is this build good or not?

[Chidori]

hi ive made a bard/marshal lvl 10 and wanted to know what you guys think of my build.

i have not done the magic item yet. as it not that important to evaluate a build.

so here it is. It set in eberron. no flaw is allowed. all book is allowed.
my concept is a warlord from the last war. that is fascinated by ancient ruin. that why the master linguist feat to be able to read and decipher any text.

Human
Bard 9 /marshal 1

Stats 14,15,16,16,13,16

STR: 13 +1
DEX: 15 +2
CON: 16 +3
INT: 16 +3
WIS: 14 +2
CHA: 18 +4

BAB: +6/+1

Fort: +5
Ref: +6
Will: +6

Special Abilities

Bardic music 9/day
Bardic knack
Spellbreaker song
Healing Hymn
Inspire Courage +2
Inspire Competence
Music of Creation: song of the heart
Inspire greatness
Minor aura( Motivate dexterity )

weapon

crystal echoblade

armor

mithral breastplate

Skill

Appraise (int)
Balance (dex)
Bluff (cha)
Climb (str)
Concentration (con) 8
Craft (Int)
Decipher script (Int) 10
Diplomacy (cha) 7+3(feat)
Disguise (cha)
Escape Artist (dex)
Gather Info (cha)
Hide (dex)
Jump (str)
k.Arcane (Int) 13
k.Architecture (Int)
k.Dungeoneering (Int)
k.Geography (Int) 7
k.History (Int) 12
k.Local (Int) 7
k.Nature (Int)
k.Nobility (Int)
k.Religion (Int) 7
k.Plane (Int) 7
Listen (wis) 5
Move silently (dex)
P.Act (cha)
P.Comedy (cha)
P.Dance (cha) (13)
P.keyboard (cha) (13)
P.Oratory (cha) 13
P.Percussion (cha)
P.String (cha)
P.Wind (cha)
P.Sing (cha) (13)
P.weapon drill (cha)
Profession (wis)
Sense motive (wis) 10
Sleight of hand (dex)
Speak language (n/a)
Spellcraft (Int)
Survival (wis)
Swim (str)
Tumble (dex) 8
Use magic device(cha) 12

Skill trick
Collector of Stories

Feats
H- Jack of all trades
1st- Master Linguist
3rd- Snowflake Wardance
6th- Knowledge devotion
bard 6- Song of the heart
9th- Versatile performer
Marshal-Skill focus(diplomacy)

Language
Common, giant, draconic, Argon, elven, dwarven, drow, goblin, infernal, celestial, orc, gnoll, halfling, Riedran

[Mr Adventurer]

The 1st level spell.Comprehend Languages will let you read any text; I'd suggest you don't need Master Linguist.

[stanprollyright]

If it's Eberron I'd suggest trading countersong or inspire competence for Song of the Heart to get yourself another feat as per the Eberron Bard. If you're good-aligned, take Words of Creation from Exalted Deeds to double your Inspire Courage bonus. Also Snowflake Wardance is somewhat overrated IMO, so consider TWF or Power Attack instead. If you're a silverbrow human you can get Dragonfire Inspiration to turn your Inspire Courage into d6s of fire damage, which you can stack with vanilla inspire courage.

Are you going into Sublime Chord?

EDIT: I guess you already did the eberron bard swap thingy.

[John Longarrow]

If you have Versatile Performer you don't need more than 1 rank in most of your perform skills. With a 16 int that would free up 36 skill points (keyboard, oratory, and singing) by having them all treated as equal to your ranks in dance. If your DM is OK with you not having any ranks but still getting the full benefit that would be another 3.

That would let you put points into Gather Info (help find stuff), appraise (know the value of items) and Spellcraft (recognize spells and the effect of spells). The appraise is mostly for RP reasons since your character is "fascinated by ancient ruin". On the practical side you'll want to also get an artificers monocle. Hey, if your already checking out that 600 year old vase you may as well identify magic items while your at it.

[Mr Adventurer]

Don't do TWF, it's a trap. You probably don't want Power Attack either - melee is not your strength.

If you are sticking with the Jack of All Trades feat, you don't need to put a rank into any other Perform skills of you're sticking with Versatile Performer? Or do I misremember? Alternatively, you might be interested in the alternative class feature from the PHB2, which replaces Bardic Knowledge.

[Pleh]

I'm no pro Optimizer, but I recently posted a build based on a similar idea.

I would advise you to consider what your character is being applied to if you want to gauge how "good" the build is. If the rest of your party is low Tier builds, then you probably are fine and don't need a lot more optimizing. If the rest of your party are experienced players with Tier 1 or 2 builds, you might want to consider some of the advice in this thread to help optimize.

