Bards, any good?

[cjdevito]

Started looking at bards in NWN and I can't tell how worthwhile they are yet. I think this there's probably two viable paths for them....

1 - Take a few levels of fighter, make an effective dual-wielding bard with weapon finesse.
2 - Avoid melee combat entirely and rely on missile weapons and related feats while in stealth mode.

Anyone tried either yet?

[Crosswind]

I'm planning to do the bard/fighter thing with specialization, weapon finesse, etcetera, as soon as I finish up being a Druid.

-Cross

[average joe]

Well, I always considered that the Bard's strength in Pen&Paper D&D was that he was a socialite. This, of course, means that he will be lacking in NwN....at least out of the box. But what I'm interested to see is what the future will bring for this game. Depending on the scripting and what-not that individuals and even groups do, NwN could be a completely different game in a year....maybe less. I'm not really sure where the boundaries are for this game.


By the way, I'm playing with a bard right now. I'm enjoying it, mainly because I'm roleplaying him like I would a bard, but compared to PnP, they are a bit lacking. Not really complaining though.

[THE JAKER]

this recalls for me the epic "no deaths, no reloads" thread by poster two on the BG2 forum back in the day...for those who weren't on the forum back then, this guy two made a bard and soloed through BG2 and TOB without ever dying - he only died twice once from a trap in Watcher's Keep and once in the final battle of TOB but he completed that last battle the second time. He did this when TOB had just come out and he had NOT played it before, he did it blind. In fact he was the first person I had heard of to solo TOB.

So we know that the bard can be tough. They are essentially a thief/mage hybrid with some tweaking. The strategies that work well I believe for a solo bard are to summon creatures and then bolster them with songs while they fight for you, and to use some of the mage combat enhancing spells like invisibility and blur (in BG2 - looks like the NWN analogue might be "ghostly visage") to make yourself unhittable in combat.

Anyway, I haven't played a bard yet myself but I know in a multiplayer party it is GREAT to have a bard. I wonder too if the bard holds up in NWN as well as it did in BG2.

[Crosswind]

No offense, but I read those posts too. Not impressive.

ToB, like any other game, is rediculously simple if you exploit certain features, all of which he did.

-Cross