Bards are one of the best classes in Tarisland, regardless of which specialization you pick. Each specialization has unique benefits, making them a valuable team member or a destructive solo powerhouse, but we’ll focus on one: Damage-per-second.
Playing Bard isn’t easy in Tarisland because you have to split focus between burst or damage-over-time. Knowing which of these to pick in the early and endgames makes a massive difference to how easily you to take down enemies. With all that said, here’s the very best DPS Bard build we’ve put together in Tarisland.
Best Solo specialization (DPS) Bard build in Tarisland
Under the recommendation section of your Bard skills, you’ll see two options you can enable for Solo—Powerful Melody and Elegant Melody. The high burst damage from Powerful Melody is incredible when you first start playing.
However, as you get into endgame content like raids and dungeons, you’ll want to focus on the damage over time (DoT) build as it offers consistently high damage.
For this DoT build, you have different talent points and inscription stone talents you’ll want to level up for consistent, reliable, and enhanced damage. Regardless of your build, your skills are the same; it’s how you assign talent points that alter the DoT focus. So, don’t worry too much when you switch from an early to a lategame DPS build.
DPS Solo Bard skills, ultimate, and rotation
Your DPS Bard has six skills and three ultimate abilities. Your ultimate abilities are used for movement speed or teleportation, to interrupt an enemy, and to shield. You’ll typically use these as needed.
Your skills, listed in the table below, have different uses depending on your encounter. A general rotational rule of thumb is:
- Wild Music – This boosts your combo and attack damage, and you can use it as soon as you enter battle. (Use this off-cooldown.)
- Zealous Melody / Zealous Melody / Chord Score
- This red/red chord combo will give you a damage buff you’ll want to keep up throughout the fight.
- Powerful Melody / Powerful Melody / Chord Score
- When you switch Powerful Melody to Elegant Melody, this will become a purple note. So this will be the purple/purple combo where you’ll deal more damage and gain a purple note, which is how you can spam the combo Chord Score faster.
- Powerful Melody / Zealous Melody / Chord Score
- This is the purple/red combo that gives you more damage.
If you don’t think you can keep up the chord pattern as you fight, you can turn on auto-battle assist and change the parameters to the above rotation. This means you only need to spam the basic attack button for the rotation to come into effect—it’s definitely made battling a whole lot easier for me, especially on mobile.
| Skill | Type | Description |
|---|---|---|
| Zealous Melody | Single target | Use this skill to attack the target, dealing magic damage and attack damage to your enemy. The healing effect is reduced when it’s cast on a teammate. This applies the red note to your Chord Score. |
| Powerful Melody | Single target | Play a powerful melody to attack the target a certain amount of times. Each attack will deal magic damage and attack. But the healing effect is reduced when cast on your teammates. This applies the blue note to your Chord Score. |
| Chord Score | Combo skill | When you have two red notes: – You’ll deal magic damage and attack damage to the target, and increase your damage for a short duration. When you have two blue notes: – You’ll attack the target twice and deal magic damage and attack damage. You’ll also gain a blue note. When you have one red and one blue note: – You’ll deal magic damage and attack damage to your target and additional attack damage. |
| Sonic Boom | Group (AoE) attack | Create a sonic boom at a location, dealing magic damage to all enemies within range. For every target hit by this skill, its cooldown is reduced. |
| Passionate Play | Burst / Enhance | Inspire the power of music to hit the target, dealing magic damage and attack damage, plus boost your attack for a duration. |
| Wild Music | Burst / Enhance | This skill boosts your combo rate, attack damage, and speed-up effect. |
| Sound Barrier | Ultimate skill – Shield | Create a sound barrier that negates total damage dealt to you up to a specific amount of your maximum health for a short duration. |
| Lullaby | Ultimate skill – Hypnotize | Chant for a couple of seconds to hypnotize a target. This makes them unable to move or use skills. However, it will expire once they take skill damage. |
| Piano Music / Potential Unleash | Ultimate – Displace / Movement speed | Piano Music will flash you in the designated direction. If you’re good at positioning, this is a fantastic skill. Potential Unleash increases your movement speed. I’ve found this helpful in dungeons when you must collect orbs to stop the boss from gaining a shield or dodging attacks. But both options are great. |