Your build seems like a solid enough gish to be competent in a party of his own peers against challenges of appropriate difficulty.

Not having any of that info to work with, the forum is trying to judge the general utility of the build half blind to what this character is really going to need to pull his own weight in the party without necessarily overshadowing the teammates.

That said, Snowflake Wardance is a bit of a trap, never quite delivering the punch it seems to be promising, but if you're okay with choosing character options based on character fluff, it's not completely useless. It's just not very efficient for most builds.

TWF is a bit of a trap, too, since you have to Full Attack to really get any benefit. Practically speaking, this means you need to build a Pouncer to be able to move and Full Attack regularly enough to keep up with the challenge curve of the standard, out of the box D&D experience. Building a Pouncer out of this character would require some rather major and intensive changes.

Power Attack is good, but ultimately isn't this character's strong suit as they could barely tap into its best benefits with a Strength Score of 13. Also, even a Power Attack based Martial build still probably wants to get into Pouncing so they can move and get full use of their action economy.

Honestly, the best advice I've seen here is Words of Creation. It's way easier to just optimize your Inspire Courage here than go back and start getting good at martial. Words of Creation + Dragonfire Inspiration will more than likely help your party far more than restructuring your character to try to be a good bard AND a Pouncer of either the TWF or Power Attack varieties.

Just be careful because Words of Creation does have the danger of knocking you out by itself if you aren't watching the cost.

You mentioned that magic items don't really affect the validity of a build, but I would disagree. Some builds quite heavily rely on small boosts from magic items to really stay on that cutting edge with the difficulty curve.

There are a number of magic items that would be readily accessible to 10th level characters that help optimize Inspire Courage, too.

[Deophaun]

If you have Versatile Performer you don't need more than 1 rank in most of your perform skills.
Fixed. Aside from feats or the occasional class feature that relies on specific skills, there is no mechanical need for a bard to put any ranks in a perform skill beyond the first. Bardic music cares about the max rank you have in any perform skill for the purpose of what songs you have access to, not about the ranks in the skill you actually use to perform them. The only exceptions when it comes to a vanilla bard are fascinate and countersong, where the DC/result is based on your Perform check; and countersong is terrible and looks like it was traded away so it doesn't count.

The build is fine sinking all points into Perform(dance) and ignoring all the rest, even getting rid of Versatile Performer.

[stanprollyright]

C'mon guys! He took Snowflake Wardance and Knowledge Devotion. He wants to attack things once in a while. In melee, else he wouldn't have taken a feat that locks him into using a one-handed slashing weapon. "Don't take any damage feats if you're not a pouncer/primary damage dealer" is terrible ('badwrongfun') advice.

There's too many archery feats, his Str is too low to make a good whip tripper, and both of those styles are at least 2 feats just to play. So yeah. Let him take ONE FRICKIN COMBAT FEAT to replace his OTHER melee feat if he wants to.

[John Longarrow]

Fixed. Sorry, didn't read to the end to see if the DM would required you to know the skill (house rule) or not.


Fixed that for you.

[Deophaun]

Fixed that for you Very unclear as to what a house rule is.
Returning the favor.

[John Longarrow]

Returned what favor? I was pointing out that your "Fix" showed you didn't read all the way to the end of my sentence.

If you want to continue this, please do it out of this thread though.

[Deophaun]

Returned what favor? I was pointing out that your "Fix" showed you didn't read all the way to the end of my sentence.
Pretty sure I included the period in my quote. Let me check... yup. I did.

Now, if you want to go to the end of the paragraph, you implied that allowing Bards to use any performance without skill ranks was a house rule; that's the "If your DM is OK" bit. You don't say "If your DM is OK with it you can Power Attack with a two-handed weapon for bonus damage equal to twice your to-hit penalty." I clarified that it is, in fact, RAW, and provided relevant details and exceptions.

And might I suggest in the future, if you wish to discuss an issue in private, you take the initiative instead of posting a public response first and expecting the other party to FOAD in thread.

[barakaka]

Forgive me if I'm wrong, but doesn't Primal Scholar fit the flavor you're wanting very well? It's a prestige class in Secrets of Xen'drik that is obsessed over long lost primordial giant magic. Prerequisites are fairly easy for any arcane caster and it has an interesting set of options if you play with Metamagic at all.

Since you would have spent a bunch of time in Xen'drik, it'd fit the flavor if you took Jungle Veteran which lets you act in a surprise round by spending an Action Point.