Bard Subclass Tier Ranking in Dungeons & Dragons 5e

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week's episode greetings my name is monty martin and i'm kelly mclaughlin and we are the dungeon dudes welcome to our channel where we cover everything dungeons and dragons including advice for players and guides for dungeon masters we upload new videos on tuesdays and thursdays so please subscribe to our channel so that you never miss an episode today we are ranking the subclasses available to bards in dungeons and dragons 5th edition we're going to be taking a look at the various subclasses presented to the bard and their different abilities and features and how they stack up against each other if you look on the screen now you'll see our tiers for how we are going to rank each and every subclass as well as the criteria that we're looking for when we examine and analyze these different subclasses we're not taking into account role play potential because we believe that every subclass has an equal opportunity for great role-playing what we are looking at is the mechanical uses that their abilities have for combat exploration and social interactions in the games of dungeons and dragons very important to note that combat efficacy is only one of many metrics that we look at when we look at the subclass we want to look at how well the subclass augments the abilities of the base class and how often these abilities will be useful in common campaign and adventuring situations abilities that are useful all the time that can be regularly used in combat exploration and social situations are much better and produce a much better subclass than abilities that cannot be used often or can only be used in very narrow applications although multi-classing can be a great factor for some subclasses we are not using that as a staple of our decisions when looking at the subclasses for the bard and in the case of the bard we actually had to be a little bit strict because the bard itself is one of the strongest classes in the game so we needed to analyze how these subclasses actually stack up against the already powerhouse that is the bard class bards are incredible characters they have so many capabilities in combat in both battlefield control but also even a little bit of capability to be damage dealers and support characters and healers they are amazing flat out for role playing and social interactions and they are also incredible problem solvers investigators and explorers almost all the subclasses on paper look really cool and offer something really really special but some of the smart subclasses encourage you to do things that diminish the versatility of the bard which is the bard's greatest strength we're going to be comparing our views with each other as well as those of the community there's a lot to discuss today so let's get rolling bards gain most of their subclass features at third and sixth level not gaining another ability until 14th level so many of them are quite front loaded and none perhaps more so than the college of eloquence bard introduced in the new mythic odysseys of theros book that just came out recently now for starting with the college of eloquence bard this one is one of the newer bards and in my opinion it really plays into the bardic inspiration which is one of the key features of choosing a bard in the first place as well as being able to really play into the social aspects of your bard which again i think is the strength of a bard player character and what they're looking to do anyway and the college of eloquence bard for me lands in a solid s tier because of how strong and versatile it is with its abilities revolving around both social aspects and the bardic inspiration i agree this is an s tier subclass every single ability that the college of eloquence bard gains from silver tongue unfailing inspiration even universal speech and especially their unsettling words ability builds on the strengths of what makes bards amazing unsettling words means that a bard with training and expertise in persuasion and deception by about fifth or sixth level we'll never get a persuasion check result under 20. it means that you never get less than 10 on the die which means that with the bonuses of your charisma score and your proficiency bonus being doubled thanks to expertise most bars are going to be lying through their teeth and persuading everyone left right and center unfailingly so if you're playing a bard there's a good chance that you're going to be the face of the party you're the talker you're the one engaging in almost every social interaction that happens in the campaign and a lot of people these days are really leaning into the role play aspects of dungeons and dragons and there's nothing better than a bard for those role play aspects if you take the college of eloquence you are never almost never i should say going to fail a deception or a persuasion check because of this core ability that you gain right off the bat the unsettling words feature allows you to spend a bonus action and a bardic inspiration die to choose a creature within 60 feet of you and give them a penalty to their next saving throw equal to the role that you get on the die this alone basically translates to you can use this action at the start of your turn debuff a target enemy and then cast one of your nastiest spells against them effectively increasing your spell saving throw dc by whatever you roll on the die but it's not just you if