ok so I had an idea for a character that I would like help optimizing. Basically I’m trying to create a tiefling bard, with a focus on combat instead of healing, sort of like a rock musician. I was thinking of making the level layout something like bard 16/warlock 2/ sorcerer 2, but I’d love an outside opinion on how to build this character, especially since I really don’t have much experience with multi-classing.
If you want your bard to be highly offensive, vicious mockery is a must.
But anyway, what is it you're wanting to do with those sorcerer and warlock levels? A lot of bard spells benefit from a sorcerer's Heighten Spell ability, for instance, but if there's a good chance an instrument of the bards will be showing up in the game you're in, Heighten Spell may not be worth building for since the instrument will already impose disadvantage on saves against a good number of those spells. One thing that is worth looking at is any spell that involves the caster making an ability check, since bards get the Jack of All Trades class feature. That means bards get a little extra juice on spells like counterspell, dispel magic, or telekinesis. Bards are also better at using scrolls of a higher level than they can cast for this same reason, so a multiclass build like you mentioned can use high level spell scrolls off the sorcerer or warlock list better than a non-bard could. Add to that that bards get Enhance Ability, and it makes them real scroll machines (which, of course, is only useful if you're able to acquire scrolls fairly easily).
Two levels of fighter for better armor options and an action surge is also worth considering. That could let you land a paralysis effect such as hold person then take advantage of it by getting an automatic critical hit with a hit from an attack spell or getting an automatic failure on a dexterity saving throw from a spell like lightning bolt or disintegrate. All of this suggests that planning ahead and figuring out what your Magical Secrets spells are going to be is a must when considering your build options.
Wow thanks. I didn’t even consider dipping into fighter, I’ll give that a try. Ok so anyways to answer your question I was planning the dip in sorcerer to maybe get something like quicken spell, which I guess makes less sense than heightened spell. The reason for the dip into warlock is mainly because I wanted something like Eldritch Blast that could get out a lot of damage in one turn, and so I could maybe get a few invocations. My thinking was, if you could get out AOE spells like thunderwave and an agonizing blast you could have the potential to do a lot of damage.
Additionally if I ended up choosing the hexblade as my patron, my bard would be fairly good at close range as well, and I could focus more on charisma. That being said with a fighter dip I gain less from the hexblade. I could gain something from warlock in the fiend patron too, I get burning hands, and a few temporary hit points, the one problem being those won’t scale. With the archfey I get a few useful spells, but I also get the fey presence ability which could be worth it. For sorcerer I’m not sure what subclass would be most beneficial for me, im not even sure if I should dip into sorcerer at this point. As for bard, the subclass I’m thinking about is probably a lore bard, just because I would be loosing out on magical secrets, though option I’m considering is collage of whispers, purely for the reason that I’m trying to make this guy resemble a rock musician of some sort. Also I’m sort of curious what you meant about imposing disadvantage, where can I find reference to that?
If you are going into Eldritch Blast it would be a shame to go Warlock 2 / Sorcerer 2. If you drag sorcerer to level 3 you get the best Eldritchblast battery there is. Quicken metamagic allows for cheap double eldritch blast in a round. Is also makes the spellslots from warlock so much better, since they can be turned into metamagic, and replenished every short rest! If the last point is appealing, one might also considder warlock 3 for 2 more metamagic points/short rest. Depends a bit on the type of group, and if short rest is important or not.
At Warlock 2 / Sorcerer 3 you can basically add on whatever you want, and bard 15 seems like a fine such choice :)
If your DM is ok with homebrew material there are a number of options on this site that may fit a play style you're looking for as well.
Otherwise one class not mentioned that could also be fun with a bard is dipping into Rogue/Swashbuckler and have a lot of fun "dancing" your way through combat using your songs, sneak attack and audacity to move in and out of combat with greater ease.
If you go the Quicken Spell/eldritch blast route you are really building more of a sorcerer/warlock than bard. The bard component becomes kind of incidental at that point, since it doesn't really help with that central tactic of spamming eldritch blast. In fact, it kind of gets in the way by making it harder to accrue warlock invocations to stack onto the eldritch blasts. Opinions differ on the absolute best way to build an eldritch blast spammer, but tossing in a lot of levels of bard isn't really one of the contenders for that.
