Beginner's Guide to 7x Bard and Gold Making

iceman2kx

Novice
Hello guys, after seeing countless post asking for pvm template help I've decided to write this guide. It was gonna be a lot more detailed, but I am quitting UO for now so I rushed this. I hope it helps the new players out. Starting out sucks, but it doesn't always have to be grinding with a parry dexxer in despise lol.

This is a step by step guide for an extremely efficient PVM template, ( arguably the best, only second to tamer ) with a new account. The template you are going to create will be a dexxer/bard. Your probably thinking, " well I want the BEST template.. a tamer ! " WRONG. A tamer takes too much time and resources to create. This template will have you making gold in about a day so you may create your pvper, or tamer if you so choose.

We all need a little reminder and a push in the right direction sometimes, so if your feeling a little lost in UO, then this guide is for you. I often see a lot of questions from new players asking a lot of the same questions, template advice, how, where, when etc. Well here ya go!

You will need: 2 accounts and patience.

Step 1.) Welcome to UOF. Go ahead and start creating your character. Start him out with 25 int, and the rest of your points into strength. Dex should have the minimum amount of points in it as possible ( keep INT at 25 though ). With your three skills, your 50 skills should be hiding and provocation. The last ( third skill ) should be healing.

Step 2.) DO NOT MOVE YOUR CHARACTER. Immediately lock your int at 25. Click " show real " and lock ALL your skills and move them to one group. If any of your skills have points in them, except the ones you chose, point them down. Create a new group. Move and unlock the following skills into the new group:

Anatomy
Fencing ( optionally you may choose macing if you prefer )
Healing
Hiding
Musicianship
Provocation
Tactics

* You may change out hiding LATER after you have some gold if you prefer for resist or magery, though I don't recommend resist. Magery is too expensive start up to train. So don't even think about it. Additionally after you have cash, it is recommended you drop your weapon skill for archery, as it is UBER and will complete your UOF 1337ness template. So for now stick with the above template.

Next, go to the tinker and buy a couple instruments.

Step 3.) This is where you patience comes into play. Start macroing your hiding. If using razor, create a macro, check loop. Hit record, use skill hiding, insert pause 10 seconds. This is your perfect opportunity to raise your dex to 100 as well. To do this, unlock snooping and start snooping peoples' bags, ideally an idle person spamming at the bank.

You can do what I did and loop this in with your macro if you don't feel like clicking the bag every time. Once your dex is 100, immediately point snooping down. ( click the arrow next to snooping until it points down )

After you hit 100 dex, loop in double clicking your instrument along with your hiding macro. Ideally you want to play your instrument several times at least per loop... because the more your instrument is played, the faster you gain.

Now go AFK until hiding and music is 100.0. This should take a day or so so macro at night until it is GM. It is very important to GM these skills.

After you are done with this, go ahead and macro anatomy. You should have a 4 second pause after using this skill on a player ( use an AFK spammer ). You will hit GM within the hour. During all this macroing, it would be good to ask around at the bank for a rune to the bard's room in deceit. Experienced players will know what you are talking about. Just explain to them you are new and would like a rune.. people on UOF are pretty friendly and should help you out.

*If you just want to play the game, you may skip hiding for now though not recommended as this can seriously help you get away from monsters or PKs. Do NOT put hiding off for last. Macro it at night if you have to.

Step 4.) You should now be 3x GM. Don't worry about your strength, it will hit 100 while training. Now it's dungeon time for a little bit. If you don't have enough gold to buy a spear, scavenge Brit for magic armor/weps other players may have dropped and vendor them. This will supply you with enough gold to buy a spear/short spear or a dagger from the blacksmith. You don't need anything uber, just cheap weps will do.

Go ahead and make a hot key for provocation. You can do this from the razor menu, under skill provocation. Put it in a spot on your keyboard you can easily access.

Now head to despise. ( if you don't know where this is, Google it or ask someone to show you ) Go to the lower levels where the ETTINS are and provoke them on to one another. This is good practice for your provocation skills so you can get use to it. You shouldn't need to heal yourself since they will be hitting each other, but it would be smart to have a few bandaids on you. If more ettins come to bug you, just keep provoking them on to each other. Meanwhile you should be leveling their health out with each other with your spear.

Keep doing this until you have about 15k BUT make sure you bank your gold at about 2k intervals (5k if you're brave) so you don't
lose it.

Step 5.) Head to Moonglow. Buy bolts of cloth and scissors ( as much as you can afford ). It should transfer to your bank, so don't worry about it dropping to the floor. Cut the cloth to make band aids.

Now it's time for.... more macroing. We'll start with healing. Now on your second account, create a char in moonglow. Max his strength out at the stats option in creating the char. Run off in the wild, or get guard whacked to kill yourself and run to your main character at the bank. Make a looped macro on your ghost saying " UOF IS AWESOME " and just spam it. This will make it so your ghost doesn't disappear to your main character.

