Bard Skills
Bard skills are incredibly useful in PVM situations. Here are the skills:
Discordance - greatly reduces a creature's defenses.
Peacemaking on a target - makes a creature stop fighting, even if it's a pet and the owner orders it to fight. A creature may break out of peace mode if it takes damage.
Peacemaking on an area (by targeting yourself) - stops all combat activity in the area. Monsters and players can fight immediately but they have to re-initiate combat.
Provocation - provokes two creatures into fighting with each other.
All three of these skills are activated from the skill menu. To use a bard skill you must have a musical instrument in your backpack. The last musical instrument you've used will be your active instrument and will automatically be used each time you use another bard skill.
While all three skills are very useful, you may find each one appropriate in a different situation. Usually players find peacemaking to be most useful for beginning to intermediate level players, and provocation and discordance more useful for very experienced players.
Musicianship is the final bard skill. It is not actively used, but is a requirement for the other skills. Without musicianship, the other skills will not work because you can't play instruments properly. Levels of musicianship above 100 increase the effectiveness of all of the other bard skills.
Training
Training peacemaking is relatively easy. Use the peacemaking skill and target yourself; repeat every ten seconds. You can simultaneously train the musicianship skill by double-clicking the musical instrument in your backpack.
Discordance is a bit more difficult because you need to find targets to discord, and as your skill level increases you need to find more difficult targets to raise your skill.
Provocation is known to be one of the most difficult skills to train. As with discordance you need to find increasingly difficult targets to train on, however because of the nature of the skill you need to find two of them. At some skill levels you can use train the skill on summons (blade spirits, energy vortices, and earth elementals).
When training discordance and provocation, you will need to find more difficult creatures to train on as your skill increases. Find out which creatures are appropriate using the barding difficulty calculator here.
Note that barding difficulty is not a precise thing; one dragon might be tougher than another. Barding difficulty also changes when a monster weakens, so it becomes much easier to use barding skills on a monster that has only half its hit points.
Musical Instruments
There are a few types of musical instruments, but the effect of them is generally the same. Using a lightweight instrument such as a tambourine is helpful because it leaves you more room in your backpack for loot. Some players prefer a lute because it's easier to tell the difference between success and failure based on the song that's played.
Some instruments are marked as Exceptional. Exceptional instruments can be crafted by skilled carpenters, and when used, provide an additional bonus to your effective barding skills.
Some instruments are marked as slayers: for example spider slayer, daemon slayer, exorcism, etc. These instruments provide a bonus against the specified monster group, even more than exceptional instruments. However against monsters that are not in the specified group, slayer instruments are less effective than regular instruments.
Fire Horns
Bards can use fire horns as an additional means of attack. Fire horns are occasionally found as loot on monsters. Using a fire horn (by double clicking it) performs an area fire attack on surrounding creatures. The damage done is based on the total skill level of all four barding skills. Using a fire horn costs 20 mana and incurs a significant cast recovery time. When using a fire horn, there is a small chance that the fire horn will disintegrate, and a 25% chance that the fire horn will backfire and hurt you if there are player combatants in your target range. Fire horns do more damage to monsters than to players.
Bard Spells and Path of Mastery
Bards can sing sustained spellsongs to benefit friends or harm enemies. Read about the songs in the player guide section about bard spells
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