So, hi. I don't really understand the two, and what differentiates them. Apparently, Valor is tankier with the medium armor proficiencies, but Swords gets them too? I also don't understand the descriptions of Combat Inspiration and the Flourishes. Please help if you can!
Valor is more team based, your inspiration allows for use on defense AC boosts and damage rolls. When you cast a spell you can attack as a bonus action.
Sword is more selfish, you can use your inspirations to flourish which gives you more combat options. Also a fighting style.
You get proficiency with medium armor and the scimitar.
If you are proficient with a simple or martial weapon you are wielding it can be used as spell focus for Bard spells you cast
You gain a fighting style: Dueling or Two Weapon Fighting
Blade Flourishes: When you take the attack action your speed increases by 10ft and if an attack hits you can use a blade flourish which consumes a bardic inspiration die.
Defensive Flourish.You can expend one use of your Bardic Inspiration to cause the weapon to deal extra damage to the target you hit. The damage equals the number you roll on the Bardic Inspiration die. You also add the number rolled to your AC until the start of your next turn.
Slashing Flourish. You can expend one use of your Bardic Inspiration to cause the weapon to deal extra damage to the target you hit and to any other creature of your choice that you can see within 5 feet of you. The damage equals the number you roll on the Bardic Inspiration die.
Mobile Flourish. You can expend one use of your Bardic Inspiration to cause the weapon to deal extra damage to the target you hit. The damage equals the number you roll on the Bardic Inspiration die. You can also push the target up to 5 feet away from you, plus a number of feet equal to the number you roll on that die. You can then immediately use your reaction to move up to your walking speed to an unoccupied space within 5 feet of the target.
You gain a second attack at 6th.
At 14th you can use a d6 instead of expending a bardic die if you choose to do so.
Valor Bard
You gain proficiency with medium armor, shields, and martial weapons.
If you inspired a creature then they can roll that die and add the number rolled to a weapon damage roll it just made. Alternatively, when an attack roll is made against the creature, it can use its reaction to roll the Bardic Inspiration die and add the number rolled to its AC against that attack, after seeing the roll but before knowing whether it hits or misses.
You gain a second attack at 6th.
At 14th when you cast a bard spell you can attack with a weapon as a bonus action.
Both get second attack. Valor bard is more support where as swords bards want to be in melee and not to inspire allies. Both are good it just depends on your playstyle.
Valor bards get proficiency with shields as well, which can give them a +2 AC over Sword bards, or more if they get magical shields.
Normally Bardic Inspiration die can only be put towards attack rolls, ability checks, and saving throws. Combat Inspiration allows a creature to use the Bardic Inspiration die granted to it by the Valor Bard to either increase their damage, or to temporarily increase their AC. Very useful.
Sword Bard's Blade Flourish not only gives a bard more movement whenever they take the Attack action, it also allows them to do special things when they hit an enemy with an attack, at the cost of one of their Bardic Inspiration die. Bardic Inspiration can't typically be used on the bard himself, but these flourishes allow the bard to expend a use of the Bardic Inspiration to influence their own abilities.
Valor bards can have higher base AC because they can use a shield. Sword Bards can temporarily increase their AC via Defensive Flourish.
The college of valor plays more as front line support. The get the best armor bards can get (because of shields) outside of feats or splashing, and always spend their bardic inspiration on other PC's.
The college of swords is meant to be a swashbuckler style of bard. The abilities focus more on mobility in combat instead of adding a shield and the bard is self-inspiring via flourishes.
Not knowing anything about your other party members or you, i would say sword is better. It gives you a chance to use your bardic inspiration when you are alone or the last one standing. And if your party is anything like mine some times they shouldn't have nice things, bardic inspirations has helped not one of them (sigh).
Oh......okay, so does my spell list accomodate to being a Swords Bard?
Id Insinuation
Bane
Faerie Fire
Healing Word
Dissonant Whispers
I'm second level, just in case you needed to know.
