ToME: the Tales of Maj'Eyal

It seems several people in the ladder don't take music at all. If you play a bard, what is your way to play it?
I normally go with yavanna and prayer to support music. Ent potions for heroism, song for better hit chance..... So it is mainly a fighter style with slowed enemies, getting the hit chance and damage from spells/songs.

The bard needs only 1 feeble finger in each of the summoning, mimicry, symbiont to reach .5. So there is a high chance that he gets at least one of the 3 at .5.

I started to play Tome again some weeks ago and i have to get used t oplaying again. My current character is an ent-hermit bard with mimicry for extra arms. Trying to keep mimicry, prayer and music at level, currently level 30.

I never have had much luck with bards. They are clearly one of the hardest classes to play.

The old posts are all gone, but it is my impression that most of the bard winners exploited one of the munchkin feats (like chain-summoning or worshiping Melkor for Curse).

I seem to remember that the best songs were the drum ones. Looking at the documentation that would be my preference. Being able to slow everything in sight is incredibly powerful.

Soccer world championship and all these vuvuzelas. So i named my new bard Vuvuzela too.

The bard class seems to be designed to use feeble finger quests: 3 Skills to .4 , just needing to be lucky with FF once and not 3 times. I decided to go with an ent bard, following Yavanna. Yavanna has useful melee support and my bard won't take weapon skills, so i have to use heroism potions a lot in the beginning, before Ent-Potion has heroism.
I did 3 temple quests till level 23 but had no luck with feeble-fingers: no summon, mimicry or symbiont yet. I put only points into music and prayer. I got 3 mimicry cloaks from princess's and finally at level 31 a FF gave me mimicry. Being an eagle i am a lot faster now but it seems the lower piety loss of the ent race remains.

The idea for the later levels will be to use extra arms with wizardry staves to push up the mana and spell power. With this the bard should be able to keep slow songs permanent active and regain enough mana to cast heroism, uproot, waterbite, hobbit melody, ...

So this bard will be using spells and songs to push up hit chance, damage and add some area effect to weapon strikes. Playing songs there is no use for stealth so being an ent doesn't matter.

Yavanna piety: I am currently at -35000. But no longer loosing much. With higher enemy levels i regain enough piety now to balance the piety loss in caves and soon i should be able to win more piety than i loose. At this point casting yavanna god spells will become an option.

I get software errors when trying to create a dump. Wonder if i did all the compiler options in the makefile in a proper way.

The Lothlorien spider quest gives a big piety boost for Yavanna worshipers. Just make sure that you can take them out before they start firing fire balls.