you have a wizard in the party that needs to land a crucial spell like banishment or finger of death you don't have to be the one that gains the benefit of this you can set up another party member another spellcasting party member this is one of the few abilities in the game that so flexibly debuffs and enemies saving throw with nothing they can really do to prevent it at sixth level they gain unfailing inspiration which means that when they give out their bardic inspiration dye and that dye is used but it doesn't turn the attack roll ability check or saving throw that you get that the party member was making into a success the role still fails that inspiration die isn't expended and can be then reused until it is successfully applied this means that your bardic inspiration is never wasted when you use it which is absolutely incredible for to augment a core ability and it takes away one of the weaknesses of bardic inspiration which means that you could use it and still fail well now it's never wasted at 14th level it gets even better because now if you use an inspiration die and it succeeds that inspiration die can then be passed to somebody else meaning that your inspiration and the uses of it go far past just handing it to one player at the table and hoping that it is able to help them you know have ways to use the bardic inspiration if it fails if it succeeds or a multitude of other options here that just amplifies everything that you want your bard to do it's so good it's so powerful and i think that these abilities work so well together the college of eloquence bard takes everything that rocks about the bard and just turns the volume up to 11 more like 12 actually so the community poll that we left gives 34.9 percent of b 27.6 in a and twenty five percent point four percent an s i think that well over sixty percent of our community did not read the abilities of the subclass and maybe didn't get the book yet i think that a lot of people maybe haven't seen this in play yet and maybe haven't experienced how powerful of an option a lot of these abilities are i went into our feedback responses for this and a lot of comments that we saw from people said that they actually didn't know how to rank the eloquence bard because they hadn't seen it in their games yet and anyone that had comments about the eloquence bard pretty universally saying its praises so i think that that's why we have the disparity here in this in this result i think at the end of the day we're putting eloquence bard at a solid s tier ranking next up we have the college of glamour introduced in xanathar's guide to everything this bardic subclass has two primary abilities that it gains right out the gate it gains its mantle of inspiration power which allows you to use your bardic inspiration to as a bonus action give a number of party members temporary hit points and also allow them to spend their actions to move up to their speed without provoking opportunity attacks which is a pretty useful and interesting mutation of the bardic inspiration ability that means that your bard doesn't have to take say a feet like inspiring leader you also gain two interesting abilities mantle of majesty and enthralling performance i think that these are pretty good abilities actually the problem with them is i don't think that they're going to come up a lot in many campaigns i think particularly the enthralling performance ability requires you to perform for one minute sing a song and engineer a social situation and i think that you could go many many game sessions without ever using this ability furthermore the mantle of majesty ability uses your bard's concentration to maintain and bards have a lot of really good concentration spells so it competes with every single spell that bards have for this reason i think the benefits of this subclass are very situational and in many cases they can be superseded by spells and other abilities that bards already get or have available to them for this i give this subclass a b i'm actually in agreeance here i love this subclass but it is for me a b tier subclass i agree with you that those abilities when you read them they sound really really cool and as a dungeon master if i had a college of glamour bard playing at my table i would engineer situations where they could use these abilities but the fact that that is the necessity is that you need to have situations that would come up that would allow you to amplify the powers of this barn and use these abilities in cool and fun ways means that it's something that won't happen regularly and won't even happen in every campaign setting and if it does it might only be a handful of times and that means that in the right campaign setting this could be a really really cool choice for a bard but in some campaign settings it's going to be a disappointment i do think that there is something interesting to state that you could have a really interesting villain that is a glamour bard i'm thinking david bowie as the goblin king in labyrinth but having those abilities used as a villain or something that you as a diane get to orchestrate the circumstances in which those abilities are cool and useful and the party gets involved in them but being a player character it's pretty niche to have some of these options come up let's see what our community ranking thinks of the college of glamour bard 11 of our community gave it an s rank 36 gave it an a and 40 of it gave it a b with the remaining 10 giving