Heroism is a good choice at low levels for fights that might last. Refilling temp hp will save more damage than healing word would cure depending on the length of the fight. Dissonant whispers is good. Faerie fire, bane, and id insinuation are all good spells but they are all concentration status effects. The save DC's against them isn't that high at low levels. I would probably replace bane with sleep, keep healing word, and consider taking heroism over id insinuation until the save DC is higher.
Heroism and sleep are both solid spells at low level and both outlive their usefulness relatively quickly as the character levels. Dissonant whispers is great if the party is making use of opportunity attacks in the party make up, and faerie fire is great for a source of advantage.
Hm....okay. So, the play style of the Sword Bard is just buffing yourself, maybe debuffing enemies, then come in and swing your scimitar or rapier around?
Hm....okay. So, the play style of the Sword Bard is just buffing yourself, maybe debuffing enemies, then come in and swing your scimitar or rapier around?
The valor bard inspiration is limited to others and adds more to what otgers can do with that inspiration. The swords bard inspiration can buff others with standard inspiration or be used for flourishes. The difference is valor bards improve on buffing others while swords (and lore) gives abilities that compete with those inspiration dice.
Combat inspiration (valor bard) is pretty good but people shy away from it because lore and swords can use inspiration outside buffing others.
A person can also go great weapon master on a valor bard if desired but swords bards do not get the same weapon proficiencies. Valor bards get all martial weapons as well as shields but people overlook that sometimes. Valor tends more towards straight up fighting while swords tends towards evasive movement.
The 14th level ability is really good for both colleges. Swords can use flourishes without spending dice, leaving dice for bigger effects or buffing. Valor uses battle magic, and battle magic is pretty awesome, IMO.
The important question is whether you see the bard more as a standard warrior or more as a swashbucker. How you see the class is what matters. Both options lean into weapons combat.
The way I look at it is: go Valor Bard if you like to spend more actions buffing your allies like a charming Cleric, go Sword Bard if you want to feel like Domingo Montoya. It's harder to die with a Valor Bard, so it's easier to learn "How to Bard" by choosing that subclass. Sword Bards are more tactical, so you need to be constantly thinking in combat about when and where to use your Flourishes until you get to 14th level.
I think the College of Swords allows for a bit more flexibility than College of Valor. Bards have great ability with magic (regardless of college), strong skill checks, and decent combat power. By going College of Swords or College of Valor, you can really boost your ability to do traditional, non-magical combat, which can be a great help if you're going for a more supporting role with your spells and forgoing magical damage (such as if you focus on magic to buff/debuff, and pick non-offensive spells). Since the blade flourish increases your damage, you can hit a little bit harder up close, and since it increases your AC, you can survive the front line much more easily. Still, Sword's biggest benefit over Valor is that it gives you more tactical flexibility. Although College of Swords implies a melee fighter, you can actually use flourish with ranged attacks RAW, and you also gain ten feet of movement speed whenever you attack (regardless if you flourish or even hit), meaning that you could play a decent back line skirmisher/support caster or even just to get a burst of speed if you get into a big nope moment.
Certainly, Swords can seem a bit more selfish than Valor, and for a purely support Bard, Valor is probably the better choice, but if you're going for a rounded build, if you're landing hits you're not going to be reducing your party's damage by flourishing instead of inspiring.
However, in the late game, Swords is going to be much better. Why is that? Because Swords has the much better level 14 ability.
Valor gives you the ability to use your bonus action to make a melee attack after casting a spell. This sounds really good, and in the right situations it is. That can be a huge help when you need to heal an ally and hurt an enemy, or even just to crank up your damage per turn by 1d8+X. However, that requires that you're casting a spell, and that spell allows you to be in a position to make an attack, and that you don't have a better use for your bonus action... such as not being selfish, and inspiring your team.
