter what so they’re not as important when it comes to the adps that The Bard is providing it’s mostly to keep the uh the Mage and the Beast Lord happy all right so that’s the songs uh let’s go into the hot bars here now you’ll see my hot bar has got a lot of empty spots and then a lot of these not usable I copied my UI from my level 125 bar and I left everything the same a lot of the other characters I cleared all the hot bars this one I left them the same because it’s like muscle memory and I don’t want to I don’t want to mess that up I did clear out the multibind just so that you know I’m not doing stupid stuff there but uh like these burn buttons these are all highle uh 125 Burns that I do so I’m not going to cover those but if you want to see those you can watch the 125 video and it’ll show everything you see even my hide corpse has the the activation for solos uh AA so it is it is what it is so this is just a hide corpse uh it forges and auto inventories I don’t even think I set that up right yeah I I did set it up so Forge I like to forge uh on all my characters mostly because it gives them one food and two gives them some trade skill items that I would normally just have access to and uh you know they just fill up the bag here like roots on this one but eventually it starts getting to like the expansion specific items once you get your skill up high enough via AAS um now I used to have so I probably showed it in earlier videos when I was playing these guys The Bard was multi-b bound on four and five I changed that so The Bard is only multi bound on five so she does not have four in any of things so when I’m hitting four on my other characters they’re doing things and when I hit five they all do things and the F The Bard would do everything that’s in5 you’ll see here that The Bard has nothing to activate at the moment uh she plays a Melody that’s it and uh and we’re going to try out the charm stuff so my assist macro when I hit five uh targets X Target 19 which is how I have the group assists Target set so whatever my tank or whoever the assist is is targeting it the target will be right here so I Target that I turn on my attack I to pet attack so if I have a Charmed pet pet will attack if I have swarmed pets the pets swarm pets will attack later on The Bard can summon uh quite a few uh summon swarm pets so just you know it’s just a basic assist macro just basic uh as we get abilities to put here and the fives we’ll fill those out but she has nothing at the moment we’re going to skip the burns and then this is just J boots uh M my other characters sit on zero I have nothing there cuz I do not want the bar to sit because like you’re playing a song right you sit and it just makes you stand back up as soon as it hits the next tick right and the next tick well she’s not going to stand up I have it where she stands up sometimes I don’t know maybe it’s just because it’s a it’s not a Melody here let’s do the melody so if I sit down during the melody she stands back up and uh she’s playing the song then so it just doesn’t work I have mine it was stop song and sit for when she actually needs to sit because she has no mana and no stamina so later on that becomes an issue but it’s not an issue now so uh then we have a mount uh just every one of my characters has a mount this one has this weird dog thing from Night of Shadows um I don’t use them normally uh on numpad one I have another pet another assist uh this is just so if I I want her to do something but I it gets kind of complicated and it’s all in my head how that some of this works right I pull with numpad one on my my puller my tank whatever he pulls with numpad one I hit numpad one so this makes it so the bar is turning on attack gets whatever the target is right and then uh does everything and then there’s a discipline that she doesn’t have at this point in time that she will eventually do if that’s even a discipline this class has I copy I copy these uis like constantly so it might that might be a paladin UI uh discipline but doesn’t matter it’s not a part of this uh and then I do the pet attack pet swarm basic stuff right pet attack pet swarm boom so it’s just so something that I can have multiple ways of getting the bar to do stuff because if I’m spamming four the B’s doing nothing she didn’t activate anything but if I hit numpad one while I’m spamming four she’s going to jump into action and get stuff going and then on numpad 3 I have the current Melody this is the leveling Melody I’m using so 1 2 3 4 5 1 2 4 5 1 2 4 5 1 2 3 4 5 1 2 3 4 5 so six seven and 8 they’re not in the melody uh what I’m doing is I’m going Ron’s uh Embers Katana solos versus Melody then I do it again but I skip solos because it’s a two-minute I could I could extend this out in infinite right I just refresh it every every two song iterations right uh this is just a basic Melody uh I have a more complex Melody like this one right here uh for my 125 uh DW rard which is a little bit more in depth and I try to put a chant in between each action I cover that in in the uh 125 video but this is a basic Melody just for leveling I switch these spells out as I get new ones um they’re okay it’s not the best it it’s it provides adps because I’m passively playing the character most of the time so she’s like literally just standing right next to these guys providing Mana Song and all the other stuff that’s why she has the drum in her hand she’s not doing a lot of melee uh sometimes she does but most of the time like the are like over here and the casters are over here so there’s a you know there it’s like extra work I I’ll move the Beast Lord in but I I don’t The Bard is like I’ll do it if I feel like doing it but I don’t always do so that’s just the basic Melody it just does those and I skip sell those every two iterations all right now I have a MZ macro so if I if it wasn’t clear and any the other videos how I do extended Target all my characters have the exact same