Baldur's Gate 3 - Jack of All Trades Bard - Class Guide

hello everyone and welcome back my name is bulko once again here with a class overview of The Bard I'm gonna frame this as always in terms of the roles from my Know Your Role video so if you're not familiar with those that might be a good place to start but otherwise you should be able to follow along just fine and right off the bat before I start I actually do want to say thank you so much for all the support I'm well over the 4 000 watch hours required to be partnered on YouTube and as soon as I hit that 1000 sub Mark I will get that done so if you would like to help me definitely hit the Subscribe button that helps the most right now and otherwise let's get right into talking about The Bard so this is my favorite class in Dungeons and Dragons 5th edition and this is a perfect class if you just want to do a little bit of everything so if you're like me and you're really indecisive or maybe you're a veteran player of tape uh the tabletop version of the game and you just want a character that's going to fit in no matter which companions you find and end up liking The Bard is the perfect fourth member in any party because they can fill almost every single role they are excellent support characters with lots of Buffs for their allies they have a ton of debuffs and crowd control abilities that make them fantastic in that controller role they have decent blasting with some of their AOE spells they even have a few single target options in both melee and ranged combat depending on the build you want and they have a fantastic skill proficiencies as well the only place where they're a little bit weaker is on the front line and that's mostly because of their hit dice but even with the right build you can get up to a very respectable 18 AC at level three without too much work and that'll serve you well so let's talk a little bit about how I would build out a Bard and as always I'm going to go through a few different options and play styles that you might want to consider depending on where you're going to take your character right away for a background I pick urchin because my bards tend to be dexterity focused and that's just because you need Charisma and the best armor you can ever get on a Bard is medium armor anyways and a DEX Build is liking a medium armor and unless you're multi-classing and taking a heavy armor proficiency strength isn't really going to make a lot of sense on a Bard but that totally is a viable option and we'll talk about multi-classing a little bit near the end but for me I'm gonna have slate of hand and stealth proficiency right away at level one with my high Decks that means I'm going to be a perfectly good scout for those first few levels my only place I'm Really Gonna struggle is perception so noticing things I'm not going to necessarily find all the secret interactables but in terms of opening chests and doors I'll be totally fine at that and I can definitely sneak around the race I went with for this build is the half elf and once again this is mostly just to emulate the ability scores at launch so we have two 16s a 14 two tens and an eight which is the array that I would feel really comfortable with obviously increasing Charisma as your primary stat and then decks up to 16. this gives you a lot of flexibility especially in the first few levels you're going to be running in with the Rapier which the bar does get to start with and you'll be totally fine in melee combat or even with the hand crossbow that you start off with as a Bard and you'll be doing solid ranged combat so you're not really missing out by not having a really useful like range damage can trip and uh you do have obviously full Caster ability so you have lots of spells and things to do on your turn but even when you're out of out of resources your attacks are going to be just fine for the first few levels of the game to fill in the gaps now your actual abilities let's talk about these so right away you're you're a full Caster so even though you still have totally fine melee combat and some decent proficiencies that let you use hand crossbows and things like that you are a full Caster you have a fairly large selection of spells to pick from now we already have blade Ward from being a half high elf so I would choose something different maybe something like friends to be a little bit more persuasive and this is gonna let you get advantage on save or on ability checks during conversations so anything you're using with your charisma and you already have such high Charisma score and Proficiency in a lot of those conversation skills you're gonna make a fantastic party face so you'll be really good in conversations and especially for my first playthrough I really like something like The Bard where I'm gonna have so many options to uh you know persuade and deceive and do all that kind of stuff so that's where I would go with and then obviously vicious mockery is great it's a 1d4 damage cantrip that does scale as you level the damage is fairly pitiful or we're not gonna worry about doing damage with the spell but it does provide disadvantage on attack roll so this is a just a nice way to you know debuff your your enemies it's a wisdom based save so oftentimes you'll be using this on like a big dumb ogre on the front line that has a low