On Mon, 20 Sep 1999, Steven S. Klug wrote:
> My alter ego, Laluni Songhammer has just made 27th! I now have the lovely
> charm song. So my question to all you higher level bards is, what is the
> best strategy for using it 1) to solo stuff, and 2) in a group (if at all?)
Sneak preview of the guide I'm writing:
27 - Song of the Sirens
Effect: Charm
Instrument: Wind, unknown enhancement
Target: Target
Does not stack with: Enchanter's mesmerize line of spells
Taunt: Very high
Quantified: Charms the target turning it into your pet for anywhere from
0 to about 15 seconds. Using a wind instrument has an unknown effect, if
any. High charisma is supposed to help with success rate and duration.
Comments: This song will revitalize your ability to solo. At this level
nearly anything that isn't green to you will tear you to shreds with their
overpowered melee capability (thanks Verant) if you try to fight them with
your now-pathetic melee skills. You know what I'm talking about - casting
mobs that are nearly impossible to interrupt, casting mobs that double
attack for 40+ damage, mobs that backstab with their fists, etc. This
song lets you turn a mob's overpowered attacks against its comrades
instead of against you or your party. Used smartly, you can avoid taking
any damage at all.
Your new pet seems to default to a "follow me" and "guard me" state. This
has both advantages and disadvantages. Pet commands start with "/pet"
followed by the actual command. Useful commands are "attack", "back off"
(to stop it from attacking a party member), "sit down" (just fun to see
some things sit), "guard here" (if you don't want it to move from a
spot), and "follow me" and "guard me" for impressing others by having the
feared mob call you master. :-)
Strategies:
- Set up the /pet commands as socials buttons, then assign them to your
hotkeys. That way you don't have to type in the full /pet command every
time.
- Make sure your party knows you're charming a mob, otherwise they may
waste mana trying to nuke it (most melee types are quick to figure it out
when they don't swing, but most caster types tend not to read the messages
and thus don't see the "protected" bit).
- The trickiest part to using this song is in recharming the mob. When a
mob becomes uncharmed, it and whatever it was fighting will all charge and
attack you. So it pays to recharm the mob as quickly as possible.
Charm, order it to attack, then BACK OFF. The song has a tremedous range
so you want to be far enough away to give yourself plenty of time to
recharm as your former pet and the mob it was fighting both charge you.
Given enough open space or a long enough hallway, it is possible to
completely avoid taking damage while using this song.
- You can use your songs to help time how long the charm lasts.
Immediately after re/charming your pet (and making sure it's attacking the
right target), start up another song. If your charm lasts the full
duration, shortly after your other song pulses twice the charm will
expire. You can use this to recharm the mob almost instantly with a bit
of practice. You probably don't want to cut it too close though, since if
you're early, the mob will uncharm right after your song pulses, meaning
it will beat on you for a full song-start-up cycle.
- When recharmed, your pet usually defaults to carrying out its previous
attack order. That means you can leave your pet targeted and concentrate
on other songs instead of retargeting and re-ordering it to attack. I
usually heal (Hymn) or prepare to run (Accelerando) while the pet is busy
attacking. If I'm in a group, I may sing some party buff songs.
- It wipes the damage list and the hate list (except hatred for the bard).
This can be used to thwart kill-stealers, but it can also used to kill
steal so I won't go into details. As an anti-kill-stealing tool though,
it's most useful for getting casters to dump most or all of their mana on
what is now your protected pet. The only caveat is that DoTs seem to give
damage credit to the caster if it lasts the duration of the charm. If
you're facing a kill-stealing DoTer, you'll have to cancel magic to cancel
the DoT.
- It is great for pulling off mobs that have frenzied onto someone else.
Because it wipes the hate list of everyone but you, it is guaranteed to
work if it isn't resisted. The only exception is if someone is very close
to dying, in which case nothing I know of (short of healing the person)
can get mobs off him. Even orc pawns will attack a high level person who
is very close to dying. Clerics and casters love bards who use this song
to pull mobs off them.
- It's nice for pulling in casting mobs. Casters tend to stand their
ground and nuke you instead of walking into the deathtrap your party has
set up for it. If you charm a caster and tell it to "follow me", it will
happily follow you right into your party's blades. Make sure your party
is aware that you're charming it, otherwise they may waste mana trying to
nuke your pet.
- If your party works well together, you can use charm as a substitue for
Lullaby. You charm one mob, all the other mobs attack your pet. Your party
pulls one mob from this group and fights it off to the side. You keep
charming to keep the other mobs occupied (usually sacrificing a few pets
to buy your group time).
