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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Empirate" data-source="post: 5458684" data-attributes="member: 78958">Were your trial runs of Bards in the past at all optimized, or were you just trying to have a little carefree fun? Bards can be totally underwhelming if limited to Core only, or if you simply don't play to their strengths. But it's also possible to build very powerful and extremely versatile characters on a Bard base.I've always held that, in Core only games, Bards are probably one of the weaker classes (tier 4 maybe). But with the addition of those tons of support material they received in splat, Bards can become anything they want (and can get up to tier 2).Bards have several things you can stress in your builds: Bardic Music, spellcasting, and sheer combat muscle (includes Inspire Courage optimization and spell buffing). Each individual bard build can probably take two of those and turn them up to eleven, but not all three.For example, I love Bard 5/Mindbender 1/Lyric Thaumaturge 4/Sublime Chord 6/Fatespinner 4 for the spellcasting/music variant, using feats like Lyric Spell and Doomspeak to convert music uses into other effects. Dandu once showed up here with a very powerful melee bard build, maybe he'll post it again?On to your actual question: It's very hard to simulate Bards using other classes. Not only is the versatility hard to match, they also have quite a few unique points to them.Bardic Music is totally unique - other classes (rarely) grant it, but in the end, it's still Bardic Music, and not using the Bard class doesn't make your character less bardy if you have the music!The Bard spell list also contains some great unique spells: Glibness comes to mind immediately. Apart from unique spells, the whole set is great, and includes some lower-level versions of very good Sor/Wiz spells, as well as curing and miscellaneous goodies. Bards also cast arcane spells in light armor, which is unique in Core at least.Bardic Knowledge is OK at best, it won't define your character. Lots of real Knowledge skills will do a better job, as will divination spells. Archivists have a similar ability and can put it to much better use. Cloistered Clerics also have the knowledge thing, and lots of PrCs grant it, as well.The Bard's skill list and amount of SP is good, but not overwhelming, and can easily be duplicated with lots of other classes (Rogue, Beguiler, Spellthief, Cloistered Cleric, even Ranger to a degree), not to speak of PrCs.</blockquote>

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