Welcome back!
Oki, I'm really wary here because it looks like you're going to be chopping this template up a fair bit to squeeze in more barding goodies.
If you're trying for a bard with music plus two or more other bard skills, the ideal starting point is a really minimal template. Basically you shave all your skills back to the absolute minimum because it's going to be a tight fit. Ideally bard skills cap at 120 with items, or real skill if you were going to use masteries and wanted them at max power. If you aren't bothered about masteries, you can use however many skill increase items you like there. Start with the minimum taming/lore/vet to handle the pets you plan to use. Then slot around 85-90 magery so you can heal/invis but you carry a + magery spellbook for stuff like resurrection etc. After that, the rest is available for your bard skills, along with any skill increase items you have to hand.
It's entirely up to you which skills you choose, though I tend to have 1 targeted one (disco) and my crowd control from provo. My partner used to run peace/provo because he was often supporting groups and liked his panic area peace button if they got in trouble heh. I wouldn't go for peace and disco on the same template, because I just don't see much fun in stacking those two on each other. Peace and provo would be ok though.
If those are real skill points on the taming skills you listed, I'd be very reluctant to drop them. My bard tamers have always ended up capped with 110 in taming skills just to be tight on skill points. However, there is another option, albeit not one you might expect... What you could do is turn that tamer into something else - if you want a good survivable template that doesn't need super connection or reaction times, I'd recomend a mage tamer with say stealth and maybe even some herding. I used to run that on 28k dialup and it was a lifesaver.
So what about that bard template?
Well...this gets crazy now, but here me out...I'd buy an advanced character token and get the tamer one, put it on a new character and give that newbie your bard skills. Then you don't need to drop taming and you'd have your main template available while you train the extra bard skills. Or you could also train a char from scratch, but if you didn't want the hassle, the tokens are handy. If you really wanted to go nuts, buy another token for bard skills too. You'll need soulstones and ideally spare skill points on the account if you do 2 tokens - the character using the token can't have much more than 200 or so skill points when they use the token. But, that seemingly crazy route would give you a nice bunch of skills to piece together as you want, without having to nuke any of your main tamer's skills.
I'd have more play time on test center too, barding alongside taming with multiple bard skills takes a wee bit of practice. You'll also find it much easier if you get a really good set of armour for your tamer. Especially if you're going to do some provoking - monsters are going to get grumpy and target you when you fail provo, so this is one tamer template you really want to armour up
As for taming strategy, invis taming does require good timing to pull it off. It does also depend what you're taming. You can tame some pets simply by bringing in a tank pet, beating it down till it's on a sliver of health. Then tell the pet to stop and follow you. It then stops attacking the wild pet, but it should keep said wild pet's attention while you tame. The one thing you'll have to do is vet your tame pet.
For larger pets I've always just beaten them down to a sliver of health then lead tamed. I precast invis, run up to them and hit my target self button. Then take a deep breath and start taming, spamming invis on myself as much as I can manage. If I take to much damage I back off, heal up and start again. Try to get at least a couple of invis spells on yourself during the process. I setup a macro to invis and target myself and also heal myself and they're lifesavers.
If you're on TC playing with your template, give yourself a few taming practice sessions too. When I came back from a taming break, I went taming draggies on TC so I didn't lose any insurance gold in the process. Cu sidhe are another great pet to practice on because they won't cast or puff at you. But if you're really struggling and you haven't got a friend to heal and invis you then honor is probably the best option. Peace taming can work too, but it's not as easy as it once was.
Sorry that was a bit of a novel even by my usual standards lol.
Wenchy
