Funny, the Bard was easily the MVP in my playthrough. Bardic Inspiration makes a huge difference for any skill check in dialogue and in combat they dominated the battlefield with Cutting Words to make enemies miss or fail crucial attacks or saving throws, crowd control spells like Hypnotic Pattern and Confusion and Counterspell from Magical Secrets.
Bards are awesome.
Dual hand crossbows and the sharpshooter feat makes for a hell of a combat monster.
To me Bards are all about using charisma to avoid fights, or create distractions while the rest of the party does the important work.
But if you play a sorcerer, you can have charisma for when you want to avoid fights and fireballs for when you don't!
A dex based bard with two levels in paladin is easily the most powerful build in this game.
But if you're a lore bard, you get both fireball AND eldritch blast for when you don't want to avoid fights.
My experience in the game mostly feels like any turn that a character isn't dealing damage is a wasted action.
Sure there's a few exceptions, like putting haste on Karlach is insanely powerful. But I'm struggling to figure out how to use most support actions or classes effectively
Use more save or sucks. Stunning an enemy character(or - bless - several) is also super valuable, it puts the fight to a 3v4 right away. On the bard’s spell list alone, Sleep is incredibly valuable, you’ve got Tasha’s Hideous Laughter, Blindness, Hold Person, Silence, Fear, Confusion, I could go on.
Admittedly haven't tried bard itself yet, but I've got access to all those spells on Gale, and I find a well-placed fireball usually ends up being the better choice. The main problem i have is that I almost never saw those conditions last for even one turn, they would just pass a save and it was like the spell might as well have just missed.
It's a little frustrating, because surely there must be value in using those spells... But I'm definitely not doing it correctly when I try them out.
For what it's worth I played tactician mode right from the start, which probably colored my learning curve a bit
This strategy is only okay until you reach act 3, and then it gets crazy powerful with all the items that bump your spell save DC up.
Bard in BG3 can be one the single highest burst classes in the game if you go college of swords/sharpshooter/dual crossbows. And you can do that three times a day with the bard shirt rest. It’s absolutely disgusting.
I felt the same way. It's 4v4. My turn is to make it 4v3 as quick as possible because even one hit on anyone other than karlach or a tank character will take me 1/2 hp. And God forbid they take 2 hits, then they're out of the battle. My main is a bard (I'm still in the first map dealing with the goblin camp) and I'm using karlach as my tank, but if my bard isn't doing a damage attack on an enemy I feel I'm worse off. I know I'm doing something wrong because this isn't the way support moves are balanced to be.
Use your Bard's abilities to buff your allies to give them advantage, or to break your enemies to give them disadvantage. Bards can also put enemies to sleep, make them fall prone with laughter, and sling horrible insults like "you have a visage well suited for scroll-writing." This will make your allies less likely to take damage, and more likely to deal more damage themselves. A bard can also heal, so at least in the early game you can run 3 dedicated DPS and a bard and have no issues in most situations.
Buffing and breaking make DPS easier. If your DPS units are taking less damage, that means fewer turns are needed for healing, so your healer can do some other buffing, or even some damage. Heck, at least in the early game, you could run a bard as your healer and support, who on off-turns could also deal damage, then use three dedicated DPS units. That'll help you out with your desire to see big bonks.
Having a bard in the party is like this... except there's a dude actually playing Immigrant Song:
Starting my first Bard playthrough right now. I'm thinking Bard with Fighter Subclass. So far it's OP af as a support character and eventually I got plans to dish out high damage too
you'd have to be particularly proficient to be able to fret and pluck in handwraps
My character this playthrough is a Bard, and I think he is probably the most powerful character I've played so far. He is excellent at everything except AOE spellcasting, and he's even better at damage than a fighter or barbarian. I'm definitely rolling a bard next time I play D&D.