Swords, on the other hand, lets you use a d6 to flourish every time you take an attack action without using an inspiration die. This means that you can do an extra 1d6 damage and then do a fun effect (more damage, more AC, or some movement shenanigans) each turn, and keep your bonus action aside to cast a bonus action spell, inspire an ally, use some cross-class bonus action feature, or just show off that you have a free bonus action. While bards admittedly only have a few default bonus actions (Inspire and any bonus action spells being the key examples), a racial ability or a bonus action from another class might come in quite handy- taking a two levels of Rogue, for example, allows you to then dash, hide, or disengage as that bonus action, making you much more flexible. Or, if you want to be a pure hearted Bard, you can just use that bonus action to inspire the Wizard to make that strength saving throw. You'll burn through your inspiration dice very quickly this way (unless you're at level 14 and using your free d6 for your flourishes, in which case you're simply doing a free extra d6 of damage).
That's besides the statistical advantage of Swords having better flourishes than Valor has inspires- getting damage *and* AC is better than either adding damage *or* reducing to hit by an enemy most of the time. Being able to add your flourish die damage to two enemies (including one next to you, which means you could straight up shoot a goblin on the other side of the room with a longbow and just slash that poor kobold next to you open with the power of STYLE and probably a concealed dagger) is going to hurt more than inspiring the Fighter to do an additional die of damage to a single enemy.
The sticking point of College of Swords is that you, as the Bard, have to make the attacks. There are two levels of suck here. The first level of suck is that every action spent attacking is an action not spent doing magic or other fun Bard stuff, like completely unhelpful persuasion checks to seduce the dragon currently murdering your Cleric. In longer battles as you deplete your fun spell slots and toss around attacks anyway, this is somewhat meaningless. The second level of suck, and the more painful one, is that you have to *hit* an enemy to flourish. If you rolled a solid stat block, have a magic weapon, or are blessed by RNGesus, you'll be fine with this, but Bards are not necessarily the best at hurting things except with unkind words. Your default weapon proficiencies are mediocre, your lack of shields makes you a bit squishy on the front lines of battle, and only having medium armor means you'll really need that flourish AC bonus to dodge hits.
This isn't a handicap for a good finesse based Bard with a high DEX who can reliably hit and add some decent numbers to your dice rolls for damage, but if you have low DEX and low STR, your damage will be low enough, and your odds of hitting when you need to flourish for that sweet AC bonus too risky, that you'll possibly be better off casting spells than attacking, even if you're down to cantrips. Additionally, if you're building DEX, that's at the cost of your CHA usually (unless you roll for stats and put two identical scores in each), meaning you're basically sacrifice magical power for fight power. If you're just buffing allies and never forcing any DC checks or making spell attack rolls, then your CHA only determines your number of inspiration dice and a few other accessory benefits. But if you're going for a robust damage dealing platform, then you'll probably be better off going CHA to watch those poor kobolds fail their saves hopelessly against your Arcane Secrets brand Meteor Shower, and then going College of Swords and just ignoring your own bonus action attack until you've used all your inspires to help the Barbarian barbarize some things.
However, if you're going to splash into a College of Swords or College of Valor dip from another class, then definitely my vote is for College of Swords. If you're considering those, you're probably already planning on doing some fighting yourself, which means you're probably going to want to help yourself fight better. The movement speed bonus and other candy is just icing on top- make your DM hate trying to kill you by forcing the enemy to dash after you each turn as you move 40 feet away and then needle the poor orc on the other side of the room with arrows while the DM thinks that they've come up with a clever plan, forcing you to move back over.
The sticking point of College of Swords is that you, as the Bard, have to make the attacks. There are two levels of suck here. The first level of suck is that every action spent attacking is an action not spent doing magic or other fun Bard stuff, like completely unhelpful persuasion checks to seduce the dragon currently murdering your Cleric. In longer battles as you deplete your fun spell slots and toss around attacks anyway, this is somewhat meaningless. The second level of suck, and the more painful one, is that you have to *hit* an enemy to flourish. If you rolled a solid stat block, have a magic weapon, or are blessed by RNGesus, you'll be fine with this, but Bards are not necessarily the best at hurting things except with unkind words. Your default weapon proficiencies are mediocre, your lack of shields makes you a bit squishy on the front lines of battle, and only having medium armor means you'll really need that flourish AC bonus to dodge hits.
