Need Help to Relevel Bard

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chocolatelover
Posts: 86
Joined: Fri Sep 23, 2022 2:52 am

Need Help to Relevel Bard

Post by chocolatelover » Fri Aug 04, 2023 4:52 am

Have 30 Level Bard

Original Stats: I only ever added to CHA. Perhaps I should add a point to Str or Dex?

STR 15
DEX 8
CON 14
INT 16
WIS 8
CHA 18

Want to make her better at PVP...not a monster, but a bit better than she is.
Does Crafting would like to keep that. Put 34 points in and someone just told me that with that I do NOT need to take Improved Dweomercrafting? If that is true, perhaps I could pout it somewhere else?

Other Feats:
Brew Potion (she's an herbalist, this comes in quite handy)
Epic Bar
Epic Character
Epic Reputation
ESF: Perform
Extend Spell
Extra Music
GSF: ABJ
Inspiring Minstrel
Improved Deomercrafting
Lasting Inspiration
Lingering Song
Song of the Heart
Uncanny Dodge 1
Unremitting Cadence 1 and 11

By level 30 I had....(with the above feats and no gear)
Animal Empathy ...7
Appraise ...1
Bluff ...9
Climb ... 5
Concentration ...5
Craft MAstery 32
Disable Trap.... 3
Discipline .... 7
Heal ....1
Hide ....`0
Intimidate ....32
Leadership...40
Listen ...1
Lore ...64
Move Silently ...0
Open Lock 8
Parry 6
Perform 53
Search 14
Spellcraft 23
Spot 14
Tumble 9
UMD 31

No GEar AC is 12, HP are 210
With Gear, AC is 27, HP is 270

So.. I was trying to raise her lore to use scrolls... but it seems I just can't get there (like to use a TIme Stop Scroll) but it looks like I should take some of those point snad put elsewhere, like UMD. Apparently, Lore Gear does not count.

She is a guard and needs the extra search and spot. Can get extra listen from spells and things.

If I get rid of Improved Dweomercrafting, what is a better Feat? To improve hit points or AC or something?

Gear:
Songssword Guard Armor
Displacer Beast Cloak
Beguiler's Crown
Adamantine Bracer of Persuasion
That belt that protects you from poison and I added strength (Encircling Snake?)
Lantanese Ring
A ring with AC +2, Cha +1, INT +1, Perf+2 , Spot +2

Boots of the Reveler
Amulet with Int +1, Lore +2, Open Lock +2, Search +2, Spot +2 {Can Remake}
(Switch out for Greater RIng of Thieves and Enchanted Gloves of Skill for Dungeon Delving)
Minstrel's Shillelagh, OR Impact Nullifier + Runic Infused Whip

Need to move something around, I guess. Is it better to go with Higher Lore or Higher UMD? Apparently I need to Switch to more wands. But can use most scrolls to level 6 and some 7s)

And , no, I do not want to multiclass.


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Morgy
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Re: Need Help to Relevel Bard

Post by Morgy » Fri Aug 04, 2023 5:11 pm

Lore gear definitelty counts towards scrolls. As a bard with that intel, you can afford both Lore and UMD, which are important.

If your goal is to be better at PvP, you are going to need to focus on a few possible changes:

  • Removing focus from high charisma bard and the feats associated (Cadence, Song of the heart), and put points into strength so you have a chance to actually hit things and damage them. Bards can do fairly decent damage with the upper levels of songs with a strength build. You can also afford to swap out feats then for weapon foci/epic weapon foci.

  • Most bards these days go 25 Bard/5LM, this makes scroll use more potent, cost effective and easier to reach circle 9. I know you don't wish to mix classes, so you'll probably want to take skill foci: lore and Epic Skill focus: lore if that's the case. I would really recommend looking at Loremaster though, it compliments bard immensely for RP and PvP purposes.

  • Your top detect skill as a bard should be listen. You can also add skill foci/epic skill foci to either spot/listen (getting spot or listen, grants the other on Arelith for free!). You can easily hit 90-100 listen this way with amplify and song. Your job in PvP will often be to find the stealthed PCs as well as supporting your team. A bard is the bane of stealthers.

  • You should be taking discipline and tumble (30 skill max tumble) to max as a bard. Concentration, spellcraft and taunt are also very useful. On my own bard I take the following skills: Concentration, Discipline, Listen, Lore, Spellcraft, Taunt, Tumble (you get +1 dodge ac per 5 HARD points in tumble, up to +6), UMD (UMD doesn't need to be more than mid-20s in most cases, if you want to use grimoires on a bard).

