The Bardic Ways | Barding Difficulty | Discordance | Musicianship |Peacemaking | Provocation | Firehorns| Bard Mastery

Professions: The Bard

UO Bard Forum

The Bardic Ways, by Clarke, Master Bard

Updated April 2009, by Poo

 

So, you have played the archer, the mage, the warrior and possibly the thief. Yet, you desire something different. The most interesting, yet most misunderstood of the Sosarian professions, the Bard, may be for you.

The number one skill for a Bard is Musicianship. Without mastering that skill, all other bardic skills will suffer.
First rule of barding, always insure your instrument, a tuneless bard is a helpless bard.

Uses of the Bardic skills:

Discordance:

This skill applies resist and skill loss to the target creature. The percentage of resist and skill loss is scaled on the bard’s Discordance skill. At 50.0 skill, the target loses 12.5% from all resists and skills, at 100.0 skill – 25% and at 120 skill – 28%. A discorded creature has a reduced barding difficulty, allowing a better chance of success using provocation or peacemaking. As a ‘team player’ a discord bard can be of great value to most other character types.

The effects of Discordance is halved on creatures with a barding
difficulty of 160 (a bard with 120 discord normally debuffs a creature
by 28%. However, against a creature that has a barding difficulty of
160.0, the bard will debuff the creature by 14% and see the message “your enemy seems to shake off some of the effects of your discordance”. [publish 28]).

Peacemaking:

Another very useful skill is Peacemaking. This skill is used in two ways, area peace and targeted peace. To area peace you would use the skill ‘peacemaking’ and target yourself. This causes a temporary ‘truce’to occur, allowing you the chance to make a run for it. The effect lasts for a very short time, much shorter than the time you need to wait before you can use the skill again. For a longer lasting effect use the skill and target a specific creature. Used in this way the skill is difiiculty-based. A successful peace attempt will cause your target to cease all hostile activity whilever the effect lasts, the length of time the effect lasts can sometime be very short however, especially if your target is being damaged.

Provocation:

This skill is one of the more powerful skills in the game (especially as a newbie character). With this skill you may provoke one or more creatures/monsters to attack a target of your choosing. Example, head east of Britain into the woods, an Orc spawn occurs, you can sit back and provoke them all to attack each other then collect the loot. It is also an excellent time to increase your combat skills. Provoke two creatures to attack each other, then attack one of them. They will be attacking each other so you will not get injured and your skill will increase. If you are unsuccessful in provoking the monster, it will become furious and attack you, however.

Note: Every use of one of the above three skills does two skill checks, the skill and your Musicianship ability. So if you have 50 in Musicianship and 50 in Peacemaking, you will have roughly a 25% chance of success. A 100 in Musicianship and a 80 in Provocation will give you roughly an 80% chance of success.

The bards of Sosaria are many and varied, yet on the whole they fall into three main groups;

Bard Templates
The Pure Bard	The Tamer Bard	The Warrior Bard
MusicProvocation Peacemaking Discordance Magery Meditation or Evaluate Intelligence	Music Provocation, Peacemaking or Discordance Animal Taming Animal Lore Veterinary Magery	MusicProvocation or Discordance Swordsmanship, Fencing, Mace Fighting or Archery, Tactics Anatomy Healing or Chivalry

Choosing Your Targets

Knowing your targets’ barding difficulty is essential. An average barding difficulty for each creature type is listed in its hunter’s guide entry.
Use of the Barding Success Calculator is recommended.

Selecting your ‘tune’

Used as weapon or tool by a Bard, instruments follow these rules:

• With a few notable exceptions, all musical instruments wear out with use. A non-exceptional player-made instrument or one purchased from an NPC has approximately 400 uses. An exceptional player-made instrument or a magical instrument has approximately 700 – 900 uses.
• The instrument used by a bard skill will automatically be the “last instrument” you double-clicked. When players wish to change their default instrument (when, for example, you have different magical instruments and need to switch between them), they can simply accomplish this by double-click it and having it set it self as the new default “last instrument.”
• Using an exceptional player-crafted instrument grants the bard a bonus of 5 skill points worth of effect for using any bard-related ability. This is applied as a reduction in the difficulty of the skill check, and does not have any effect on any calculations that use the bard’s skill level. For example, the bonus for using an exceptional instrument cannot increase the maximum range or radius of an effect.
• Magical instruments are available in the game that have some similarities to the “slayer weapons” that are more effective against specific creatures, or creature groups, and less effective against others.

Each of these magical instruments give the bard 10 skill points worth of difficulty modifiers against a certain class of creature. However, possessing these instruments does not cause the bard to be vulnerable to other types of creatures. Instead, when using the instrument against the opposing creature type, the attempt has a difficulty penalty instead of a bonus.

As an example, a “Demon Slayer” instrument of will increase the bard’s chance to use a barding ability against any variety of Demon by 20% (when that instrument is used). When used against an elemental, however, the bard’s chance of success is reduced by 20%.

Special Instruments

• Gwenno’s Harp – an Ilshenar minor artifact dual slayer instrument: Repond and Reptile. 1600 uses
• Iolo’s Lute – an Ilshenar minor artifact dual slayer instrument: Demon and Undead. 1600 uses
• Dreadhorn’s Flute – a rare drop from the peerless, Dreadhorn, regular instrument, self-recharging, maximum uses 700
• Flute of Renewal – Currently not spawning (Treasures of Tokuno item), superslayers in 6 forms, undead, demon, reptile, repond, arachnid and elemental, self-recharging maximum charges 300. NB: This item is destroyed if allowed to reach 0 uses.
• Firehorn – Creates a fire damage area effect with a cost of 4 sulphurous ash, a common monster-drop

In closing:

The Bard has free reign over all of Sosaria. Armed with only an instrument, a Bard can stroll into Destard and begin to provoke drakes and dragons to fight each other; wander into Shame and make the Earth Elementals do battle with themselves.

Good luck and play well,

Clarke, Master Bard