Solo Bard DPS Talent points and passives
| Level | Talent to unlock | Passive (unlocks automatically) |
|---|---|---|
| Level Eight | Music Theory: 3/3 – This increases the damage of all music notes skills. Variation: 3/3 – You’ll deal more damage when you play a different chord from your last chord. | Combo Mastery – Your combo rate is increased. |
| Level 12 | Symphonic Poem: 3/3 – When you cast Passionate Play, you have a 100 percent chance to obtain the Symphonic Poem effect. While it’s in effect, your Chord skills don’t cost notes. | |
| Level 16 | Stimulate: 3/3 – Zealous Melody and Zealous Chord will deal more base damage. | Impermanence: 2/2 – Your damage against enemies inflicted with Elegant Melody is increased. – Once Elegant Melody lands a combo, it can make your next Elegant Melody deal additional damage equal to a percentage of your attack. But if multiple enemies are affected, the chance of this occurring is lowered. Passionate Play: 2/2 – Passionate Play deals more damage. While active, your damage will be increased. |
| Level 20 | Elegant Melody: 1/1 – This replaces Powerful Melody (the skill that gives you the blue note). – Now, you have a skill, Elegant Melody, that will give you a purple note, which means your combos will change. – Two purple notes on the Chord Score: —You’ll immediately deal magic damage, attack damage, and gain one purple note. – One purple note and one red note on the Chord Score: — You’ll immediately deal magic damage and attack damage. You will also deal additional magic damage to the target. Homology: 3/3 – Zealous Chord’s damage bonus is increased. – Zealous Chord has a chance of dealing additional damage to the target. | |
| Level 24 | Outburst: 3/3 – Elegant Melody deals more base damage, and Elegant Chord deals more base damage. | |
| Level 28 | Impermanence: 2/2 – Your damage against enemies who’ve been inflicted with Elegant Melody is increased. – Once Elegant Melody lands a combo, it can make your next Elegant Melody deal additional damage equal to a percentage of your attack. But if multiple enemies are affected, the chance of this occurring is lowered. Passionate Play: 2/2 – Passionate Play deals more damage. While active, your damage will be increased. | Chord Resonance – The damage dealt by all Chord Skills is increased by the omni percentage multiplied by a scaled percentage. – When enhanced with Omni, Chord Score increases the damage of your next Musical Note skill. |
| Level 32 | Tragic: 3/3 – Mixed Chord’s damage is increased. – When an Elegant chord is cast, there’s a chance you’ll be granted the Tragic effect. This means that when you play Mixed Chord while this effect is active, Passionate Play’s cooldown is reduced. | Infinite Casting – Passionate Play has a chance equal to its cooldown percentage multiplied by a scaled percentage to return a percentage of its cooldown. – Wild Music’s cooldown is reduced when Passionate Play is cast. |
| Level 36 | Change Beat: 3/3 – Every note on your Musical Score can increase your combo damage. Wild Music: 3/3 – Wild Music lasts longer; while active, all your Chord Skills deal more damage. | |
| Level 40 | Majestic: 2/2 – Wild Music now grants 50 percent of the attribute bonus to nearby allies within 25 meters, including the duration bonus of the Wild Music plus talent. I prefer this option at level 40 because it’s an excellent buff in raids. However, max out the Free Inspiration talent if you want more damage. | Combo Damage Mastery – Your combo damage is increased. |
Inscribed Stone and equipment stat focus
For this Bard build, you’ll want to unlock the Attributes that focus on:
- Cooldown reduction.
- Intelligence.
- Combo damage- this should be your main focus in the tree.
- Omni.
- Critical damage.
Regarding Emblems, the best ones you’ll want to slot into the nodes are Sprawl, Burst, High Energy Potion, Intertwined Fates, and Strive, as they can increase your intelligence, damage, and DoT and have additional effects like increased health. I’ll include screenshots of the exact path when I’ve fully built out the stone.
For gear, you’ll want to try and get items with the same attributes, with a focus on combo damage and cooldowns. The best way to get gear is to run dungeons and raids.
So, if you want to use your harp to deal consistently high damage and are unsure how to achieve that, this is everything you need to know about the endgame DoT Bard build in Tarisland. If you’re new and this seems a little too complicated, you can always use Tarisland’s auto Solo build feature. This automatically assigns out talent points and optimizes your build based on whether you want DoT or burst damage.
