This was my first Outlander and first bard.

Cabal wise, i liked everything. Outlander is extremely interesting
and i will definitely try to play one again in the future.

The class was a different matter entirely. It was very frustrating
to say the least and it didn't match up well to my playing style.
It was a pain in the ass to figure out how to fight people
solo on my laggy connection especially with songs firing without a target.

A friend said to take maximum advantage of Outlander you need not to die all the time and i think that sums it up very well. I just don't see myself playing another bard ever again, the amount of time required for prepping and song mastery is too much.

Thanks to everyone who helped me rank and showed me things.
Lylesse you were really cool, i enjoyed your RP immensely. Thanks for inducting me. Renenalu too. Rikxa thanks for ranking me, you seemed strong and solid.

I found the "songs go through even when there's no target" thing really annoying too, during my limited bard experiment.

I think you probably would have been better levelling slow, and learning the class. I personally feel if you're doing a couple of firsts like that, powerranking to the end game is self-defeating. Beyond that I liked the char.

But to me, bard at hero plays very differently to bard at low/mid levels.

Much wider variety of preps/maladicts, several very powerful songs, access to some nicer edges (because you can explore almost anywhere), probably very nice tanking even if you powerranked etc.

I know I'm decent (though not hugely deadly) with a bard at hero, whereas I'm fairly sucky with a lowbie bard and regularly die to pairs of thieves etc.

Once I perfected the important songs, got a high level instrument, and took a few key edges, my bard played pretty effortlessly.

Bards are just strong at hero, period, but things like a really sweet set of gear and having many of the expensive edges really take from them strong to scary.

If nothing else, a fiend-spec can get a ridiculous number of PKills simply but putting in the "wrench time" to put together the build and wax groups. There's almost always at least one or two guys in the raiding party who don't have no base svm and no resist mental preps to boot. Which isn't to say that fiend-specs take absolutely no skill and/or are actually very common, just that if you can't make the bard class work, there's always that.

The comment about not dying as an Outlander confuses me a little. Yeah, the preps are rot_death, but they're so easy and quick to farm anyway that I never cared when I died. Plus, you can avoid having to constantly check for limited talismans by substituting in free, non-limited Outlander preps instead.

Spamming songs is kind of unfun. My last human bard (who purged) had sing pretty close to 100% in the 20s through minimal spam and "skill learn" or whatever, but because songs can't be targeted and some of them have high lag, perfecting all the PK-important ones is important. That's a drag, but then again you can do it anywhere, unlike skills that require being in combat or something like that.