I Played a bard from level 3 to lvl 9. He was the coolest character, I have played to date. If your game play is dungeon crawl after dungeon crawl you will probably not be happy. At first I wanted my character to be kick ass in a fight. That did not happen. In any kind of dialog situation...
the order can be finessed:
1 lvl priest (domains str and destruction)
3 paragon orc 1/2 orc
3 paragon human
the rest cleric.
you get +4 str from the two paragon classes
the feats I like Power attack, extra smite, practiced spellcaster and extra rage.
so at seventh lvl:
all martial and all...
Here is one:
We had a Paladin played by a very money orientated player. Anyway the DM Let him have a very nice mount.
Celestial Flying Lion. Inteligent and dignified
Anyway one day there was a festival. The player spent about 10 mins trying to convince everyone that we should sell tickets...
I was playing a small gnome wizard. The party was suprised by two hill giants. One ran up and power attacked my gnome reducing him to less than half his hit points in one blow; staggering him.
With much of my spell power depleted, I had only one chance for survival. I turned him into a newt...
Another facorite build of mine:
Warmage4/cleric 3/Mystic Theurge5
Practiced Spellcaster for the warmage
Take BattleMage for the better armor
Improved Toughness for more hit points
Purchase Mitheral Plate
Take the War and destruction domains
The end result:
Platemail/small shield martial...
It's a running joke at the gaming table. Whenever someone asks what class would make the best fighter?(or something like that) the pat response:
Why a fighter makes the best fighter.
Bards are very late in being fun to play in combat. This is one reason why they are a hard class to play. Now on the reverse they are great out of combat, even early on. They are amazing at 9th level and on.
I had one of the most enjoyable games with a bard. I played the bard because it was...
This is countered by not having a penalty for move rate due to armor. Medium armor would put a 30 base move to 20 anyway.
Dwarfs are the only race that can tumble in platemail if you read the rule for tumble and wording for the armor not effecting move rate..
To make the balance a little better.
Wizards had to pay for scaling up the spells. 10 points for a 10d6 fireballs.
Sorcerers didn't: 5 points for a 10d6 fireball.
That still was not enough.
I use D-Door to get others out of a grapple. There was this one time we faced Minotaur vampires. I had to get the cleric out of the grapple, so I DDoored him out of the grapple and put him right back where he was.