First Steps as a Bard

This first picture is of Xeoni in a group in Iron Tomb, one of the first Rift dungeons.

My beloved Xeoni is a bard in addition to being a ranger. As I've mentioned before, Rift allows you to switch between 4 different soul sets. My secondary soul on Xeoni is bard. I tend to swap over to bard while in groups because it's fun. I've always enjoyed music oriented classes.

One of my favorite MMO characters was a musician in Star Wars Galaxies. You would sit in a cantina and play music all day long. It was fantastic, you never had to leave to fight things. I would chat with adventurers when they came in and hear about their epic quests, but I didn't have to leave town unless I wanted to. This might sound silly after all, why would I want to play virtual music in a game when I could play a real instrument? Well... actually I don't have a great answer to that question. I'll go with a combination of my Star Wars obsession and my MMO addiction. Those would be the two reasons I enjoyed it. All bard classes remind me of those happy days in SWG (before SOE ass raped it of course).

My next favorite musician class in a game was the bards of Dark Age of Camelot. They were a hybrid of healers and bards. You needed to do something called twisting while playing DAoC bards. Twisting only applies to bard classes and is when you start a song, then start another, and another to get the effects of all three (or more), while refreshing what you started with. Master bards would twist together songs to get effects at just the correct moments. For example if the group needed extra heals, you could twist in extra healing songs. It was a very dynamic and fun class to play. Plus PvP in DAoC was amazing and bards had the ability to mesmerize their enemies, thus preventing the enemy from using his skills.

Both SWG and DAoC are pretty dead games now. Today SWG is a mere shadow of what it used to be. DAoC could be worth revisiting in the future.

I think this is my last photo of Paris, well of me in Paris anyway. Be prepared for Barcelona next week!

EDIT: I just read the latest update from the blog Epic Slant by Ferrel. He talks about the upcoming patch changes in Rift. Check it out here.