Getting away from that specific tactic, I would say bards benefit less from Quicken Spell than sorcerers or warlocks do, mainly because bards have the option to use Bardic Inspiration as a bonus action and they have healing word and heat metal on their spell list, all of which are frequently very useful ways to expend bonus actions, and thus building in extra bonus action options for bards is of limited utility. Bards have a ton of "save or you're screwed" spells, so pumping up their spell save DC and focusing heavily on charm spells and pairing that with an Instrument of the Bards, or broadening out to other spells and taking Heighten Spell makes them extremely dangerous. It really depends on the style of campaign you're going to be in and the type of DM you will have. Will there likely be an Instrument of the Bards? If so, Heighten Spell isn't worth as much. Will your DM frequently be throwing monsters at you that are immune to charm effects? If so, Instrument of the Bards becomes less useful, and Heighten Spell starts to look better. Later on they get a lot of extra offensive options in combat with polymorph and animate objects that don't involve this type of decision making, but it's still worth considering these questions before you start to map out your character.
For your second Metamagic ability, if you do go that route, take a close look at Subtle Spell. It's cheap to use and quite effective. It's arguably more effective for bards than for pure sorcerers or sorcerer/warlocks, too, because bards get the silence spell. So they can create an area of silence and then use Subtle Spells to keep casting spells within that area. Very useful if you're up against things doing thunder damage or enemy spellcasters you can keep wrangled in one area. Twinned Spell seems nice at first glance, but you need a lot of sorcerer levels to make it effective so you get enough sorcery points to be able to twin higher level spells without having to constantly spend bonus actions to restore your sorcery point pool. You may not want to take that many levels of sorcerer.
One other thing about going two levels of fighter is if your first level is in fighter, while your range of musical instrument and skill choices suffers some, you do get proficiency in constitution saves, so that helps with all those concentration saves you'll be making on down the road (also the case if you take sorcerer at first level if you triple class to get Metamagic options). The improved armor class you get from going fighter also means you probably won't have to make as many concentration saves in the first place, either.
Well many of the bard's abilities are not built around dps, but rather versatility. So attempts to optimize a bard around dps, will result in few bard levels (as seen with sorcerer/warlock).
The second issue I encountered is how hard deal damage. The few bard abilities that boost damage are mostly based on weapon attacks.
So I prioritized bard and looked for low level dips to increase damage potential.
One that I'm fond of is 17 levels whisper bard and 3 levels hexblade warlock with pact of blade, improved pact weapon and devils sight invocations. You get to 9th level spells and 2 extra 2nd level slots. The meat of the build is the psychic blade feature of the bard with hex warrior feature of the warlock. You can use any weapon, I recommend heavy crossbow for max range and damage, bonus action hexblade curse, +12 to hit, 1d10+8d6+12 damage. Crit on 19, with advantage if you cast darkness, +1d6 damage if you cast hex.
There ARE a couple of bard colleges that let you use your bardic inspiration offensively(one specific one lets you use it for melee trickery, forget the name though)
Optimizing eldritch blast doesn't really involve anything that Bard really brings to the table, but splashing one level of Warlock to obtain Eldritch Blast makes a 19/1 Bard much much more offensive than a level 20 Bard. Splashing 18/2 even more so, since you can then pick up Agonizing Blast.
A mere 2 level splash will still leave you feeling like you're playing a bard, not a weird warlock multiclass optimization beast. I think splashing Sorcerer is largely unimportant, you won't really get enough sorcery points to get up to anything too exciting. At Warlock 2/Bard X you can either use each and every bard level, ability, and spell for cool non-combat "fluff," knowing that Eldritch Blast is always the right thing to use whenever you're trying to do damage on any given round of combat, or you can try to do something cool and non-optimal, like make a Grapple Specialist bard, knowing that you have Eldritch Blast to fall back on whenever grappling isn't cute/appropriate.
ok so I had an idea for a character that I would like help optimizing. Basically I’m trying to create a tiefling bard, with a focus on combat instead of healing, sort of like a rock musician. I was thinking of making the level layout something like bard 16/warlock 2/ sorcerer 2, but I’d love an outside opinion on how to build this character, especially since I really don’t have much experience with multi-classing.