wisdom score but a really threatening attack and this can be sometimes useful but it is a little bit more situational and largely I love it for the flavor as many people do just the idea of making fun of someone to death it's gonna happen and that can be fun on to the leveled spells so there's quite a few spells here that are really powerful heroism and Tasha's hideous laughter these are kind of like the recommended ones I would take them off and for the first couple levels I really like sleep and fairy fire so you're playing more of a control role and especially at lower levels I find that having these big area of effect spells when you only have a few spell slots is a little bit better tashes is something that I would absolutely take because it's a really powerful single Target control spell but when you don't have as many spell slots it's a little bit better to do something that's either going to be more reliable like sleep or it's going to hit a whole bunch of targets like verifier and in the first three or so levels of the game sleep is completely nuts it hits targets with up to 24 hit points and just puts them to sleep so it's a fantastic spell to control one or two enemies without needing to do any checks or anything like that likewise Ferry Fire it has a dexterity saving thread which is fairly common especially against some of the early enemies in the game but it has a nice big AOE a nice long range and if you're hitting three or four enemies you're gonna have a couple of them get that disadvantage on their defense essentially all your allies are going to get advantage attacking them and this significantly increases your chance to hit so if you're having uh you know pre-buffing with bless and then you're casting fairy fire to start a fighter on the first round of combat you're gonna do a ton of work and you're really going to clean up fights quickly obviously healing word lets you be that backline healer picking up your allies that fall down in combat and this is fantastic and then you do have a few other kind of interesting support spells not to speak to animals lots of great dialogue options and I would recommend having this available on your character in some way shape or form for your first playthrough just because it is so fun and land is a fantastic job of putting in hilarious animals to talk to and they always have great personalities and lots of Secrets and things that are unlocked by talking to your Furry Friends uh charm person is very similar to friends um the cantrip so it has uses but I I personally find friends is like sufficient if you want to use it thunder wave is a nice little Blaster spell does some damage in an AOE knockback I also really like dissonant Whispers it's a bit more of a single Target nuke but the way I treat it is it does half damage when enemies make their saving through so I almost save it as like that guarantee finisher if there's an enemy that's at low health and I'm in a pitch position where I really need to kill them before they take their next action I can use dissonant Whispers And just pick them off for sure and sometimes if you have the spell slots kicking around it does just do a lot of damage so it is totally fine to use and then the frightened condition which is different than the table top um they just get disadvantage on ability checks and attack rolls it lasts for two turns so it is a pretty powerful debuff so once again if there's like that big scary ogre in the front line that's going to do a lot of melee attacks and a lot of damage using dissonant Whispers it'll often have a good chance of hitting and it'll severely debuff them special shout out also to Bane which is a powerful debuff that targets up to three creatures it's a Charisma savings throughout which is a very very difficult save for most uh monsters to make which is fantastic I don't really like animal friendship I think it's kind of a waste and I think long Strider and feather fall as well as disguise self like there's better things you could be doing with your spell slots at least at the early game and yeah so that's the kind of the selection I would recommend an array like this it gives you a nice mix of like a single Target nuke a heel and a couple of area effect spells that are going to augment or debuff your enemies um rather and then yeah you can obviously pick your starting instrument as well I like the violin so I'm going to keep that and then finally last but last last but not least we have bardic inspiration so bardic inspiration is a really cool ability it takes a bonus action and you're giving a dice to an ally that they can spend to use to augment an attack roll or a saving throw so they can use it offensively or defensively early on in the game you're most likely going to be spending these on attack rolls but there is a little note that I want to talk about with this I highly recommend disabling the automatic use of bardic inspiration so Valerian has they received a lot of pushback on this because a lot of these abilities in the Early Access version of the game had just an automatic use you just toggled it and it would use it when it you could but a lot of these abilities are only good when you get to make an informed decision so bardic inspiration is one of those and this example here is showing you that you know I rolled 24 I I don't need