Now switch over to your main character ( you should have both accounts running at the same time ). Create a looped macro double clicking the band aid stack from your bank and clicking your ghost. Make sure put a pause for .25 after each command and 15 seconds after " absolute target ". If you don't put the .25 after each command, there's a good chance your macro will get hung up. Trial and error on this and you will see what I mean ^^

You are set. Keep this macro running until your GM healing. If you run out of band aids, you can either go back to despise to get more gold, scavenge magic armor/weps for gold or beg if you so choose.

Step 6.) You should now be 4x GM. Let's take that up to 6x.

On your second char, go ahead and rez up. Now switch back to main char. Go buy about 5-8 junk daggers from the weaponsmith. Make sure you use daggers as they do hardly any damage. You can use the same macro you used for healing for this next part, though you may need to increase or decrease the pause depending on the amount of damage you are doing. Usually with a low level weapon skill it should be about a 20/25 second pause, lowering it gradually to adjust with the damage.

This part can be a little confusing. If you can find a guild, it's easiest to just do it that way. If you have these chars in the same guild... don't worry about this next part.

On your noob char, go grey. I found it easiest to attack a NPC outside of town and run away. Have your main char attack the criminal char. Keep the "attack" going. Due to UO mechanics, you can be grey to each other forever even though the chars turn blue again as long as you stay engaged. Eventually after your criminal character goes blue, your chars will still be grey to each other and you'll be able to macro. Hurry up and run them to the bank, but make sure you keep them engaged so the original criminal char doesn't go blue to your main char. If this happens you'll need to repeat this step.

Quickly equip a dagger and hit play on your macro. This will take you to GM tactics/fencing QUICK, like an hour.

Again if you run out of bandaids, rinse and repeat the noob gold making methods.

Step 6.) Congratulations... 6x! Now it's time to finish it up with provocation. Hopefully you took my advice earlier and got that bard's room rune. Make sure you put it in a runebook and buy a couple recall scrolls. Ask a mage to mark you a rune to brit and throw that in your rune book too. Runebooks are very cheap, you can go back to despise or farm a couple skeletons until you can afford if you don't have the gold.

Now, go to the tinker and buy a few of the cheapest instruments. Head to the moongate and go to jhelom. From the gate, run west until you find the graveyard.

Make sure you don't lure any shades or magical creatures, you want a zombie. Lure him from the OUTSIDE of the fence ( so he can't hit you ). You should have a zombie in front of you looking helplessly at you thru the gate.

Macro time.

I'll help with this macro. Hit record:

Double click instrument
pause .50
Use skill provocation
pause .50
Target Zombie ( will say absolute target )
pause .50
Target self
pause .50
Pause 10 seconds

Stop recording

Right click the instrument line and choose use item by type, or whatever it says in the option. If you don't do this part, the macro will try to use the instrument you last clicked even after it breaks, which will mess up your macro.

Play macro.

Do this until you stop gaining around low level 60s. Now repeat this with a bone/skeletal knight until 80ish skill. He'll be hanging around jhelom graveyard as well. Again, don't lure any shades or any magical casting guys. If you don't want to remake the macro, you can right click " absolute target " and click "re target" and target the bone/skeletal knight.

Once your in the 80s.. It's time for the bard's room.. the worst place I've even been too. Plan on being PK'd or messed with. It's gonna happen, but we all had to go through this.

Make sure you have a few instruments and go ahead and recall to the bard's room. Edit or remake your macro, targeting the rotting corpse to yourself.

Macro tell GM.

Step 7.) Congrats. You're 7x. If you followed this guide it shouldn't of took you more than a couple days to do. You now have one of the deadliest bard templates in the game. From here you can start in any dungeon killing any monster you want ( as long as there are two of them to provo against each other ). It is recommended to save up enough gold to train archery.

This is a uber char for champ spawns as well, especially if you have archery.

Have fun and I hope this guide helped you out.
 
Last edited by a moderator:

Cens

Grandmaster
Great guide! :) I went archery from the beginning. I think you could add:

1) If it is your first character, and you'll have the [Young] status, I think it's not a bad idea to go directly to Despise before any macroing on hiding/healing/anatomy, etc. You won't be PK'd, and you can attack/kill Ettins after a short spell in the Britain Graveyard to raise Archery a little beyond the 30/40 that you can buy. I bought archery, raised to 50 in the Britain Graveyard, took a set of bone armor with me to Despise, and raised archery/anatomy/tactics up to 80 killing Ettins while [Young]. Made some great cash! Once you lose your [Young] status you become very vulnerable, and then is a good time to macro in town the rest. :)

2) With your ghost character, I think they can just be in war mode (alt-c) and they will remain visible without text spam. At least, my ghost stood there all night in war mode without disappearing.