"Can I insight check the wolf?"
If you want your bard to be highly offensive, vicious mockery is a must.
But anyway, what is it you're wanting to do with those sorcerer and warlock levels? A lot of bard spells benefit from a sorcerer's Heighten Spell ability, for instance, but if there's a good chance an instrument of the bards will be showing up in the game you're in, Heighten Spell may not be worth building for since the instrument will already impose disadvantage on saves against a good number of those spells. One thing that is worth looking at is any spell that involves the caster making an ability check, since bards get the Jack of All Trades class feature. That means bards get a little extra juice on spells like counterspell, dispel magic, or telekinesis. Bards are also better at using scrolls of a higher level than they can cast for this same reason, so a multiclass build like you mentioned can use high level spell scrolls off the sorcerer or warlock list better than a non-bard could. Add to that that bards get Enhance Ability, and it makes them real scroll machines (which, of course, is only useful if you're able to acquire scrolls fairly easily).
Two levels of fighter for better armor options and an action surge is also worth considering. That could let you land a paralysis effect such as hold person then take advantage of it by getting an automatic critical hit with a hit from an attack spell or getting an automatic failure on a dexterity saving throw from a spell like lightning bolt or disintegrate. All of this suggests that planning ahead and figuring out what your Magical Secrets spells are going to be is a must when considering your build options.
Our resident archer ranger is actually a college of valor bard.
"Not all those who wander are lost"
Wow thanks. I didn’t even consider dipping into fighter, I’ll give that a try. Ok so anyways to answer your question I was planning the dip in sorcerer to maybe get something like quicken spell, which I guess makes less sense than heightened spell. The reason for the dip into warlock is mainly because I wanted something like Eldritch Blast that could get out a lot of damage in one turn, and so I could maybe get a few invocations. My thinking was, if you could get out AOE spells like thunderwave and an agonizing blast you could have the potential to do a lot of damage.
Additionally if I ended up choosing the hexblade as my patron, my bard would be fairly good at close range as well, and I could focus more on charisma. That being said with a fighter dip I gain less from the hexblade. I could gain something from warlock in the fiend patron too, I get burning hands, and a few temporary hit points, the one problem being those won’t scale. With the archfey I get a few useful spells, but I also get the fey presence ability which could be worth it. For sorcerer I’m not sure what subclass would be most beneficial for me, im not even sure if I should dip into sorcerer at this point. As for bard, the subclass I’m thinking about is probably a lore bard, just because I would be loosing out on magical secrets, though option I’m considering is collage of whispers, purely for the reason that I’m trying to make this guy resemble a rock musician of some sort. Also I’m sort of curious what you meant about imposing disadvantage, where can I find reference to that?
"Can I insight check the wolf?"
If you are going into Eldritch Blast it would be a shame to go Warlock 2 / Sorcerer 2. If you drag sorcerer to level 3 you get the best Eldritchblast battery there is. Quicken metamagic allows for cheap double eldritch blast in a round. Is also makes the spellslots from warlock so much better, since they can be turned into metamagic, and replenished every short rest! If the last point is appealing, one might also considder warlock 3 for 2 more metamagic points/short rest. Depends a bit on the type of group, and if short rest is important or not.
At Warlock 2 / Sorcerer 3 you can basically add on whatever you want, and bard 15 seems like a fine such choice :)
If your DM is ok with homebrew material there are a number of options on this site that may fit a play style you're looking for as well.
Otherwise one class not mentioned that could also be fun with a bard is dipping into Rogue/Swashbuckler and have a lot of fun "dancing" your way through combat using your songs, sneak attack and audacity to move in and out of combat with greater ease.
If you go the Quicken Spell/eldritch blast route you are really building more of a sorcerer/warlock than bard. The bard component becomes kind of incidental at that point, since it doesn't really help with that central tactic of spamming eldritch blast. In fact, it kind of gets in the way by making it harder to accrue warlock invocations to stack onto the eldritch blasts. Opinions differ on the absolute best way to build an eldritch blast spammer, but tossing in a lot of levels of bard isn't really one of the contenders for that.