to use my biotic inspiration but if you didn't toggle this it would just automatically use it and it would let you roll like 30 to hit woohoo doesn't do anything so click that button go back make sure you have ask for biotic inspiration it might slow down the flow of combat a little bit but it's going to make sure you get the most out of bardic inspiration so highly recommended and this is going to get you a lot more value for your Bart so that's level one let's talk about level two so at level two bards get Jack of all trades which is going to give them half of their proficiency bonus to every single ability check that you are not already proficient in this is really what makes bards reasonable at everything so nice bonus there you get song of rest this is a little different than in the tabletop version of the game which just lets you kind of get give additional healing at the end of a short rest this actually just gives you an additional short rest in valders K3 so that's really powerful it makes bards pair it really well with you know a Battle Master fighter or warlock that's going to take advantage of those short rests and then obviously you get another spell so we talked about those already I'm just gonna take speak with animals because it's going to be fun to play around with and this first few levels and that's where we're going for level two onward to level three at level 3 bards get to make a really interesting choice in terms of the college they would like to join so you have three choices come launch you're going to have College of lore College of Valor and College of Swords there's a few benefits for each but overall College of lore is going to give you more skills and you're going to be a little bit more of a spell Caster because uh one of the main features that College of lore gets is they can take spells from any classes spell slot at sixth level as well as tenth level it should be noted that all bards are going to have that ability to dip into any classes spell list at level 10 and pick up some really neat spells so you only get a couple of spells when you do this so lore bars are just gonna have you know double the amount of these bonus spells which lets you take really really impowerful impactful spells you wouldn't otherwise get but it should be noted that The Bard spell list is actually quite good and a lot of the spells in Baldur's Gate 3 work a little bit differently than in the pen and paper version so we don't know exactly what those high level spell slots or spells rather are going to do exactly yet so I mean obviously the fallback is sixth level take Fireball you know your Bard can function sort of as a wizard blow things up as a blaster you still have hypnotic pattern and a lot of powerful control and support spells you can take another you know powerful impactful buff spell as well and you're you know you'll be totally fine but if you want your Bard to be a little bit more of a skirmisher you're still going to be a full Caster with lots of powerful attacks and debuffs you could take something like College of Valor which is going to give you two weapon attacks at sixth level and then once you hit 10th level you can actually do some real Shenanigans and you can take something like Swift quiver from the ranger spell and a college of Valor Bard actually puts Rangers to shame when it comes to being an Archer because of your ability to um to make four attacks per round with the right spells additionally enchanting your attacks with magic and you can even do things by taking a couple dips like two levels in fighter to get the archery fighting style and action Surge and then 10 levels of Bard and you could be you know going off popping off as it were um as an Archer if you're going College of Valor you can also as College of swords and College of Valor um you're you're doing more damage obviously um College of Valor lets you use your uh bardic inspiration as a combat buff a damage buff for your allies which is gonna just overall increase your party's damage potential it just gives you a little bit more flexibility because you can do something where you give bartic inspiration to your Frontline character they swing you see if it's going to hit if it is going to hit you don't use it for the attack roll and then once they land you can decide oh this is how much damage they're doing look at their hit points do I need to add the additional damage and you you get a lot of flexibility and you're always going to get value out of your Bardock Inspirations that way um barter uh College of Valor bards rather also get medium armor proficiency as a bonus so this is just a nice thing to have and they also get Shield proficiency martial weapon proficiency doesn't necessarily matter as much it's gonna let you use a longbow which is cool but in terms of Shield proficiency if you're a half elf or a human you're already gonna have that and the medium arm efficiency is nice but all combined at third level as a college of Valor Bard you can have 18 AC so you put on some scale mail you put a shield on and you're using your Rapier you're fairly tanky you're you're you can be up there with the front line you don't quite have the hit points that some of your other Frontline characters are gonna have but in terms of your AC and your overall resilience especially because we