3) Could you list a few excellent/common provocation spots at the end? This will help guide the newly x7 GM bard. :)

Best,
Cens
 

iceman2kx

Novice
Not all new players are young players:) However archery takes money and time to train vs a weapon skill you can grind out with a couple crappy daggers in a hour. Archery is the hardest weapon skill to gm.
 

Rhygar

New Member
I'm currently GM Music/Prov/Magery/Eval. Working on GM Hiding right now and I have resist at 84.9, meditation is at 74 and climbing. Should I drop all these magery related skill and instead go for archery?
 

Cens

Grandmaster
I am doing this currently, just need to GM Archery:

Archery, Anatomy, Tactics, Healing, Hiding, Music, Provocation

What is nice is that I can go into a dungeon with an exceptional bow, 100-200 arrows and 30 bandages. No armor, starter instrument + ethereal horse. If I get PK'd or screw up (I screw up often, am not good at this) it's not a big loss. Easily replaceable. If I'm not PK'd and don't screw up, can easily make 5-10k before recalling back to the bank.

I thought about taking like magery, meditation, evaluating intelligence, resisting spells, hiding, music, provocation... but regs are more expensive... I guess having EV would be nice, but at the moment I die too often for this to be a good idea. :)

Dunno which is better, just rambling here. :)

Cens
 

Rhygar

New Member
It's actually a pretty constant struggle I'm having lol. I enjoy recalling, gating, energy vortexes... I also enjoy the near instant heals with magery but I think archery would produce a more steady DPS, in terms of having to wait for mana.
 

Rippen

Adept
I have followed this guide completely so far and it has been incredibly helpful.

As for the 'Bard Room' rune. I haven't found anyone who knows what or where that is. Do you recommend finding any particular player or vendor that may have this? Or is there anyone who might be able to help?

Thanks!
 

Kraden

Grandmaster
Didnt finish reading it but if you macro speech while in ghost form you will get muted. Just tab that character into war mode. In war mode the ghost will show and u dont have to spam. I also recommend doing this in a dungeonfor healing and extra gains just take 100 or bandaids with u and be naked
 

Rippen

Adept
Following up on this. I was able to complete the build as noted above and it was definitely a great step for a first character. Very effective and assisted in getting started and funding other characters.

+1 for a guide well written.
 

Jesterhat

Neophyte
nice! can't wait to start it tonight. Thanks :)

*Edit* This guide has been wonderful. Really gave a good direction to go in for a first character. Making money should be a breeze.

As for the BARD RUNE: You'll want to make sure to either have teleport or MAKE SURE the rune is marked on the raised platform in the rotting corpse/skel/zombie room. Otherwise you will get mobbed and destroyed.

Thanks again!
 
Last edited by a moderator:

quantumv

New Member
Great guide, very handy, works like a charm.

One thing, is it a lot faster to get to the bard room once you are in the 80s? Could you GM it in Jhelom?
 
Last edited by a moderator:

Sanitarium

Neophyte
Great guide, thanks for that, but i am wondering why you skipped out entirely on Resisting Spells, i am feely itchy skipping out on that on any character really. i personally am thinking about substituting hiding with it. Can you/Anyone else give me the reasoning and "why" hiding is better than resist?

Cheers!
 

Kraden

Grandmaster
Great guide, thanks for that, but i am wondering why you skipped out entirely on Resisting Spells, i am feely itchy skipping out on that on any character really. i personally am thinking about substituting hiding with it. Can you/Anyone else give me the reasoning and "why" hiding is better than resist?

Cheers!

If you need resist it means you are taking constant damage from spells. If that is happening you arent provoing right Bout as simple as it gets.
 
Last edited by a moderator:

Sanitarium

Neophyte
Ok thanks! That makes sense. i guess i want to be a bit better prepared for the occasional spell hitting me and pks coming at me, but with a provoker ill probably end up dead either way against pks, so hiding might actually work better, cheers!
 

Kraden

Grandmaster
Ok thanks! That makes sense. i guess i want to be a bit better prepared for the occasional spell hitting me and pks coming at me, but with a provoker ill probably end up dead either way against pks, so hiding might actually work better, cheers!

Yeah and dont quote me on this but i believe you can provo while hidden
 

Osiris

Neophyte
you can "cast" provo while hidden but you can Hide after and it wont break the provo.

Best part about having a bard set up like this is all you need a cheap instrument and maybe arrows if you are an archer with a gm bow, Plenty of damage and if you get pked you only loose the gold you have on you and nothing more.
 

amonseti

Grandmaster
you can "cast" provo while hidden but you can Hide after and it wont break the provo.

Best part about having a bard set up like this is all you need a cheap instrument and maybe arrows if you are an archer with a gm bow, Plenty of damage and if you get pked you only loose the gold you have on you and nothing more.
well you lose the bow and the arrows ..

Also just a note when I hide after a provo it does break the provok on my targets .. ? am I doing something wrong then.. ?
 
Top