it a c not a bad breakdown i think it's a pretty even split between a and b and i think i'm in agreement with the idea that in the right campaign this is good it's solid but i think that i gotta hold the whole pat on the b i i think that i could engineer that situation that the glamour bard can do with another bard and pull off more strong things in other situations absolutely this is a b tier and most of the community agrees with us although i could definitely see the reasoning for a high percentage of people wanting it to be a and you could argue those points very easily next up we come to the college of lore bard found in the player's handbook a classic choice and i think a very popular favorite many people forget that the college of lore bar gains three extra skill proficiencies and eventually can use their bardic inspiration to boost their own skill checks with peerless skill because i think the thing that most people are here for as the college of lore bard are the cutting words ability which allows you to use your reaction to spend bardic inspiration to debuff enemy attack roles and let's face it the sixth level feature additional magical secrets gaining two bonus spells from any class list is just fantastic it is exceptionally difficult to fully quantify just how much getting to pick any two spells from any class in the game at sixth level can transform your bard every bar gets magical secrets and can do this but the lore bar gets to do it earlier at a very sweet spot when third level spells just are becoming available for this reason i think that as long as you are choosing really great options with your magical secrets the lore bard is s tier i have to agree with you it is by far in my opinion one of the most powerful bard options having the magical secrets chosen twice once which allows you to look at the third level spells which really alleviates the pressure of the tenth level magical secrets where you say okay there's a lot of great spells of level three four five what do i do now instead of having to compare all of those spells together and make your choice you get to focus in at six level on the third level spells and then at tenth level you can choose those higher end spells and really change the way your bard's going to work this combined with something that shouldn't be taken for granted which is three additional skill proficiencies which can really amplify what your bard is already good at your bard is a skill junkie all birds are skill junkies they gain benefits to skills that they're not proficient in and they get a lot of proficiencies this doubles down on that and then cutting words is just excellent and this bard really is going to be just an amplified version of everything that the core class already offers you so s tier is absolutely what i give the lore bard and i think it's without a doubt it in the eloquence bard double down on what the bard already is without taking anything away you don't have to make any difficult choices on whether you're going to lose something to gain something else these two subclasses are nothing but gains you can choose the right spells to suit the campaign so no matter what type of campaign you're playing in no matter what party makeup you're in if you're like our party actually needs some additional healing our party doesn't have anybody that knows fireball our party doesn't have a counterspell you can pilfer exactly the right spell that you need to suit this this flexibility is absolutely incredible and it comes online so much earlier so let's take a look at what the community has to say about the laura bart this is the landslide 66.9 percent gave it an s tier the remaining 25 percent gave it an a um i think that the a is totally possible if you don't make good choices for your magical secrets the community poll is staunchly in agreement with us this is an s tier subclass with the remaining 25 giving it a a and 66.9 ranking it the s tier i think we can solidly say the college of lore bard is an s tier subclass so next up we have the college of swords bard which was introduced in xanathar's guide to everything and this is a way to make your bard more of a melee combatant it gains proficiency with medium armor and scimitars and only scimitars which isn't quite as good as maybe a few other options that are out there and when i look at the abilities there's some really cool and unique ways to use a college of swords bard and you get choices for how you can use your bardic inspiration in unique and interesting ways but a lot of these ways are selfish they only impact you as the bard player which in my opinion actually takes away from what the greatness of the bard is they are the essence of what it means to be the support player dishing out their bardic inspiration to help the entire party when you make that more of a selfish and internal thing to help amplify your attacks it's really cool and if you wanted to play a melee oriented bard this is an option that you can take but for me this actually lands solidly in the d tier as i read through this bard subclass compared to all of the other options presented this one seemed the least impactful to me it seemed like it actually took away from all of the love that i have for the bard and tried to make it something that i felt wasn't what the bard is so the college of swords bar gains some meager additional weapon proficiencies and armor proficiencies it doesn't get shields and it doesn't get interesting two-handed