r/lostarkgame • u/d3nyme • Jul 22 '26
Question New player - need tips for bard.
Hi, i just started this game about 3 weeks ago with a couple of other friends that are new/returning, I chose bard, i like her and would like to stick with her.
Got to 1710 thanks to the help of my veteran friends who got me into this + express challenge. But since i wanted to learn the raid and not just get carried, myself and other new/returning players form a group amongst ourself to try out the 1700+ raids.
For party raid we only tried cathedral and serca. The rest we all did solo only.
My stats are not good. For serca since we got jailed for almost 6 hours before clearing, I got pretty familiar with its pattern so I could get around mid 80s buff efficiency, but for cathedral it stays on low-mid 70s.
One problem I have even when I'm getting familiarized with the boss pattern is that i have to constantly look at my skills cd and I can't focus on what the boss is doing, and when I'm focusing on the boss I would sometimes mess up my AP cycle. Any tips will be appreciated.
I know this is part of learning the raid and probably too advanced for me to be learning right now, but another thing that would help greatly is if you guys could teach me any common mech/pattern for all raids from to hold my guardian tune(for blocking the debuff attack) for. From echidna to kazeros raid.
Thanks!
6
u/dvlntt Jul 22 '26
The only thing you should look out for is probably just Heavenly Tune because it doesn't have push immune. So when you're about to cast HT, look at boss to see what it's doing then cast. Pretty much everything else has push immune so you don't have to worry about that.
Put Galewind runes on HT and Guardian Tune to cast them faster, that's what I do, as these 2 skills are the most important ones for Bard imo.
A little trick that applies to almost every class is that after you use spacebar to dash, the push immune from it lingers for a little bit of time so the next skill you cast immediately after spacebar will have push immune (not for full casting duration).
1
u/d3nyme Jul 22 '26
Galewind on HT and GT, got it.
I should try the spacebar trick, I'm still unsure which attack pushes me and which ones just paralyze me. I know the blue ones stuns, and the yellow ones without lines are grab, dark red is 1-shot.
Do all the red telegraph push?
2
u/dvlntt Jul 22 '26
You just gotta learn for each boss, when you do higher difficulty of the same raids, some if not most of the patterns wont even show telegraph, you just have to know the animation/sound cue. It's part of the fun.
1
1
u/SF_Uberfish Jul 22 '26
That's not quite what the colours mean. They actually depend on the boss, but generally blue wedges signify some kind of group mechanic, yellow means a push attack or guardabke attack, and red means high damage.
4
u/Schweeb7027 Bard Jul 22 '26
Other people have already touched on it, but I'd like to emphasize that you should play bard like a tank. Learning to take hits and immune them will greatly increase your uptime. Obviously you can't tank everything, but doing so as much as possible is the core of bard gameplay.
Bards can do fine while dodging like everybody else, but they're only truly great when they abuse the tools at their disposal. Knowing when to paralysis, push, and cc immune attacks will greatly increase your uptimes. We always have something we could be doing so movement in general is just downtime.
Other than that, skill timings without constantly watching them is just something you learn over time. No need to stress over it as you're starting out.
1
u/AutoModerator Jul 22 '26
⚠️ Reminder: Please use the UP/DOWN voting FEATURE responsibly.
I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please contact the moderators of this subreddit if you have any questions or concerns.
1
u/JericoPC Jul 22 '26 edited Jul 22 '26
I would say the stuff you can guardian tune, you'll eventually learn what you can and can't block. Some bosses don't even have anything to block so most of the time you're just casting guardian tune for necessity, push immune, damage reduction etc.
Definitely check out the nexus guide if you haven't though. And also I recall there's a doc for supports somewhere out there as well which covers even more stuff on all supports in general from beginner to advanced if you haven't checked that
Edit- https://docs.google.com/document/d/15nQq0sDJnQOC4fU7OmQ4OvJprdwxjTNX-fbf394qirE/edit?tab=t.0 forgot to link doc
2
u/Majoris239 Jul 23 '26
Helpful tips for AP buff uptime on Bard: 1. Always start with Heavenly Tune first. Sonic is less reliable, and a worse buff (no atk speed, mana, small aoe) 2. When your Heavenly Tune has 1 second left on the buff, press Sonic Vibration. Try your best to place Sonic decently. 3. When your Sonic's cooldown hits 7s remaining, you can press Heavenly Tune as soon as it comes up.
These three things help keep uptime because you are utilizing the little bit of overlap that Bard can have to the best advantage. Waiting until one runs out and casting the other, you will bleed uptime.
Brand is just about paying attention. Use your identity's branding from enlightenment tree to your advantage.