While I do agree with what you're saying, I don't think that the bard weapon proficiencies are that lacking; They the highest two finesse weapons (disregarding scimitar, which is honestly kind of a weird thing to exclude. Sword Bards get it as an added proficiency, but it's not like it's necessary when short-swords and scimitars have the same damage die.), proficiency with a long-sword is pretty nice for a level 1 aspiring valor bard. Is it amazing? No, not really. But they get the same proficiencies as the Rogue, and even if you're playing a valor or swords bard you're still a primary caster, so that's quite impressive in my opinion.
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It's ok Ranger, you'll always be cool to me.. Unless druid gets another use for its wild shape charges.
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So, hi. I don't really understand the two, and what differentiates them. Apparently, Valor is tankier with the medium armor proficiencies, but Swords gets them too? I also don't understand the descriptions of Combat Inspiration and the Flourishes. Please help if you can!
Thank you in advance!
Valor is more team based, your inspiration allows for use on defense AC boosts and damage rolls. When you cast a spell you can attack as a bonus action.
Sword is more selfish, you can use your inspirations to flourish which gives you more combat options. Also a fighting style.
College of Swords
Valor Bard
Both get second attack. Valor bard is more support where as swords bards want to be in melee and not to inspire allies. Both are good it just depends on your playstyle.
Your secret is safe with my indifference - Percy
Valor bards get proficiency with shields as well, which can give them a +2 AC over Sword bards, or more if they get magical shields.
Normally Bardic Inspiration die can only be put towards attack rolls, ability checks, and saving throws. Combat Inspiration allows a creature to use the Bardic Inspiration die granted to it by the Valor Bard to either increase their damage, or to temporarily increase their AC. Very useful.
Sword Bard's Blade Flourish not only gives a bard more movement whenever they take the Attack action, it also allows them to do special things when they hit an enemy with an attack, at the cost of one of their Bardic Inspiration die. Bardic Inspiration can't typically be used on the bard himself, but these flourishes allow the bard to expend a use of the Bardic Inspiration to influence their own abilities.
Valor bards can have higher base AC because they can use a shield. Sword Bards can temporarily increase their AC via Defensive Flourish.
Hopefully this clears a bit up for you.
The mechanical differences seem covered, so...
The college of valor plays more as front line support. The get the best armor bards can get (because of shields) outside of feats or splashing, and always spend their bardic inspiration on other PC's.
The college of swords is meant to be a swashbuckler style of bard. The abilities focus more on mobility in combat instead of adding a shield and the bard is self-inspiring via flourishes.
Oh......okay, so does my spell list accomodate to being a Swords Bard?
Id Insinuation
Bane
Faerie Fire
Healing Word
Dissonant Whispers
I'm second level, just in case you needed to know.
In advance, thank you all so much!
Best wishes!
Not knowing anything about your other party members or you, i would say sword is better. It gives you a chance to use your bardic inspiration when you are alone or the last one standing. And if your party is anything like mine some times they shouldn't have nice things, bardic inspirations has helped not one of them (sigh).
we may be a party, but every man and woman is for themselves -archetypical swords bard
Heroism is a good choice at low levels for fights that might last. Refilling temp hp will save more damage than healing word would cure depending on the length of the fight. Dissonant whispers is good. Faerie fire, bane, and id insinuation are all good spells but they are all concentration status effects. The save DC's against them isn't that high at low levels. I would probably replace bane with sleep, keep healing word, and consider taking heroism over id insinuation until the save DC is higher.