martial weapons it gains an option of two different fighting styles both gravitating it towards one-handed weapons or dual wielding so it's either the dueling fighting style or two weapon fighting it gets extra attack and then it gets these blade flourishes the blade flourishes on paper somewhat resemble battlemaster maneuvers but rather than being powered by a separate set of dice they're powered by your bardic inspiration so if you're using blade flourish you're not giving out bardic inspiration or if you are using both together you are burning through your bardic inspiration die at a breakneck pace now you do get these back on a short rest but if you're constantly handing these things out you are going to go through them really really quickly in a combat encounter and then in battle if you are going ahead charging forward stabbing things with your rapier for a little bit of damage not anything impressive at all you are now not casting spells with your action which is fine if you're going to cast a concentration-based spell and then come in and conserve spell slots by stabbing things but i still think that a bard casting one spell and then using vicious mockery is going to have way more of an impact on a battle than you will poking things with a rapier for a couple d8s of points of damage as the college of swords barred i think that leaning into the play style offered by the subclass makes you a worse bard and that's why i give it a d there are some cases where a bard wants to be competent as a melee combatant where they need to step in and fill the role but the college of swords bard leans in just too heavily and doesn't give us anything else to support anything else the bars are good at now i understand that a lot of people out there actually love the college of sorts and i think again we go back to the fact that the bard itself is such a strong root class that if you tack on the college of swords you're still going to have an amazing player character you're not going to be like oh i messed up and picked a bad subclass no you're going to still have a great time playing this bard at the table the fact is if we stack it against all the other subclasses this one takes away the most from what we want the bard to do can we do better with the other subclasses and in both of our opinions the answer is yes going into our community poll 36 percent of respondents gave this an a or a b with 10 giving it s and 14 giving it a c i gotta disagree completely with the community results on this only two percent of respondents gave this a d and i i think it's exactly as you said kelly i think that people are not seeing the forest for the trees with this subclass yeah i don't know i i think that at the end of the day this mixed bag of results is because the bard in itself is so great that adding the swords barred to it is like oh yeah i've played a swords bard and it was still great and yeah it probably was but it wasn't as great as the other options yeah i i it just sorry folks but at the end of the day we are giving this a d ranking and i apologize to everybody who's upset about that but it's the way it's got to be yeah this is the worst bard subclass i think so when i was reading the comments there was one comment that said the swords bard is everything that the valor bard wanted to be and i feel the opposite the college of valor bard introduced in the player's handbook introduced the template for the marshally oriented bard the college of valor bard like the college of swords gains proficiency in weapons and armor but with the case of the college of valor bard you're getting medium armor shields and all martial weapons meaning instead of needing to run up into the front lines you can pick up a bow and you can lean into the archer archetype with the college of valor college of valor also gains combat inspiration allowing you to allowing your allies to use your bardic inspiration to boost their ac further augmenting your bardic inspiration letting you use it in more ways and at 14th level the college of valor bard gains the battle magic class feature which when they cast a bard spell with their action on their turn they can make a weapon attack as a bonus action which again doesn't have to be a melee attack this can be a ranged attack so i love the college of aller bard i think it's actually great and i think it fills an important niche it's not as strong as the eloquence or the lore bard i think but i think i'm confident enough to give the valor bard an a because i think having a somewhat tankier bard wearing more armor or using a bow to make arranged attacks is a solid approach to playing the bard in a lot of circumstances this makes your bard into a pretty viable combat ally misplayed i think that this falls much further quite quicker but i'm really confident in giving this an a i think it augments enough of the class i gave the college of valor bard a b ranking i think it plays into the melee combatant bard or the combat oriented bard better than the college of swords and i do think that this does depend on the campaign and the party dynamic if you're a college of valor bard and you're in a party with a fighter and a paladin you're going to look like an idiot trying to stand up next to them and be like i'm a fighter too and they're going to be like no you're not man and then because you're leaning into this you're you can look at the spell casters and be like i'm a spellcaster too and they're going to be like no you're not man