Are 3.5 Bards mechanically weak?

Question

People frequently seem to think that Bards are mechanically weaker than other classes, and I was wondering if this was true?

Answer 1

Not at all; Bards are a very flexible and potent class

At least not if you allow an admittedly-large number of supplements. Even in straight Core, Bards are fairly middle-of-the-road (decidedly better than Fighter, Monk, or Paladin, decidedly worse than Cleric, Druid, or Wizard), though they are quite limited. But if you have a lot of books available, then they have a ton of options out there, many of them quite good.

Inspire Courage is great

Inspire Courage, by default, gives +1 to attack and +1 to damage to all allies who can hear it. Not particularly glamorous, but that’s a pretty sizable bonus. It does, unfortunately, grow very slowly, at +⅛ per level.

Take the Song of the Heart feat (Eberron Campaign Setting), cast inspirational boost (Spell Compendium), activate a Badge of Valor (Magic Item Compendium), and you’re at +4+⅛/level attack & damage. If you’re willing to allow it, Words of Creation (Book of Exalted Deeds) doubles this.

Dragonfire Inspiration (Dragon Magic) allows you to play a separate song that gives +1d6 Fire damage for each +1 to attack/damage your Inspire Courage would normally grant, again to all allies who can hear it. Note that this stacks with Inspire Courage; they’re two separate songs. Now we’re looking at +4 attack, +4d6+4 damage, or twice that with Words of Creation.

Bardic Music can make you a melee powerhouse

Snowflake Wardancing (Frostburn) allows you to add your Charisma to damage rolls, Gauntlet of Heartfelt Blows (Dragon vol. 314) adds Fire damage equal to your Charisma (that’s Charisma×2), and a Crystal Echoblade (Magic Item Compendium) gains bonus Sonic damage if you’re using Bardic Music. The harmonizing magic weapon enhancement (Magic Item Compendium) allows you to attack and use your music together more easily. In combination these can turn a Bard into a very potent melee character, while still distributing considerable bonuses (through the above stuff) to the rest of his party. Use Song of the White Raven (Tome of Battle) to multiclass Bard with Crusader or Warblade for even more martial prowess.

Diplomancy, or just Suggestion

Diplomacy, if you use the rules straight from the book, is absurd. It’s not very hard to make the check necessary to make even your most heated rival fanatical to you (DC 50). Most DMs don’t run Diplomacy this way, and even if you do, a real “diplomancer” quickly becomes dull since everyone is supposed to always do what he wants. Still, never underestimate the power of convincing someone to do what you want.

If you don’t want to rely on Diplomacy, which are probably governed by ill-defined houserules, fascinate and then later suggestion are extremely potent abilities whenever you’ve got to convince a crowd of anything. If you haven’t, read Julius Caesar, Act 3, Scene II (“Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears”) for just how amazingly awesome this can be. Sure, he used Diplomacy, but the Bard doesn’t even have to.

Spellcasting

Don’t underestimate the Bard’s spells: they aren’t a Cleric’s or a Wizard’s, but they’re really quite good. They make a Bard flexible and adaptable.

Some great choices include summon instrument and the aforementioned inspirational boost, as well as grease (see why), glitterdust, heroism, phantom steed, freedom of movement, etc. etc. The various image spells are amazing. Invisibility is never bad. And so on.

Glibness

Glibness gets its own section. Hell, for that matter, glibness got its very own Order of the Stick comic! This spell is stupid-amazing. +30 to Bluff, on a high-Charisma, high-skill class, means almost nothing that isn’t actively using magical truth-detection abilities is going to fall hook, line, and sinker for even the most preposterous lies. If you cannot think of awesome ways to use this, you’re not trying hard enough.

Prestige Classes

There are more awesome Bard-related prestige classes than you can shake a stick at. Lyric Thaumaturge (magic+songs), Virtuoso (magic+better songs), Urban Savant (lots of really nice city-themed abilities), Sublime Chord (9th-level spellcasting as a Bard), Warchanter (powerful new songs) etc. etc. The list really does go on. You’ve even got weird things like the Battle Howler of Gruumsh (faster Inspire Courage progression).

Answer 2

A single, lone, non-multiclassed bard, is nowhere nearly as powerful as a Wizard, Cleric or Druid, especially in Core (but see below). Still, he is much more versatile than a fighter and it is a property of individual game and individual player if a character/class suffers more from a lack of raw power or from a lack of versatility.

Bard's roles are social, versatility and force multiplier. The first and the second of these are very strong, but depend on the game. The last depends on the composition of allied force - he can add a lot to a field battle, with lots of knights, henchmen, and mounts (more than plus-minus several knights), but not so much to a small band of magic-users who do not rely on melee to fight.

Answer 3

The real answer is that a core bard depends on the nature of the campaign. The fascinate ability is extraordinarily powerful because it used a skill check as a save DC. And bards can pump their skill check through the roof. Fascinate, however, works BEFORE combat, not once it has started. So if you are playing in a hack and slash campaign, the bard is going to be a generalist and at best a nice 5th wheel for the party. But if your DM encourages role playing and intrigue, then the bard can be horribly overpowered when tossing suggestions on top of the fascinate.

I personally like bards as a choice for a cohort with my Leadership feat, since you want a cohort to kind of be able to do a little of everything.

Answer 4

Yes and no.

