Battle Dancer Bard going straight Bard 1-20

[Zekarra]

My wife plays a bard and for some strange reason wound up with really strange stats:

Str = 18
Dex = 14
Con = 19 (Our DM allows us to have a 19 if we roll 4d6 and roll 6 on all 4 dice)
Int = 14
Wis = 14
Cha = 14+3(lvls)+4(item)=21

Early levels she was the strongest in the party. We joked that her instrument was a baby grand piano. lol :-)

She wants to be more of a Battle Dancer/Performer
She Likes Whips and has the Exotic Weapon Mighty Whip Dagger feat

looking at trying to help her flesh out a more battle oriented Bard while still being able to Sing/Perform while doing it.

Any thoughts are welcome as I know nothing about Bards.

Thanks.

[StreamOfTheSky]

Is this 3.5 or PF?

3.5 has a base class called Battle Dancer that's like a cha-based monk except even weaker than core monk somehow.

PF has a Bard archetype called Battle Dancer (and a 2nd archetype, Dawnflower Dervish, that gets "Battle Dance" instead of Inspire Courage).

So I just am confused exactly which class(es) your wife is using.

So far, my only contribution is that Bards get whip proficiency for free as part of their class, and whip-dagger has a shared proficiency w/ normal whips, so she shouldn't have needed to spend a feat, unless "mighty whip dagger" is something else entirely...never heard of it.

[Zaq]

Snowflake Wardance (Frostburn) lets you add CHA to your to-hit rolls with one-handed melee slashing weapons, which whips happen to be. (The whip-dagger is listed as ranged, but that's an artifact of the 3.0 rules and likely shouldn't be considered to be a problem here.) Snowflake Wardance's bonus stacks with your usual bonus from STR, which is nice.

In addition to the above, the general strategy for making a Bard good at attacking is to invest in Inspire Courage, either the regular style (for bigger bonuses to hit) and/or Dragonfire Inspiration (from Dragon Magic, for bigger bonuses to damage). It makes your party awesome too, but that's a good thing! Are you familiar with the various ways to increase how big a boost you get from Inspire Courage?

[liquidformat]

on a side note, an interesting prc to look at is cloaked dancer from complete scoundrel, it drops your caster level by three but gives you some interesting extras too.

[Zekarra]

Playing 3.5
Whips are the only Ranged MELEE weapon. They do not provoke AoO’s like normal ranged weapons since they are melee and yet the ranged weapon feats like point blank shot etc work with whips.
I will look a frostburn class/prc
I will look at Dragonfire inspiration

Thank you

[Zaq]

In 3.5, the whip is a melee weapon. It provokes AoOs "just as if you had used a ranged weapon" (PHB pg. 121) but the similarities end there. Ranged stuff doesn't apply to it. Using the whip dagger is a little weird because the whip dagger is from a mostly 3.0 book, but the whip is not a ranged weapon. Point Blank Shot doesn't apply, for example. Power Attack, for example, can apply.