Heroism and sleep are both solid spells at low level and both outlive their usefulness relatively quickly as the character levels. Dissonant whispers is great if the party is making use of opportunity attacks in the party make up, and faerie fire is great for a source of advantage.
Hm....okay. So, the play style of the Sword Bard is just buffing yourself, maybe debuffing enemies, then come in and swing your scimitar or rapier around?
The valor bard inspiration is limited to others and adds more to what otgers can do with that inspiration. The swords bard inspiration can buff others with standard inspiration or be used for flourishes. The difference is valor bards improve on buffing others while swords (and lore) gives abilities that compete with those inspiration dice.
Combat inspiration (valor bard) is pretty good but people shy away from it because lore and swords can use inspiration outside buffing others.
A person can also go great weapon master on a valor bard if desired but swords bards do not get the same weapon proficiencies. Valor bards get all martial weapons as well as shields but people overlook that sometimes. Valor tends more towards straight up fighting while swords tends towards evasive movement.
The 14th level ability is really good for both colleges. Swords can use flourishes without spending dice, leaving dice for bigger effects or buffing. Valor uses battle magic, and battle magic is pretty awesome, IMO.
The important question is whether you see the bard more as a standard warrior or more as a swashbucker. How you see the class is what matters. Both options lean into weapons combat.
Hmm....Changelng Swashbuckler with a serious personality but he also has 18 CHA?
The way I look at it is: go Valor Bard if you like to spend more actions buffing your allies like a charming Cleric, go Sword Bard if you want to feel like Domingo Montoya. It's harder to die with a Valor Bard, so it's easier to learn "How to Bard" by choosing that subclass. Sword Bards are more tactical, so you need to be constantly thinking in combat about when and where to use your Flourishes until you get to 14th level.
I don't get the pop culture reference, but I get what you mean
Oh, sorry. Domingo Montoya is a dueling swordsman from the movie "The Princess Bride." Action-adventure-romance-comedy.
Inigo Montoya not Domingo Montoya
Your secret is safe with my indifference - Percy
Oops!!
I think the College of Swords allows for a bit more flexibility than College of Valor. Bards have great ability with magic (regardless of college), strong skill checks, and decent combat power. By going College of Swords or College of Valor, you can really boost your ability to do traditional, non-magical combat, which can be a great help if you're going for a more supporting role with your spells and forgoing magical damage (such as if you focus on magic to buff/debuff, and pick non-offensive spells). Since the blade flourish increases your damage, you can hit a little bit harder up close, and since it increases your AC, you can survive the front line much more easily. Still, Sword's biggest benefit over Valor is that it gives you more tactical flexibility. Although College of Swords implies a melee fighter, you can actually use flourish with ranged attacks RAW, and you also gain ten feet of movement speed whenever you attack (regardless if you flourish or even hit), meaning that you could play a decent back line skirmisher/support caster or even just to get a burst of speed if you get into a big nope moment.
Certainly, Swords can seem a bit more selfish than Valor, and for a purely support Bard, Valor is probably the better choice, but if you're going for a rounded build, if you're landing hits you're not going to be reducing your party's damage by flourishing instead of inspiring.
However, in the late game, Swords is going to be much better. Why is that? Because Swords has the much better level 14 ability.
Valor gives you the ability to use your bonus action to make a melee attack after casting a spell. This sounds really good, and in the right situations it is. That can be a huge help when you need to heal an ally and hurt an enemy, or even just to crank up your damage per turn by 1d8+X. However, that requires that you're casting a spell, and that spell allows you to be in a position to make an attack, and that you don't have a better use for your bonus action... such as not being selfish, and inspiring your team.