Bards are designed to be flexible; they're a jack-of-all-trades, with an emphasis in being The Face. They have magic - but they're weaker than wizards and clerics. They can have rogue skills - but they're weaker than thieves, because they have multiple important stats and can't just max out dexterity. They can fight - but not as well as fighters or even rogues. And as the bard levels up, those party-wide bonuses start to pale in comparison to having the bard do something other than sing in combat. You can focus in one aspect or another, and get a bard who is great at, say, magic, but they still won't be as powerful in that aspect as, say, a wizard who focuses on magic. But the fact that bards can take almost any role is their prime strength.

If your party lacks a role, then bards can do it - just not quite as well as a character dedicated to filling that role. The trouble with bards in D&D is that the system rewards specialization more than generalization, and bards are generalists. If they're on their own, then they're less likely to be stuck because they can't do something, though they may have problems doing it well.

Bards are The Face

Between bardic knowledge, high social-interaction skills, bardic music, and their sheer reputation, bards are good at persuading people to go their way. People want to be remembered well in bardic songs, and don't want to be vilified by a bard's next original song. Bardic knowledge lets you know what tack to take with people: is the duke insecure about his title? Are those ruins just ruins, or do they have a long history? Bardic knowledge can also short-cut some puzzles or clues, though it won't hand you the quest objective.

Of course, this makes a bard's powers dependent on the GM: if they ignore the (somewhat broken) Diplomacy rules, and don't include any situations where talking will help, and run roughshod over the players' attempts to get information out of an enemy, then all of those bardic powers won't do much; bards won't be very effective in a pure dungeon crawl.

But if your GM likes to include intrigue, skulduggery, persuasion, and talking in the campaign, then a bard far outshines what its mechanical numbers say on the character sheet. A few well-turned phrases at the right moment can end a war or topple a kingdom, and bards are the kings of well-turned phrases.

Answer 5

I think a lot of people seriously underestimate the aforementioned "force multiplier" effect.

Plus one to hit and damage, for example (or higher for higher levels), on every single one of your characters using a weapon definitely can add up over the course of a combat. A mass buff, so to speak. The ability to fill any breach at least adequately can be tremendous. Having played several bards, when the cleric goes down ... The bard can heal him, get him back up and running. Not as well as the cleric, but well enough. There is a breach in the frontline? A bard can plug the hole. Not as well as the fighters, but well enough. And so on. A bard is also a good skill monkey, and especially as the levels accumulate, a potential source of information in just about any field that another player isn't already covering.

Answer 6

In a high-level campaign, with access to lots of expansion books, bards can be an effective class. (If nothing else, they are a spellcasting class, and spellcasting classes become very powerful at high levels.)

However, when a player is new to the game, if they build a low-level bard character it is likely to be a flat-out non-combat character. (Reading the bard character description, they can get the impression that a bard's role in combat is to spend the whole time singing Inspire Courage while the rest of the party does the actual fighting.)

This might be a good fit for some campaigns (those that contain no combat or very little combat) but in other campaigns it can be unplayably bad. The character might get less unplayable at higher levels, once it starts getting good spells, but many players will get frustrated and quit the game before that happens.

The stereotype of bards being weak probably comes from observation of low-level high-Charisma bards in combat-centric adventures.

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Let me offer a specific example.

I had a player who played a paladin character; it was an effective and useful character and she had fun in my game. In the next campaign she played a druid; it was an effective and useful character and she had fun in my game. In the campaign after that she played a bard.

We started at third-level, as is usual. We got into combat and she didn't have anything to do; she didn't have any useful spells, she didn't have a weapon, and she hadn't thought that would be a problem for a Charisma-based character focused on the Diplomacy skill. She spent the whole time hiding behind the fighter. After two sessions she stopped showing up and I never heard from her again.

When I say "the bard class is too weak", this sort of experience is what I am talking about.

Answer 7

The question is problematic, because "weak" is arbitrary and dependent upon situation. Spellthieves are "weak" when fighting fighters but "strong" when fighting spellcasters, especially those that depend on buffstacks. A so-called "Tier 1" wizard is useless and more or less helpless in an antimagic field. Its not a linear spectrum progressing from weak to strong.

Bards are largely dependent on the teammates that they make stronger. The more allies the bard has, the more pronounced an effect he has. This is also true of "aura" users like marshals or dragon shamans. A solo bard is relatively ineffective; in a party with a Conjurer who focuses on summoning and a druid with animal companions he is terrifying.

In combat, bards lack damage-dealing benefits other than the buffs they share with teammates, most of whom can exploit them better than the bard can. But they have a decent BAB, light armor and proficiency in the exotic weapon the whip, which is the best tripping weapon in the game; a bard who goes with Combat Expertise and Improved Trip can be an effective defensive fighter to protect soft arcanists from melee, and an use healing magic to patch them up in an emergency.

Conversely, bards are surprisingly effective as anti-casters as well: the bard spell list is full of great anti caster spells like glitterdust and dissonant chant. They have the stealth skills Hide and Move Silently and the points to make them work, although they lack the Evasion ability that makes other stealthers so deadly. They can also counterspell pretty well and use a variety of spell trigger items for specialized uses, courtesy of being the best Use Magic Device skill of any class.

Even more than his buffs, the information spells a bard can use are invaluable. Know Vulnerabilities and Know Opponent are amazing.

As a PC, bards are often considered unfun, but I disagree. A bard always has something to do. Specialists inevitably end up in situations outside their forte where they can't contribute much; this never happens to bards. They always have something they can do that moves the party forward; even if someone else can do that thing better.