First, put a single throwing knife in your Range slot. Put a stack in your ammo slot (you can also keep them in an inventory slot). Then move up to the mob so that you are in range and click on the Throw attack key. The downside of throwing knives is that the range is so short you often end up inside the mobs aggro radius before you can actually get a shot off. I recommend Forged Throwing Axes or Forged javelins (not the storebought kind as they are not stackable; player made ones are).

Why bards get Throwing skill never made much sense to me. We have plenty of songs that do the job and have excellent range. In fact, only Forged Javelins and certain darts have better range than one of our songs. And the songs are free to use, never need to be replaced.

To pick a lock place the lock picks on your cursor. If its a door you want to open just hold the lock picks on the door and click the mouse. Alternatively you can press the 'U' key on your keyboard. To open chest objects in LDoN you need to target the object, hold the lock picks over it and press your Pick Locks skill hot key. Note that this only works on mechanical chests. Cursed or magically sealed chests can only be opened by casters.

Note that you have to train lockpicking to 11 at your guild master before you can start using it at all. That is because the easiest locked door to pick is on the top floor of Befallen. It has a minimum skill level of 11 required. You can train on that door all the way to max (for a bard anyway, 200 if you are a rogue).

Edited, Tue Feb 24 13:54:32 2004 by Slipskin

Like a lot of bards, I gave up throwing once I max'd the skill back in my mid levels. I just recently picked it back up tho. A lot of raid level mobs we're fighting now have short range AEs or even AE Rampage, and being in melee range when those go off sucks. Using Shuriken of Eternity I can easy park with the casters twisting mana and resists while chain throwing stars at the mob. The shuriken throw insanely fast, like 1 a second and no they wont all hit since our skill cap is pretty low.. but enough land and crit that it adds up. And any DPS is better than zero, which is what you contribute if you dont melee or die to some nasty AE when you do melee hehe.

They're also very handy for outdoor pulling. If you get a long ranged thrown weapon like shuriken above or forged javalins, you can stop at max range on the weapon... throw... back off with selo's. Often you'll be far enough away by the time the weapon actually hits, that you will only pull a single even thru mobs that should assist.