- You can cast buffs on pets. With our short duration charm, I'm not sure
why you'd want to, but it's always an option.
- You can cast cancel magic on pets. If a mob you're fighting has several
buffs on it, you can charm it, then let a party member hit it with several
cancels without it going aggro on him. This doesn't work so well with
casting mobs since they usually just rebuff themselves. I suppose you
could try doing this to drain their mana (cancel tends to be a cheap
spell).
- I've heard that if you charm a mob that casts SoW while underground,
sometimes it will cast SoW on you. :-)
- Think carefully about which mob you should charm. For example, the
mortuary fungus in Unrest is not particularly difficult to kill, nor does
it do a lot of damage. But the mort drowsy spell it casts renders all
melee mobs nearly completely ineffective. I was able to use a fungus to
kill a skeletal monk and two barbed bones simultaneously, even though
monks and barbed bones are much more dangerous.
Cautions:
- The song tends to have a pretty big taunt effect. If you're left with a
pet with a considerable amount of life left, it will beat on you for quite
a while as your party attacks it from behind. A tank can sometimes get it
off you with a taunt and high-damage hit, but be prepared to really take a
beating until your party gets the former pet off you.
- You need to have your pet targeted to recharm it, so you can't really
help your group or your pet by fighting another mob. (You can, but
switching targets can get tricky.) So just keep your pet targeted, and
equip an instrument to concentrate on buffing/healing your party instead.
- It's important to charm and recharm only one mob at a time. If you
charm a different one, your former pet will attack you almost exclusively
until it dies. So instead of having two mobs attacking each other, you'll
wind up with one mob attack a mob that's attacking you. This prevents you
from being able to back off to prepare to recharm.
- Your pet has to be your pet when the mob it was fighting dies in order
for you to get credit for it. If your pet becomes uncharmed and your
party kills its target, the kill goes to what is now an unaffiliated mob,
and you get no experience and the corpse disappears. For this reason I
would not recommend using charmed mobs to kill named mobs, unless you make
it clear to your group to let the pet make the kill. Sometimes I'll order
a pet to attack a different target every time I recharm it. That way it
softens up the horde of mobs, without doing enough damage to any specific
one to steal the kill. You get Pixie Strike next level, which is better
for controling multi-mob (more than two) situations anyway
- Sometimes your pet will attack a party member on its own. I'm not quite
sure why this happens, but since it's a pet, the party member cannot fight
back. Give the pet the "/pet back off" ASAP to get it to stop attacking.
You'll have to retarget and give a new "/pet attack" order.
- Some mobs are smart enough to attack the master (you) instead of the
pet. I found out that evil eyes will do this. I've heard guards do this
as well, which would make it a bad tactic to charm someone in a duel and
ordering him to attack a guard.
- This song does not work (well) with the enchanter's mesmerize. You can
charm a mesmerized mob, but you end up with a mesmerized pet that will
stand there and not respond to commands.
- Your pet may refuse to attack something that is too high level. Most
undead do not care about level and will attack anything you order it to
attack.
- Mobs that are fleeing continue to flee even after charmed. This is most
noticable when a pet drops low enough in life that it'll flee on its own.
But sometimes (e.g. Mistmoore) you'll have mobs that flee to call in
reinforcements. Charming it will not stop it. Most undead do not flee
so they can make better pets.
- You will find that using this song, fighting 2 or 3 mobs at once solo is
a lot easier than fighting 1 solo. Don't make the mistake if thinking
that because a mob was really easy to kill with a charmed pet, that you'll
have an easy time soloing it.
- Don't charm healing mobs. During the brief interval between the charm
expiring and you recharming, they tend to heal anything else your group is
fighting.
- Do not use this song to pull from a camp. When you charm it, it picks
up your faction, and stuff that would attack you (i.e. everything in the
camp) will attack it. Furthermore, because it's probably blue to you,
stuff that normally wouldn't attack you because you're too high level
*will* attack your pet.
- Do not use this song to pull from a camp if you've lulled the others.
Unless you can instantly hit it with a back-off command, your pet will see
all these other hostile creatures around it and attack them, defeating the
purpose of lulling them.
- A lot of players don't understand that when two mobs fight, it's usually
because one is charmed, and they'll jump in to "your" fight without
asking.
- The song caps at L37. You cannot charm mobs L38 or higher.
Fortunately, most of the "interesting" mobs (giants and such) fall below
this limit.
--
John H. Kim
kim@...