  • Bards get chased around in PvP so it's worth having improved expertise to boost your AC by 10 when you need to. Armour skin is also a nice to have for this reason.

  • If you have brew potion and 30 bard levels, you will have tier 3 dweomercrafting so will need no more feats. If you have 30 skill points in crafting you will also have tier 3 that way.

  • With Songsword guard, you want to make sure you can reach 18 dexterity with items/buffs, so you can reach the +4 dex ac bonus cap from chain armour.

  • Aside from Songsword guard, my weapons and my enchanted shield; all my items are crafted in the basin, largely as the following:
    +1 Attribute, +1 Attribute, +2 skill, +2 skill, +2 skill, +2 skill, +1 skill. Boots can be different as you'll want the +1 dodge ac added to them in the basin. You may also prefer +1 universal save over attributes in some cases.

In conclusion there are a lot of modifications you can make to be more optimal in both PvE and PvP. I suggest you try some of these ideas on the PGCC. But my biggests points to you would be - Take discipline and tumble, and get enough LORE through feats or items to cast time stop/disjunction/gate spells. If you double click the lore row in your character sheet in game, it will tell you how much of your current lore counts towards scrolls (Only half of your bardic knowledge bonus and not your song bonus).

Goodluck!


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Scurvy Cur
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Re: Need Help to Relevel Bard

Post by Scurvy Cur » Fri Aug 04, 2023 7:32 pm

Alternatively, if you're not looking for a primary melee bard (which has fallen a little out of favor in recent years), you can refocus some of your feats and gear spread towards survivability.

In particular, this is a problem:

No GEar AC is 12, HP are 210
With Gear, AC is 27, HP is 270

Not just for you, but for any party you're in, because all benefits of bard song and penalties of curse song end if the bard providing them dies.

Quickly, I can see a few things you might remove to improve your survivability, entirely without any stat reallocation:

Extra music and lingering song are comfortable feats, but not necessary by any stretch of the imagination. Improved dweomercrafting is the worst offender, however. It does exactly nothing for your build.

From the Wiki on Dweomercrafting:

One Magic Tier is gained for each of the following:

12 levels of Cleric/Healer, Druid, Elementalist, Favored Soul, Hemomancer, Shaman, Shadow Mage, Warlock, Sorcerer and Wizard (not Spellsword).
Having 24 levels of these classes adds a second Tier.
21 levels of Bard, Hexblade, Paladin, Ranger and Spellsword.
Having 28 levels of these classes adds a second Tier.
Dirgesinger is treated as Bard for the purpose of dweomercraft tiers.
Scribe Scroll, Brew Potion or Craft Wand feats.
Skill Focus or Epic Skill Focus feats in Craft Mastery.
Improved DweomercraftIng feat.
Forge Domain (Cleric)

So to recap: you get 1 Dweomercraft level from 21 bard, another from 28 bard, and a third from brew potion.

So the first thing I would do is scrap improved dweomercrafting and lingering song, and use these feats to slot in expertise and improved expertise. These buttons are, in a lot of cases, 5 or 10 free AC for a bard, respectively, but you'll need to reapply after casting. Still, as a bard, you will always be a priority target in group fights. Having improved expertise lets you pull a considerable chunk of AC out of nowhere whenever you get focused.

You may also consider stripping out extra music, and finding space for epic skill focus: discipline in your build. With this feat, decent gear, and the skill bonus from song, you'll be relatively hard for most people to knock down, even if you don't have very much strength.

Which brings us to gear.

Songssword Guard Armor
Displacer Beast Cloak
Beguiler's Crown
Adamantine Bracer of Persuasion
That belt that protects you from poison and I added strength (Encircling Snake?)
Lantanese Ring
A ring with AC +2, Cha +1, INT +1, Perf+2 , Spot +2

Apart from the songsword's guard, I'd replace all of this.

Beguiler's crown doesn't offer you a lot; an extra cast of a level 5 bard spell is about it. I would replace this with a headband of protection. 26 SR will offer you reasonable protection against a lot of scroll-based spell effects, and if you're keeping GSF:abj, the combination of the headband of protection and a shield potion will remove the first 7 damage of any force damage effect, at a minimum. If you don't want to fiddle with shield potions, pick up an adamantine helmet instead (though I personally think the shield potions are worthwhile, especially with the abj focii).