took blade warp as our can drip we can pre-buff us ourselves with blade Ward have our 18 AC and we're gonna be totally safe in the front line of combat if we need to or just skirting around the edges even but we're gonna we're gonna definitely be someone who can take a lot of hits College of lore as I mentioned is more of a Caster based Bard they have a few different um features they get additional proficiencies so you get three proficiencies in Arcana intimidation and slate of hand come release these will not be fixed proficiencies meaning you'll be able to just pick any three new proficiencies you want if you are playing in The Early Access obviously you'd want to make sure that you don't take any backgrounds or proficiencies in intimidation or slate of hand or Arcana at level one because you're gonna get them for free if you're going College of lore this is going to open up a lot more options for your character as being that sort of skill monkey character being able to make all those outside of combat um ability or yeah ability checks you also get regardless of your college expertise and this lets you pick any skill that you have Proficiency in and double your proficiency bonus so if you pick slate of hands and persuasion for example this is going to let me open a lot of locks and this is going to let me be a really good party face um building up this character to both sort of fulfill that role of the Rogue slash the party face this is great um one thing it should be noted that's maybe a little unfortunate is that you cannot Inspire yourself so a lot of times you're gonna have amazing skill proficiencies but if you did have a character that also has expertise and skills like a rogue in your party for example they're gonna have this plus seven and then you can additionally give them your Bardock inspiration die to really push them over the top so that's something to consider there as well now let's talk about the level two spells so bards actually have access to some fantastic spells with a wide variety of options that are going to let them fill quite a few different roles so they have some powerful debuffs things like blind you'll notice it just lasts 10 turns there's no concentration which makes it really good it's gonna give your enemies disadvantage on all their attacks and they won't be able to Target you with a lot of spells because they're blind so this can be a powerful debuff it does have a con Save which does mean it is going to be resisted frequently so maybe not a great choice especially at early levels it's not going to have a huge impact calm emotions can be okay um I'm not necessarily a fan of this spell in terms of um it's just gonna make it so they can't be Charmed or frightened which isn't super impactful it's not like in the tabletop version where you can like end a fight and calm and down and then like you know RP it out um cloud of daggers compared to the tabletop version is actually a completely nuts spell because the way this works in Baldur's Gate 3 is it's a circle instead of taking up a single square and you're not relying on the DM letting you place it creatively on the grid um you can hit easily two to three enemies especially if you're in a choke point or you kind of bog them down with a spell like web or even just like grease and they're Fallen prone and this will do damage the second you cast it and then the second they start their turn in it so it it does a ton of damage enemies will run through it it'll hit two or three times and oftentimes if you're hitting at least two enemies in it and you know they're gonna start their turn in it when it comes up it's worth casting and even just being able to push or shove enemies back into it you can get so much value out of a cloud of daggers and I've had this thing trigger two or three times on two or three enemies so really you're getting so much value out of this spell it's it can be deceptively powerful in Baldur's Gate 3 and should not be overlooked so I actually really like this as my level three is spelled to take it's just going to give me some options to just straight up kill things instantly um with with my spell slots um some other cool options obviously crown of Madness this you can cast on an enemy frontliner character and they will just start turning around and slapping their allies you uh want to cast this ideally from Stealth at the beginning of combat before the front line gets to you um because it just gonna make them attack the closest thing and if that's one of your characters it's not going to be helpful detect thoughts this is a fun RP sort of thing that you can use it's you know larian has put a lot of effort into all the dialogue options and these RP spells these spells should not be overlooked your DM in the tabletop version your mileage may vary with how fun this spell is but larion it like they've put stuff in this game that you will not see if you don't take this spell so there might be some options for taking this just in your playthrough to see more content I don't know if I would take it because it's not necessarily what I want to do and I I love like the Tactical combat spells and like that's just what I have in fun with but I honestly on a second playthrough I would take something like this just to see some of those options um and get a different experience enhanceability