extended Target setup the character I’m playing from is the first and then everything is ordered based on how their Windows show up in is how isboxer shows their windows on the other screen so like if you imagine there is a box here box here box here box here box here and a box here right so it just goes like this in group order and so it’s one you know Hobs VA all the way to 20 20 being the last one so all of them have the same order so I just know that X Target one is always Hobs no matter what and that’s who I play from when I play these characters um but with that that’s 1 through six 7 through 18 are targets that are not currently being engaged right now keep that in mind not currently being engaged the current Target being engaged is X Target 18 that’s the main assist Target so hob is Hobbs is currently my main assist so he is currently that let me fix that uh he will currently be the uh whatever he’s targeting right so if I go to Hobs I click on that I click back on her you can see the ring shows up on it and it’s targeted right there perfect right so that is seven or that’s eight that’s 19 and then 20 is the whoever’s marked tank uh I currently use that for whoever is being healed guess the way I the way I have things set up at the moment but uh You’ have to watch a series to see how I do that so for seven and eight right here so these are the next two Targets so say we have this aggro and we have that Agro and that aggro like we’re inside of a situation where I can’t get anything on the extended Target so just imagine that right here is combat dummy Dena and then this one is combat dummy yeah right so if I hit this macro right I’ll just go ahead and Target that and then it will stop whatever I’m playing so if I just click it stops my song I Can’t cast on this mob anyway cuz he’s too high level never mind here we’ll do it on this one here imagine it’s this one so son’s dream starts casting and he he resisted that one so he’s going to tr again there we go we got it landed on the next iteration so you see there now we have a Target mest this target would would be like this one right here x Target uh seven and we just you know keep it messed as long as I don’t hit five on her if I hit five right she’s going to go into combat mode and fight whatever the target is so she’ll just start swinging her sword and I’ll have to move her into position so her attacks on but if I go here x Target 7 she’s going to turn off attack and she’s going to try to mes it makes sense like it it pretty simple right now same thing again but it’s X Target 8 now like this this takes a lot of lot of effort on my part to do if I have two two Targets here I’ve I’ve done it on my 20 series I’ve been able to Mees uh I think up to three it’s this the B song doesn’t last very long it’s like 20 seconds so I have enough time to Mees this one one right I’ll click it and then that’s 19 seconds and I can click again to do the other Target and I got 20 seconds and I can I have this on my numpad no other character has any key keybinds for these three slots I can just hit eight and I can hit nine I can hit eight and I can hit nine and it’ll just she’ll keep doing it so it lets me Mez without having to actually do anything so it works pretty well now I’m adding this charm macro which will charm the first Target instead of mesing it so in theory we’re going to test this out in the the next video in chard do I believe this charm will go up to like 50 something so hopefully we can even do it uh if not we’ll do it on the next charm but she’ll Target X Target s she’ll stop singing Whatever She’s singing and then she’ll do Melody 8 which Melody 8 is the the charm doesn’t say the level uh let me see if I can figure out what level this is real quick uh see here 39 charm up to level 51 so we can charm a mob up to 51 so we shouldn’t have any issue Charming something from the entrance and charu now it’s a one minute duration uh but it might be a better way of crowd control for Bard like when I play with real bards they always charm something so this is me trying to put that into my my repertoire of things that I can do from as a box cuz I I would be doing all this where is he I don’t even know where he’s from here right so like I’m on I’m on Hobs and I hit uh numpad n so she’s GNA oh she can’t charm that anyway so let’s just do numpad 7 right she she doesn’t have Target cuz there is a one there we go so if I hit numpad 7 so she’s doing her song you can kind of see the glow in her hands right I say that but I don’t think I have key maps on why are you not working oh cuz it’s numpad 8 not numpad 7 I’m dumb here we go numpad 8 is uh the button I want to push so you can see there she’s messing that so it just this is going to be a new way I do it but we’re going to try it out so as I was saying that’s that that’ll be a charm that’ll be new then I have a sit and stop song macro it’s useless uh at this point uh I have a follow hockey so this is what I use to follow I turn off attack i x Target one so X Target one is always the character I’m playing from I stand up if I’m sitting I follow and I invite uh as I said in many times when you invite somebody who has invited you to their group you will join their group so it’s just a timesaver for me uh then this whole row here is all teleport items so we got the north row teleport we got two Guild Hall teleports we got origin we have a gate potions but apparently I’m out of those at the moment we have campfire teleport we have the Stein for teleportation and we have Throne of Heroes to get us back to Guild Lobby so those are uh those are all the teleports I use and it just makes getting around easy uh let’s see here and then I have a stop song macro this is just something I push uh to stop singing it’s the same as just like clicking once on the spell bar uh that’s not usable and then these we’re going to ignore all these these are all the imported uh UI from my 125 I just wanted to keep the same Melody