Bardic Master of Shrouds

[barelylegit]

I've been playing in a campaign for awhile now and its come time for me to roll a new character. I have been very interested in making a Master of Shrouds and focus primarily on summoning (in this case, shadows, wraiths, etc. not your typical necromancer). While building this character, I came across Dirgesinger. Now I've perused the MoS Handbook and know Bard is a dip that can be done to get into MoS early (which I plan to dip somewhere for that). My question is, how bad would a Cloistered Cleric 1 / Divine Bard 2 / MoS 10 / Dirgesinger be?

It concerns me that this is very caster heavy and then Dirgesinger seems to get no casting progression, solely music progression? Would I be better off going cloistered cleric / x / MoS / x and give up on MoS Bard combination? I know bards can be built as necromantic summoners if you avoid the MoS line and go more of the traditional necromancy routes but I thought this could be some fun flavor.

Thanks for your suggestions in advance!

[Silva Stormrage]

While a cool concept the main problem is that dirgesinger is just overall kinda bad.

As you noted yourself it has no real spell progression and the actual custom effects it has are actually not that relevant. With all of them being pretty much weaker than standard bardic music except for Song of Awakening which while interesting and cool is also uh really weak.

My suggestion would be to see if your DM would allow a custom item that lets you use some of the dirge singer's songs. Because ya they are very flavorful, a cursed musical instrument of some sorts. Either that or work with your DM to increase Dirgesinger's power level so that it grants spellcasting or something that makes it worth while to take.

[Zaq]

There's a few things to consider here.

The first is the blunt optimization level of your table. If you tend to play games where you need to be a full caster (or, I suppose, a full caster's pet beatstick with lots of party support) to pull your weight, then yeah, losing the caster levels is going to be painful. If there isn't a big gap between the casters and noncasters in your group (whether because of player style, DM style, or both), then a "magical but not highly spell-heavy" character (perhaps on par with a Warlock, DFA, Binder, or something similar) might fit in just fine, you know? (Of course, while writing that paragraph, I forgot that MoS is 10 levels long rather than 5. Getting 10-11 casting levels and then stopping the progression is a little different than stopping after 5ish. Hmm.)

The second thing to consider is level of play. Dirgesinger's abilities are semi-decent if they're, for lack of a better term, current, but they don't scale well at all, and they don't progress at all once you finish the relatively short class. (They're never great, but I'm willing to make some concessions because they're super thematic and cool.) Because that's what it's about—the Dirgesinger is very thematic and cool, but it's not really optimized in any way. (Even the picture is kinda cool, if you ignore the fact that the dude apparently shops at Hennet's Belt Emporium and also has a shuffleboard stick made out of vertebrae as a weapon). It's a very low-level class—its abilities before the capstone basically map onto spells of 2ndish level, plus or minus 1. You can make an argument for that being semi-useful if you enter the class as early as possible, but not much later than that. Hmm. I'm kind of talking myself out of this. Houserule casting progression onto Dirgesinger, and it's not awful (lose IC progression but keep BM progression, pay a tax feat, lose 2 skill points per level and end up on a bad skill list, and gain some thematic tricks—that's fairly reasonable, possibly even a little underpowered), but as-is, it's basically just treading water until you get the capstone. Which is a fun capstone, at least.

Basically, MoS is a much stronger class than Dirgesinger, and I feel like you're never really going to make Dirgesinger shine in a build that includes both. Divine Bard as entry into MoS is reasonable enough; it's obviously more optimal to have higher-level spells (and therefore to pull from a 9-level list instead of a 6-level list), but it's functional. If you've got a low optimization level as your goal, you can make it work, but Dirgesinger is pretty much entirely an anchor on you. It's clever enough to shove both into one build by means of Divine Bard, but they don't actually have any real synergy.

This post ended differently from how it started, but that's how it goes.

[barelylegit]

Those are good points to keep in mind. It had been awhile and I had forgotten that bard only gets up to 6th level spells... I was considering going pure divine bard after MoS and taking the Requiem feat so that I could just boost my Shadows and Wraith summons as well, but I may just scratch that idea because capping at 6th level spells doesn't sound great. My party isn't an optimized party, but I also don't want to be laughably underpowered for flavor.

[barelylegit]

Basically, MoS is a much stronger class than Dirgesinger, and I feel like you're never really going to make Dirgesinger shine in a build that includes both. Divine Bard as entry into MoS is reasonable enough; it's obviously more optimal to have higher-level spells (and therefore to pull from a 9-level list instead of a 6-level list), but it's functional. If you've got a low optimization level as your goal, you can make it work, but Dirgesinger is pretty much entirely an anchor on you. It's clever enough to shove both into one build by means of Divine Bard, but they don't actually have any real synergy.


You bring up a great point here. What if I ditched the dirgesinger idea completely, but still kept the Bard idea going with Requiem as a feat? Instead of taking Dirgesinger and starting as Divine Bard, what if I started as Cloister Cleric / X (Divine Bard?) / MoS 10 / Divine Bard ACF of Prestige Bard. If I take additional Inspire Courage feats with Requiem, I could buff my shadows and still have access to 8th level spells by increasing cloister cleric casting progression through Prestige Bard. I would still give up 9th level spells, but its a lot better than capping at 6th level spells. This would still give me some fun flavor of singing to Undead without dropping 5 levels in a low power PrC.