and so you end up falling in this weird middle ground that the bard can excel at being in the middle ground but in this i think that push towards specialization requires the right mix of the right atmosphere the right party dynamic in order for the college of valor bard to really shine so yes in the right campaign i think the college of valor shines really really well but in a lot of cases there's a chance that the player could feel disappointed that they're not having the output in combat or spell casting that other characters in the group are and therefore they just feel diminished by that again this is another subclass that unlike the eloquence in the lore bard it doesn't bring us anything that we get outside of combat it is just a combat specialization and i do agree with you like over specializing with your bard is really dangerous like if you you can do this with the bard and the spell casting too like if you take all the charm and mind control spells with your bard you've really narrowed your pool and over specialized your character and this is the danger with the with the combat oriented bard so i think i could be convinced in dropping this down to a b th this this is the interesting thing about the valor bard is i could probably convince you it's a b and you could probably convince me it's an a so it really falls really close to the middle of those two for me i also think like if we're going on this idea of specializing your bard that is the thing is that a specialized bard is never as good at what it's specializing in as another class that the game has to offer the bard's strength comes from its versatility and to remain versatile is the best choice you can make for a bart i could even be convinced to rank the college of valor lower than what i did so maybe b is the safe bet let's see what the community says 36 percent gave it an a 39 gave it a b 15 gave it a c it's really close between a and b and a little bit of c so again if you make some good choices maybe it's an a although maybe the a vote is for the people who are playing it in a great campaign where they get to excel at being a frontline fighter in a lot of campaigns you might land in the b section and if you make some bad choices with your spells you might end up landing in the sea i think that a solid b is the right choice for the valor bard finally we come to the college of whispers bard found in xanathar's guide to everything this subclass grants you some key abilities the first of which is the psychic blade's power when you hit a creature with a melee weapon attack you can expend one of your bardic inspiration die to deal an extra 26 points of psychic damage to that creature as you gain levels you gain a few additional d6s that you can add to this psychic damage you also gain two really unique powers words of terror and mantle of whispers words of terror allows you to spend a minute talking to a creature to frighten it and mantle of terror allows you to create a shadow of a recently slain creature that you can adopt to basically assume its identity arya stark style you actually even get to know a little bit about what it knows when you do this i think that these abilities are super cool and super evocative and also will happen like once even in a campaign that is built for them the mantle of whispers ability is so restrictive on paper it sounds like wow this is amazing but you have to be there when the target you want to transform into dies and so i'm a little bit at a loss to what does this ability do that you couldn't necessarily accomplish by casting disguise self and detect thoughts i think that ultimately everything that this subclass grants you can be granted by the other subclasses and even as unique as these are you can emulate them all with spells and if you tried to engineer the circumstances where the subclass is amazing they're so rare and so specific that they're only gonna happen in a heist one shot that is built for your character to excel this is a d i gave the college of whispers a c i love the college of whispers in its flavor unfortunately we're not ranking the flavor of it we're ranking its mechanical output i still give it a c because if you're playing an infiltration heavy campaign this bard could grab a town guard drag him into some bushes slit his throat become the guard and walk straight into the castle i still wouldn't give it a b because even in the right campaign it's still relatively niche on its output and relatively hard to use and could be replaced with spells but not but it's not just a spell it's you could do almost everything the subclass does with the sky itself and really good skill checks like a college of eloquence bard is never going to roll under 20 on their deception check so they disguise itself and start lying i'm not saying this is that's why it's c and i'm not giving it even close to the college of eloquence i still wouldn't pick the college of whispers unless i definitely wanted to play college of whispers which part of me kind of does at some point i still don't think it's the worst subclass out there and i still think it has some really fun options for somebody who's really attached to this idea and could really enjoy it the fact that you have to kill the target to use this ability is actually to its detriment because if you're killing the target that implies some sort of situation where potentially you could either do it stealthily or you could capture them another bird could capture the target