Aelryn Bloodmoon wrote: ↑Sun Jul 05, 2020 7:24 pm
Question 2: How often does taunt come up in your melee as a necessity? With less than max ranks you're probably not going to be giving any caster spell failure, so unless you frequently need taunt to lower someone's AC to land your shots, I would consider giving it up completely and keeping your heal ranks.
This, in fact, is the main reason to take taunt. It's not about the ASF, though that's nice. It's about the additional AC reduction that you can bring along with your curse song since battlebards of all sorts are about winning the AB/AC game as decisively as possible.
That said:
You really don't need much, if any, investment in taunt for it to be good on a bard.
As an example: if you take 5 out of heal and put it into taunt, and also scrub 3 out of spellcraft, because 33 ranks + 2 int + 8 bard song = 43 (and on a 40 modified spellcraft score your bonus to saves v spells will be plenty good), you'll almost certainly have enough taunt even before using curse song.
Your taunt is going to be 8 ranks + 8 bard song + 10 cha under these circumstances, for a total of +26 taunt. If you curse song your opponent for -8 concentration, that's functionally 34 taunt. 26 is enough to
nearly always succeed against an opponent that has no skill investment in concentration. With curse in play, you will
guaranteed beat even con-based builds with no concentration investment.
This just so happens to be
pretty much every melee opponent ever.
A quick note re:taunt and heal.
Having a passable taunt score will help you through PvE with less damage taken, especially at low levels. This is because taunt + expertise is a good way to retain functionally the same DPS you have outside of expertise while snagging the 5 AC. Post-EE, taunt does kick you out of expertise (it didn't do so before), but you can play around this with the following algorithm:
1. Queue your taunt while you're in combat, presumably in expertise/imp expertise.
2. Let the top attacks of a combat round go off, then cancel your attack action. This immediately begins your taunt animation, which is shorter than the duration of the round. You don't technically need to let the first flurry of a round go past, but this helps make sure that you get your best attacks in
and keep expertise up. Not mandatory, but best practices all the same.
3. Wait for the animation to finish.
4. Activate expertise or imp expertise at any time before the next combat round begins. While the game will not activate Exp/Imp Exp until the top of the next round, it will remember that you've signaled that it should be activated next time you attack someone.
5. Force attack your target by clicking on them. This is necessary since the taunt animation will leave you with no followup attacks queued, so you'll need to manually restart your attack chain.
If you've done this correctly, your expertise will come back up almost immediately as the taunt animation finishes and you start the next combat round. Total time kicked from expertise: a fraction of a second.