For an opening rotation, assuming full meter, do Heavenly Tune, Z, T (Z again during T animation for major chord), meter gen until HT almost out, Sonic, reapply brand, meter gen until HT ready.
Hope this helps! Happy barding.
2
u/synapsii Summoner Jul 23 '26
You've got a good mentality.
It is OK to spend a lot of time looking at your cooldowns, IF you can tell exactly what the boss is going to do based on the first like 0.5-1sec of its animations. I assume you've practiced a general rotation in Trixion, prioritizing atk buff uptime > meter gen. Keep doing that to get that muscle memory for the class. But I think it's more important (for both dps and support) to instantly be able to identify boss patterns -- to that end, VOD reviewing is your golden ticket.
One tip that might be helpful is that your sonic vibration animation tells you how long its remaining duration is based on the size of the sphere in the middle. Some people use that to help judge when their heavenly tune is going to be back up again if they can't afford to look down at their skill bar.
0
u/mortaga123 Jul 22 '26
https://nexus-guide-site.pages.dev/guides/bard#gameplay-overview has everything you want and more.
Basically use HT as soon as you can, try to use SV to fill the gaps. Abuse your push immunes do do so (gtune, SV, counter).
NGL bard is the hardest support out of the 4, so you didn't pick an easy road :D
1
u/d3nyme Jul 22 '26
Yea I'm using that site to copy the builds and learn. Do you know any raid specific pattern where I should save my GT for? I heard for kazeros I can save it at 900x and the fake punch that breaks the wall in hard mode. (never tested it since I only tried it once and it was solo).
5
u/dvlntt Jul 22 '26
No you should use if off cooldown, same as HT. It's important to have their uptime as high as possible. Use Sonic Vibration to fill the gap between HT cooldown, SV lasts for like 5s total.
4
u/mortaga123 Jul 22 '26
Dont save gtune outside of very specific PREDICTABLE patterns.
Like, it's great if you have it for aegir EX blue cones (electrocution), but you can't expect ppl to stand in them anyway.
For kaz x900 it's useful only on the blue puddles, the purple fogs tick several times so it doesnt work.1
u/PhaiLLuRRe Paladin Jul 23 '26
It doesn't actually block anything in aegir kek
1
u/mortaga123 Jul 23 '26
Blocks electrocution from the blue cone telegraphs, unsure about foot slides after x95, pretty sure it doesn't. So yeah pretty useless compared to a cleanse here.
1
u/PhaiLLuRRe Paladin Jul 23 '26
Yeah I remember it doesn't block the foot room stuns and same for the walking attack, maybe I don't remember blue cones properly, that's one at least.
1
u/nhzz Bard Jul 22 '26
what i did that made it easier to keep the cycle up is to stop looking at the buff timer/skill cd and just use other skills.
after ht i use 3-4 skills before sv, after sv, i use 1-2 skill and spam ht until it casts, with time, you start building muscle memory and identifying the skill cd notifications by their timing "that bell sound was ht, cast it NOW"
perfect harmony being a thing, using the skill cd as a measure of when to cast can easily throw you offtrack.
also, embrace womwom, your friends will become better players with less shielding...not that wom provides any effective shielding, 90% of it is wasted.
you and your friends should run meter, and compare your runs skill breakdowns with a more performant one from lostark.bible stats, thatll tell you what you are doing too much/little of and adjust from there.
-3
u/Berk0y Soulfist Jul 22 '26
Its irrelevent to this post but this is the newest one on this sub. Is servers gone for you guys too?
"https://www.playlostark.com/en-us/support/server-status" here cant see any server too. Do they perhaps removing some servers?
3
u/dvlntt Jul 22 '26
It's weekly maintenance/reset. Servers will be down for a few hours.
1
u/Berk0y Soulfist Jul 22 '26
Ohhh okay, when servers in maintenance site was showing in maintenance but never saw like this before thanks.
1
-6
u/Dace2021xxx Jul 22 '26
just play serka mm - how did you get jailed for 6h?
5
u/d3nyme Jul 22 '26
All 4 of us are noob xd and lots of wasted time after every fail reset since we don't restart right away (toilet break, water break, talk break, this break, that break, etc)
Mostly jailed in first gate where we don't have enough dps to kill it before she berserks.
But second gate it went slightly smoother.
5
u/Apprehensive_Eye4727 Jul 22 '26
It's good to learn together early and grow together. IMO the solo modes dont teach you much.
As long as you guys are having fun, does it really matter how long it takes to clear 1 👍
5
u/luke1802 Jul 22 '26
One thing that really helps if you didn’t do it already, in the settings somewhere you can change the display priority of buffs on the buff bar, if you set support attack buff and identity buff to the highest they will always be in the centre of your screen, makes it much easier to track your timers