Swords, on the other hand, lets you use a d6 to flourish every time you take an attack action without using an inspiration die. This means that you can do an extra 1d6 damage and then do a fun effect (more damage, more AC, or some movement shenanigans) each turn, and keep your bonus action aside to cast a bonus action spell, inspire an ally, use some cross-class bonus action feature, or just show off that you have a free bonus action. While bards admittedly only have a few default bonus actions (Inspire and any bonus action spells being the key examples), a racial ability or a bonus action from another class might come in quite handy- taking a two levels of Rogue, for example, allows you to then dash, hide, or disengage as that bonus action, making you much more flexible. Or, if you want to be a pure hearted Bard, you can just use that bonus action to inspire the Wizard to make that strength saving throw. You'll burn through your inspiration dice very quickly this way (unless you're at level 14 and using your free d6 for your flourishes, in which case you're simply doing a free extra d6 of damage).
That's besides the statistical advantage of Swords having better flourishes than Valor has inspires- getting damage *and* AC is better than either adding damage *or* reducing to hit by an enemy most of the time. Being able to add your flourish die damage to two enemies (including one next to you, which means you could straight up shoot a goblin on the other side of the room with a longbow and just slash that poor kobold next to you open with the power of STYLE and probably a concealed dagger) is going to hurt more than inspiring the Fighter to do an additional die of damage to a single enemy.
The sticking point of College of Swords is that you, as the Bard, have to make the attacks. There are two levels of suck here. The first level of suck is that every action spent attacking is an action not spent doing magic or other fun Bard stuff, like completely unhelpful persuasion checks to seduce the dragon currently murdering your Cleric. In longer battles as you deplete your fun spell slots and toss around attacks anyway, this is somewhat meaningless. The second level of suck, and the more painful one, is that you have to *hit* an enemy to flourish. If you rolled a solid stat block, have a magic weapon, or are blessed by RNGesus, you'll be fine with this, but Bards are not necessarily the best at hurting things except with unkind words. Your default weapon proficiencies are mediocre, your lack of shields makes you a bit squishy on the front lines of battle, and only having medium armor means you'll really need that flourish AC bonus to dodge hits.
This isn't a handicap for a good finesse based Bard with a high DEX who can reliably hit and add some decent numbers to your dice rolls for damage, but if you have low DEX and low STR, your damage will be low enough, and your odds of hitting when you need to flourish for that sweet AC bonus too risky, that you'll possibly be better off casting spells than attacking, even if you're down to cantrips. Additionally, if you're building DEX, that's at the cost of your CHA usually (unless you roll for stats and put two identical scores in each), meaning you're basically sacrifice magical power for fight power. If you're just buffing allies and never forcing any DC checks or making spell attack rolls, then your CHA only determines your number of inspiration dice and a few other accessory benefits. But if you're going for a robust damage dealing platform, then you'll probably be better off going CHA to watch those poor kobolds fail their saves hopelessly against your Arcane Secrets brand Meteor Shower, and then going College of Swords and just ignoring your own bonus action attack until you've used all your inspires to help the Barbarian barbarize some things.
However, if you're going to splash into a College of Swords or College of Valor dip from another class, then definitely my vote is for College of Swords. If you're considering those, you're probably already planning on doing some fighting yourself, which means you're probably going to want to help yourself fight better. The movement speed bonus and other candy is just icing on top- make your DM hate trying to kill you by forcing the enemy to dash after you each turn as you move 40 feet away and then needle the poor orc on the other side of the room with arrows while the DM thinks that they've come up with a clever plan, forcing you to move back over.
While I do agree with what you're saying, I don't think that the bard weapon proficiencies are that lacking; They the highest two finesse weapons (disregarding scimitar, which is honestly kind of a weird thing to exclude. Sword Bards get it as an added proficiency, but it's not like it's necessary when short-swords and scimitars have the same damage die.), proficiency with a long-sword is pretty nice for a level 1 aspiring valor bard. Is it amazing? No, not really. But they get the same proficiencies as the Rogue, and even if you're playing a valor or swords bard you're still a primary caster, so that's quite impressive in my opinion.
It's ok Ranger, you'll always be cool to me.. Unless druid gets another use for its wild shape charges.