On Tue, 11 Jan 2000, Robin Wise 3 wrote:

>
> I was in a pickup group of warrior, warrior, shadowknight, mage, enchanter
> (all 40-44) and me, a charming, debonair, devil-may-care woodelf bard with
> 37 songs. Obviously I was the only healer (ack!) but thankfully the group
> was pretty high-powered and the tanks knew their jobs. We were in the pool
> room fighting swarms of GKs, which the enchanter thankfully kept enthralled.
>
> The night wore on, and I decided to test a different tactic: chains,
> celerity, hymn, wielding a mandolin the whole fight. I reasoned that I was
> not doing much of the damage, and perhaps the fights would go the same
> either way... the results exceeded my expectations by quite a bit. Where
> before one or both fighters and sometimes the mage would be down a bubble or
> two after each round of a few GKs, now nobody lost even a half bubble of
> health. I still waded into melee and did *some* damage with my fists, but

Melee-heavy groups are a lot of fun if everyone is competent.
Basically, you have everyone's readiness status up in front of
you all the time (their health bars). So you can play around
with healing and pulling to settle on a rate where the action
is pretty much non-stop without having to ask "mana?" all the
time. (Casters can join in on the nonstop fun too if they're
good about conserving their mana. :)

Mind you, playing Hymn with a lute instead of using weapons
meant each fight was taking a little bit longer. But if you
were waiting to heal up after each fight anyway, then your
kill rate would be better if you can keep everyone almost
topped (since waiting to heal time = not-doing-any-damage
time).

A lot of people complain about excessive downtime in this
game. The one thing no other class can touch a bard at is
reducing or eliminating downtime.

--
John H. Kim
kim@...