Question for all you experienced bards ^^

[yrostran]

Hi all i was wondering how bard's fair at farming? I know we cant do what a melee class can do,so my question is can bards camp NM's? Im getting a little tight on gil and farming is so hard with bard so was wondering i love the class so far but why did they have to do us so weak melee wise jeez,they should have at least made us sort of a redmage melee ;_; What you guys think.

[Aniga]

We are, by far, the worst soloing class out there, but one of the best surviving classes. What I mean by that is that it takes me quite a while to kill Too Weaks Elementals for clusters, 5-8 minutes depending on what element it is. Our melee is subpar to every other class, perhaps save BLM and SMN (Even a WHM with Hexastrike is more damaging than us). Requiem and Dia don't add up at later levels, either. But we are great at surviving, we have all the tools for it. If you can sleep it, you can kill it as a bard--It would take a while to, however, but not many other classes can claim this. Take it as you will.

On NMs, we can camp easy ones such as Leaping Lizzy or Valkrum Emperor easily. We could probably camp Leech King or Argus too, but I haven't tried. And if you were really desperate, bored, whatever, a bard could solo Simurgh with ease since our sleep sticks so well--Just would take you hours upon hours, perhaps days.

[Talonus]

Aniga hit the nail on the head basically. It takes bards forever to kill anything, but it takes anything forever to kill bards. The only way for a bard to really lose a fight is to face a mob that a) has high resists so that lull doesn't stick or b) kills the bard in a handful of shots.

That said, I've done pretty well at soloing for weaponskills. Even at 60 I can solo easy prey with pathetic weapon skill levels. I've taken a couple decent challenges for fun as well, but that's rare. Yes, it takes 5 mins or so per mob, but it is better than many classes can do.

[Fooma]

Around 50 you can hunt tigers in batilla ok by making a macro to
1: lulluby to claim the target from competition
2: cast highest level paeon on yourself
3: sneak attack and go for it

you should be able to make 8-10k / hour. The only thing slowing you down is the waiting on paeons.

Around 65 or so you can go through with maybe 1 paeon every 6 tigers instead of after each one, it's still good money.

At higher levels you can also sub thief and hunt spiders in altepa for spider webs (roughly 5k on each server)

At 70 and above, sub bst and grab the strongest too-weak you can on a map, and go on a rampage. West altepa scorpions against spiders, Floor 11 bats on floor 10 giants in upper delkfut (gaining you lightning and light clusters as well ), torma vs tonberry in uggaleph (for lanterns and coat, just never get hate!), ect.

It's difficult to go into the beastman areas as they are very low on the tamable popultation for brd/bst. However brd/bst is better than other jobs subbing bst at 70+ because we can immediately sleep and light threnody after failing charm, and charm it again while asleep, get some distance, lulluby it again and charm it again. No other class can control this situation consitantly. But only charm too-weak as you want to maximize your time not having to refresh charm.

[PetriW]

I just fish for gil, it's pretty fast and works at any level.
The brd/bst option look real nice though, I'll probably try that out when the time comes.

[yrostran]

All great suggestions ^^ thank you guys,now im gonna try and stick it out and hopefully will have enough gil for a while,ive got 200k saved that my friend gave to me,he's been playing for a while now and he's a 68 dragoon,anyway yes bard does look fun and even though i know i wont be able to farm i still wanna stick it out,thank you guys for responding