this if you want to be that skill monkey character if you want to be that character that has advantage on all your ability checks you're opening all the locks you know you take this it's gonna help you in conversations it it you can pick the ability when uh when you cast it so it's a concentration spell but outside of combat this is going to be completely insane cheap metal is disgustingly powerful um this is a con save but once they are uh once they're wearing the armor they always have disadvantage on attack rolls and ability checks um you can use your bonus action on subsequent turns to continue dealing the fire damage over and over and over um and if you use it on their armor they can't just take their armor off um so at least in the tabletop version that's my experience but it only works if they're wearing metal armor um so there are some limitations in how you who you can Target but when you target somebody with this it tends to be incredibly devastating another in completely devastating um spell is hold person uh you completely paralyze someone and in addition to making them unable to act or move they just lose their turn as long as you maintain your concentration which makes this one of the best CC spells in the game you automatically crit on anyone who's paralyzed so this is also going to let you quickly dispatch them invisibility turns you invisible does what it says this is really useful for stealth and sneaking around obviously it's going to give you advantage on stealth checks it does break as soon as you attack or cast a spell but has a lot of uses for kiting or if you're in a bad situation you can just turn invisible and get out of there because when you're invisible you don't trigger a tax of opportunity lesser restoration it removes disease or conditions um affecting a creature it's personally I find this typically is not worth it there's other things you could be spending on phantasmal force is kind of cool it's like a damage over time that has a neat flavor but it doesn't do a ton but it does last a long time so it can do things that are okay but generally I I don't think it's worth it um the uh shatter is sort of like your your baby Fireball it's just a medium-sized AOE it does 3d8 thunder damage a decent amount of damage um it's it's reasonable if you're looking to kind of fill in that like a bit of a blaster roll and then you can uh scale this up obviously as well so when you're upscaling this it kind of can fill the role of like a poor man's Fireball in those situations where you want to finish off like a couple of enemies or there's a cluster of enemies and because it does the damage even if they make their saving throw it is really nice for those situations where you see that they're at low health and you just want to finish them off but cloud of daggers often is going to do a similar amount of damage and is also going to do that damage the next turn and then the next turn and so oftentimes it feels like you're gonna get you know if you're hitting two ticks of cloud of daggers it's doing a lot more than one one ticket shutter so um the AOE is a little bit smaller but generally speaking these are kind of comparable I and I prefer clutter daggers as you get higher level obviously you can have both and then finest finally um silence is is kind of neat uh it makes it so spells um aren't going to happen any spells with with verbal components just don't go off so um you can completely eliminate casters sometimes by just kind of trapping them and then silencing them um that can be a cool ability it also makes you immune to thunder damage so you can't be shattered for example or you can't be thunder waved you won't take the damage from those um so just kind of there is like some anti-synergy because a lot of the barred damaging spells are doing Thunder damage you know big Sonic booms so um think about that Synergy there but otherwise there's lots of uses um for for this and uh yeah that's the The Bard spell list lots of fun utility again I really like cloud of daggers in Baldur's Gate 3. this is sort of like the sleeper hit for me so I would recommend playing around with them if you have the Early Access but obviously if you're watching this maybe you don't and you just want to get some uh some other opinions so there's one for you there I love cloud of daggers and that is what I'm going to take for my second level spell slot at level three on my college of lore Bard and yeah let's talk a little bit it about multi-classing your Bard so bards because they use Charisma as one of their primary stats as well as dexterity have a lot of classes that they synergize really well with and I'm going to talk about some of the my favorite combinations so Bard pairs incredibly well with Paladin for two levels it's one of my favorite characters in the tabletop version of the game was a sixth level Valor Bard with two levels of Paladin and I sort of called it like a glory chanter sort of character and I did have like a whole story around it and I think even like the the feel of it is like this you know kind of Paladin like plate wearing barred character that was all about like you know bringing bringing the the holy glory song Everywhere he went um was really fun character design and it is incredibly powerful um with Valor Bard at level six you get two melee attacks