Getting away from that specific tactic, I would say bards benefit less from Quicken Spell than sorcerers or warlocks do, mainly because bards have the option to use Bardic Inspiration as a bonus action and they have healing word and heat metal on their spell list, all of which are frequently very useful ways to expend bonus actions, and thus building in extra bonus action options for bards is of limited utility. Bards have a ton of "save or you're screwed" spells, so pumping up their spell save DC and focusing heavily on charm spells and pairing that with an Instrument of the Bards, or broadening out to other spells and taking Heighten Spell makes them extremely dangerous. It really depends on the style of campaign you're going to be in and the type of DM you will have. Will there likely be an Instrument of the Bards? If so, Heighten Spell isn't worth as much. Will your DM frequently be throwing monsters at you that are immune to charm effects? If so, Instrument of the Bards becomes less useful, and Heighten Spell starts to look better. Later on they get a lot of extra offensive options in combat with polymorph and animate objects that don't involve this type of decision making, but it's still worth considering these questions before you start to map out your character.
For your second Metamagic ability, if you do go that route, take a close look at Subtle Spell. It's cheap to use and quite effective. It's arguably more effective for bards than for pure sorcerers or sorcerer/warlocks, too, because bards get the silence spell. So they can create an area of silence and then use Subtle Spells to keep casting spells within that area. Very useful if you're up against things doing thunder damage or enemy spellcasters you can keep wrangled in one area. Twinned Spell seems nice at first glance, but you need a lot of sorcerer levels to make it effective so you get enough sorcery points to be able to twin higher level spells without having to constantly spend bonus actions to restore your sorcery point pool. You may not want to take that many levels of sorcerer.
One other thing about going two levels of fighter is if your first level is in fighter, while your range of musical instrument and skill choices suffers some, you do get proficiency in constitution saves, so that helps with all those concentration saves you'll be making on down the road (also the case if you take sorcerer at first level if you triple class to get Metamagic options). The improved armor class you get from going fighter also means you probably won't have to make as many concentration saves in the first place, either.
Well many of the bard's abilities are not built around dps, but rather versatility. So attempts to optimize a bard around dps, will result in few bard levels (as seen with sorcerer/warlock).
The second issue I encountered is how hard deal damage. The few bard abilities that boost damage are mostly based on weapon attacks.
So I prioritized bard and looked for low level dips to increase damage potential.
One that I'm fond of is 17 levels whisper bard and 3 levels hexblade warlock with pact of blade, improved pact weapon and devils sight invocations. You get to 9th level spells and 2 extra 2nd level slots. The meat of the build is the psychic blade feature of the bard with hex warrior feature of the warlock. You can use any weapon, I recommend heavy crossbow for max range and damage, bonus action hexblade curse, +12 to hit, 1d10+8d6+12 damage. Crit on 19, with advantage if you cast darkness, +1d6 damage if you cast hex.
There ARE a couple of bard colleges that let you use your bardic inspiration offensively(one specific one lets you use it for melee trickery, forget the name though)
EDIT: college of swords is what I meant
Giant flaming rocks filled with tarrasques fall, everyone dies.
Aren’t all bards offensive?
Optimizing eldritch blast doesn't really involve anything that Bard really brings to the table, but splashing one level of Warlock to obtain Eldritch Blast makes a 19/1 Bard much much more offensive than a level 20 Bard. Splashing 18/2 even more so, since you can then pick up Agonizing Blast.
A mere 2 level splash will still leave you feeling like you're playing a bard, not a weird warlock multiclass optimization beast. I think splashing Sorcerer is largely unimportant, you won't really get enough sorcery points to get up to anything too exciting. At Warlock 2/Bard X you can either use each and every bard level, ability, and spell for cool non-combat "fluff," knowing that Eldritch Blast is always the right thing to use whenever you're trying to do damage on any given round of combat, or you can try to do something cool and non-optimal, like make a Grapple Specialist bard, knowing that you have Eldritch Blast to fall back on whenever grappling isn't cute/appropriate.
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I'm going to make this way harder than it needs to be.