so I when I put the same spells in I will get the same effect as her without having to rewrite all that uh and then I have lessons of devout and experience potions just uh if she gets any experience potions which she has some I don’t even know why they’re not showing up down there that’s weird but uh So eventually we’ll be using experience potions probably in the next video to kind of speed up leveling uh then I have some clickies that we don’t have on this character at the moment then we have access to the LOL right here just a quick little uh click the lull kind of thing it lasts for 30 seconds so it’s kind of like if you’re fast enough you can get a few mobs led up it just depends right I think the most I’ve gotten is like three or four but it gets kind of dicey when you get back over here to this one right is it it just doesn’t wear off so it doesn’t matter uh see here Nature’s Melody so the weapon I have has a right click to give uh haste and stuff like that it only lasts for like 2 minutes so I’m kind of lazy I was expecting it to be a proc weapon uh when I got it but I didn’t realize it wasn’t so uh these are macros for the level 100 in VI a just ignore those those are all high level abilities now what I’ve done is I’ve set a Bandelier here with uh different things right so so we don’t have defiant armor we don’t have uh planer armor so we don’t have any um instrument modifiers on our gear at all so our our only option is to actually use instruments so we take a look here what the hell oh jeez that one’s all busted uh yeah okay well here let’s do this throw that away hot button I think it overused yeah it’s overusing a hot button from like high level abilities anyway you click that and it uh it switches me to dagger dagger right if I click this switches me to drum if I click this it switches me to Horn I click that switches me to flute uh depending on what I’m playing uh I typically just keep drum up at all times so like I haven’t really spent any effort in trying to melee with her excessively she doesn’t I don’t even think she has double attack yet um so it’s it’s like why bother she might have gotten it just recently say your skill name yeah she doesn’t have double attack she just dual wield and that’s it as you can see here I’ve never even dual wielded when she gets double attack and triple attack and stuff like that we we’ll talk about melee but right now it’s just not worth my time so I keep the drum SE my solos as fast that’s literally all it is uh these are all uh abilities we just don’t have yet so we’ll get those eventually and same with all those those are just copied from the other UI uh I got the summon Banker macro to summon my banker in to uh use it there there uh then I have some masks I have uh the various ones you can see them all in my key ring uh so I have a dwarf mask Barbarian mask and dark Health mask and a gnome mask just uh some mask I high laying around on some of my other bars that I no longer play and then more not found things uh gear wise you want the best like the best weapon you can get at level one is this Nature’s Melody uh but anything really works melee doesn’t matter he wants stats is really what it is the bards are going to go for direct heroic dexterity as their stat of choice leveling up and getting augs and stuff for uh but I’ve pretty much just leveled them gave them all uh vas Ray loot so they can do it at level one but now they’re level 50 so this all this gear is pretty PR much going to be obsolete as soon as we start getting more defiant drops uh ornate defiant starts to be an iffy change flawed iffy and then intricate totally replaces whatever I’m wearing uh as we get that gear I will replace it it is significantly better than this uh stuff because it has instrument modifiers on all the all the main pieces so it’s significantly better I can then actually dual wield and not have to carry a drum or anything like that so it’s just as a matter when we get that stuff I’m not going to go out of my way to buy it or anything like that with the way we’re leveling right now um let me see here I think that’s everything for The Bard like um It’s The Bard is a very complex class and the way I play it is not the most efficient way it’s not the most most you know skilled way to do it right it’s a class that provides a lot of utility in the fact that it has 0ps utility songs it has all kinds of useful needs but it’s a low interaction class because of Melody I can just click Melody and I’m I can I can literally do nothing on this character uh except maybe keep her from going AFK and that’s on like on T tlps the AFK thing is big a big issue cuz once you go AFK it can kick you from the server but I’m I’m playing on live I can sit idle for days on end and I’ll never be kicked from the server so I can just literally Park these guys wherever I want go over to my uh my shadow KN and just play the game and then hit the assist buttons and they will assist and do what they need to do via the multi binds I have set up on all of them so The Bard is just exceptional at that kind of thing and uh it’s it’s a really useful class for that now as I start adding in charm to the equation and we’re train that out and seeing if we can charm a mob for a minute and get it to fight for a minute I mean that’s that’s going to be pretty cool I mean like that’ll be cool but I don’t know how much effort that’s going to take on my part versus just straight up killing the mobs or AOE tanking them like I have been so that’s you know some thoughts there you know try to improve things but for the most part that’s it that’s uh that’s all I got for The Bard right now if you have any tips or tricks that you want to share that you know put them in the comments and uh I’ll uh I’ll respond but that’s all I got I’ve been making bars for a while and that’s all I need when I play I it’s it’s dead simple for me but uh let me know thank you very much for watching and please have a fantastic day no