interrogate them using their various charisma related abilities or spells like suggestion and detect thoughts keep them captive and then go back in with themselves with the sky itself something else to prove it and maybe even pick up modified memory as a magical secrets to wipe the target's brain that had ever happened that's all well and good but let's say that you are in the middle of a mission and you need to infiltrate the castle and you don't have time for any of that guess who can do that quicker the college of whispers part at the end of the day we're we're very close to the same argument here i think i just really like the college of whispers bard and i personally think that the college of swords bard is worse than the college of whispers but but i mean you you no i think they're equally bad let's see what the community has to say about the college of whispers to see whether they agree with monty or myself or neither of us with the college of whispers bard twenty six point two percent gave it an a and six point four percent of people give it an s tier forty five point three given b 18.4 gave it c and 3.7 percent gave it d have you seen the bard spell list like have you really looked at the barred spell list bart's can do everything that subclass can do already even so even as somebody who is trying really hard to defend how much i really enjoy the college of whispers bard i still don't think it's a or b tier i still think that you can do a lot of what this class subclass has to offer with the right spell selection where do we land as a final assessment for this subclass i think if we are going by our ranking scheme which is which one of us has the higher percentage vote if we disagree it's going to land as a c tier i will stubbornly concede and give it the c but i'm not happy about having to do that i know i know he's not so in conclusion when we're looking at the bard the general idea here is that no matter what subclass you choose you're going to have a great time if you set out to play a bard the bard class in itself is so strong that no matter what subclass you choose you're going to be benefiting the party and you're going to have so much fun in your campaign setting but the question that you have to ask yourself is if you look at all of the subclass options can you get away with doing what these subclasses offer by a good spell selection and then still gain the benefits that something like the eloquence bard or the lore bard give to you that just amplify what the bard already does and then with a few good spell choices and if you're playing with feats maybe pick a few of those up and suddenly you're cooking with gas with your bard who can play every instrument in the book and write beautiful ballads for the world to enjoy or are you going to be stuck in the garage band trying to make it big with your terrible terrible music that you're whipping out with your friends in 5th edition dungeons and dragons the bard simply rocks it is one of my favorite classes next to the wizard i think that its flexibility and versatility are incredible strengths and i think that if you are someone who loves role-playing problem-solving battlefield control being a team player the bard has everything that you need to succeed it's just that the lore bard and the eloquence bard take all those things that you love about the class and turn the volume up they amplify it whereas the other bard subclasses give you some interesting abilities and interesting specializations but they're much more narrow in their focus and they're going to give you abilities that you might spend entire game sessions and even entire wings of campaigns and you will never use the features of those subclasses and to me that is the detriment is i look at a subclass and i go can i see using these abilities time and time and time again in every game session do i feel like i'm using these powers in every game session the whispers bard you might not the swords bard you will get to feel like you're using those abilities but it's actually going to take away from you the lore bard and the elk inspired though that's some good music so this has been a look at our rankings of the bard subclasses in dungeons and dragons 5th edition tell us about how you think these subclasses stack up in the comments below the videos that we create on our channel are made possible thanks to the amazing generosity of our patreon supporters and we thank each and every one of you from the bottoms of our hearts if you enjoy the content that we create here on youtube please consider checking us out on patreon by following the links in the description below don't forget to check out our live play in the worlds of drakenheim which airs tuesday nights at 6 pm eastern at twitch.tv dungeon underscored dudes you can find all the previous episodes of that campaign right up over here and we have plenty more rankings and guides for the classes of dungeons and dragons 5th edition right up over here please subscribe to our channel so that you never miss an episode thank you so much for watching and we will see you next time in the dungeon

Channel: Dungeon Dudes

Views: 238,463

Rating: 4.8454289 out of 5

Keywords: dungeons, dragons, tabletop, gaming, roleplaying, games, accessories, rules, rule, gameplay, play, game, rpg, d20, player, character, D&D, 5e, DM, PC, tips, advice, guide, guides, review, dice, books, book

Id: xOcCBhD9se8

Length: 35min 53sec (2153 seconds)

Published: Tue Aug 11 2020