so you're not really missing out on that and then obviously you have way more spells and spell slots than a typical Paladin but you still have the smites so you're gonna you're able to completely decimate single targets it makes you a really powerful Striker the plate proficiency for being a paladin lets you be a really powerful Frontline character um and there's lots of cool options there you'll still have access to quite a few powerful at higher level Bard spells um if you go all the way up to 10 levels of barn and just stay with only the two levels of Paladin you do miss out on a few Paladin goodies but you'll still get the ability to pick pick spells from any casters list at level level 12. um you know 10 levels of Bard as a valid Bard which is fun so a fun combination pretty powerful definitely um worth putting together likewise a very classic combination is The Bard slash warlock um I already mentioned how the song of rest pairs really well with a warlock because it gives you an extra short rest per long rest so why not also be the Warlock in your party um The Bard warlock is great because you get Eldritch blast which scales with your charisma this means you don't really need anything else in terms of single Target damage you just take two levels of warlock that gives you two of your packed spell slots and you're gonna be able to use those for hex and some of the other uh unique warlock spells throughout the game which are you know there's a few that are worth considering um but mainly just having hex is totally fine and even just taking something like charm person um that's like because you're not gonna have things these these slots aren't going to scale as well so having something that you can just use over and over will be totally fine and even just using those spell slots for your other spells um it gives you really its Eldritch blast with agonizing blast as your main damage spell so you can go two levels of Warlock and then 10 levels of Bard you're still mostly a Bard but you just have a really powerful can trip and that also gives you enough ability score increases to max out your charisma and you're going to be totally fine you can go any style of barge you want you could even go into a Valor Bard and be sort of like a kind of get the hex blade thing going on you would potentially want to go one step further to get back to the blade but um warlock Bard there's a lot of powerful combos there there's also uh taking one level of sorcerer specifically if you go draconic sorcerer is really popular and when you take um some of the options um I believe it's this one um the the white gives you armor of agathis which is a unique spell that you can get which is really powerful and um you also get Constitution saving throws as a sorcerer which is really really important so this is going to make it make it so whenever you're making a concentration check on your spells you have uh that additional proficiency which is going to mean your your concentration is going to be broken a lot less so bards don't actually get that and that's something to look out for so even just one level of Sorcerer And then the rest of your levels in Bard just makes you a little bit better in terms of those those casting things and then you also get just a few kind of fun fun bits with um you know you get one extra hit point and then you get some draconic resilience which is boosts your AC so especially if you're going for something like a lore Bard where you're more of a Caster you're not going to get into the medium armor this and this would give you um you know 18 AC pretty early on if you're a human or half elf you already get the shield proficiency for free you're getting the 16 AC just by being naked all the time um and then yeah the plus two with the shield so that's another powerful combination so I think those are kind of the the default that I would say is you know Paladin sorcerer warlock make the most sense for a Bard um pretty straightforward even two levels of fighter though for a Valor Bard as I mentioned like it gets you accents action Surge and lets you have that strength or the heavy armor proficiency if you wanted to do more of a strength Valor Bard um totally a viable option and The Valor Bard as well like you could be a Bard with a big two-handed sword um lots of flexibility there and uh yeah so that's that's a whole bunch of different things to think about for creating a Bard as I mentioned before this is my favorite class in fifth edition you can really play any role you want with this class they can do it all and a lot of times you don't even have to focus that hard you can actually just do it all and do it all quite well so bards are are going to be this is pretty well guaranteed the first character I'm going to make come launch this is what I hopefully will be playing through on my first playthrough and uh it looks like it's gonna be so much fun I'm really excited for ball dish K3 in just a few days now so once again if you're still here if you're still listening thank you so much I appreciate your support and I will catch you in the next one thanks for watching [Music]

Channel: BulkoIV

Views: 62,401

Keywords: baldurs gate 3, baldur's gate 3, baldurs gate 3 gameplay, bard, Dnd, DnD, BG3

Id: RDymVtGL_f8

Length: 32min 50sec (1970 seconds)

Published: Sun Jul 30 2023