Likewise, the adamantine bracer of persuasion doesn't help as much as you might like. You aren't aiming to max out any of the skills on it (leadership is the only one you're pumping, and you can get it to the maximum useful skill of 50 without these bracers). These (and most of your gear slots) should be replaced with basin crafted gear. On that note, I'd toss out the lantanse ring and the +2 AC ring. The +2 AC on the second ring won't stack with the helmet, and the lantanese ring is an inefficient item.

Replace these with enchanted scholar's rings (you can buy them at the arcane tower, and it's not too hard to put +2 discipline, +1 constitution, and +1 universal save om them), for an end item with +1 con/+1 unisave/+5 lore/+2 discipline in both ring slots. As you are able, you can apply a masterwork bejeweled rune to each of these for extra stats.

Like the lantanese ring, the encircling scale is an inefficient item, especially post nerf. It gives you saves against poison, but with proper gearing, your saves should be fine anyhow. Make something in the basins that covers your useful skills (I'd pick discipline, spellcraft, lore, listen, and perform, plus constitution and universal saves, but you can grab other skills). Morgy has already adequately explained why boosting your listen is good.

Make something similar to replace the displacer beast cloak and the adamantine bracers of protection, and the amulet. As with the rings, you can make better stuff eventually, but these will be cheap, easily made items that improve your survivability drastically.

Boots will be a little trickier, because it's important for your boots to have a +1 AC enchant on them. My personal preference here is to do 1 point ac, 2 discipline, 2 spellcraft, +1 to your weakest save, and +1 to con, and then to use a masterwork tailored rune to add a second stat or another skill, to taste.

Regarding spot/search:

I would make a separate gear set for this. You can now easily swap loadouts with a quick use of the -loadout command, so you can simply hotkey your "combat" loadout, and your "guard duty" loadout.

Regarding AC: you should be sitting around 52-54 AC outside of expertise.

Get a shield. The extra AC is good for you. The one you want is probably the +4 large shield from carpentry.

Get tumble. The extra AC is good for you.

Buff your dexterity to fill out the songsword's guard. Because you're running a base dex of 8, you might need an ioun stone and 1 point of dex enchanted on an item. Your target is 18. Songsword's guard comes with 2, cat's grace will give you 5, and an ioun stone another 2, for 9.

When in combat, make sure to keep a wand of barkskin around. Mass haste is part of your spellbook, and your casts of it last 6 minutes each, so you should be hasted for most fights.

If you do all this, your AC breakdown should be about as follows, for 52-54 AC before expertise, with a maximum of 60 when you press the turtling button:

AC
Base 10
Dex 4
Armor 8
Shield 6
Tumble 6
Song 6
Bark 4
Mage Armor 1
Boot 1
Haste 4
Helmet/Sheild Spell 2-4
IE 10
Total 62-64

If you do all these things, you'll have picked up enough constitution to let you hit the +12 buff cap, which should yield +180 HP. You'll also have mid-50s AC for most fight situations, and the ability to go to mid 60s at need.

Between these two things, and picking up 5-7 points of universal saving throws and additional spellcraft, you will be much more resilient against spells that have saves, and melee damage.


MRFTW
Posts: 517
Joined: Mon May 03, 2021 5:37 am

Re: Need Help to Relevel Bard

Post by MRFTW » Sat Aug 05, 2023 9:14 pm

2 great responses above.

I'd look at a middle ground between the two. I think 25/5 with loremaster is the way to go, especially since you've paid the INT tax already. I'd take the AC and HP secrets from loremaster as well as armour skin, ESF listen and improved expertise. The two greater LM secrets could be used for AB/Ward/Yoink/Scry(boo) as desired.

False life is also excellent as a source of temporary HP. A deep HP pool is very helpful since AB and damage are so high and living in imp. expertise mode is very restrictive and not a long-term solution to incoming pressure. A deeper HP pool gives you longer to act under incoming damage before you die or heal. With 14 base con I even think there is merit in stacking toughness on top of all of the above.

This would give:

240 base
180 CON
60 feats

480 HP, with similar AC as Scurvy Curr described, with temp HP to push you over 500. A lot of PvP will be running around trying not to die between g. resto cooldowns, managing heal potion sobriety and buffing allies and annoying opponents.

The other option is to plan to burn bright and fast in PvP, investing into AB and STR over defenses (other poster's advice above still excellent regardless) but enemy melee AB and damage can be so high that they simply outlive and overwhelm with great saves and deep HP pools.


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