What Would Bards Need For Bardic Inspiration To Be Their Combat "Thing"

[Amechra]

I have good memories of playing 3.5 and super-buffing the rest of the party with Bardic Music. I'm somewhat sad that the 5e Bard doesn't really have a way to build in that direction. What would have to change for Bardic Inspiration to be a primary combat strategy?

(As a side note, I'm kinda sad that all of the "cool" bardic music uses are subclass specific. I'd love to be able to mix Cutting Words, Combat Inspiration, and Infectious Inspiration.)

[Hail Tempus]

Be a Blade Bard

[Lunali]

Short rest recovery of bardic inspiration or unlimited uses, increase in effectiveness (probably by affecting more targets) at the cost of making it an action.

[AvatarVecna]

If your goal is "buffing allies" as a bard, there's a few things you can combine to great effect:

1) Starting at lvl 5, Bardic Inspiration recharges on a short rest. You get these after every other fight, usually, but sometimes after each fight. Assuming "every other fight", you should be handing out 2 or 3 most fights, and most combats don't last more than 5 rounds so that has you covering most of each fight with Inspiration bombing.

2) The feat "Inspiring Leader" pairs well with your Song Of Rest during downtime for big heals+temp HP going into the fights to come.

3) If you went Lore Bard (which...most bards should), you got two cross-class spells known. One of these should be Bless, because while it's not the most powerful buff in the game, it's a solid spell that will be useful for your entire career. It's easy to cover the whole party with this, especially if you have a small party or a second bless-capable caster, but if you'd prefer to combine two different buff spells rather than bless on everybody with one 1st lvl slot from each of you, you could use a higher-level slot to cover the other party members while the other caster uses a different buff.

4) There is an Unearthed Arcana PDF called "Feats For Skills" that has several interesting options, but the one I'm concerned with here is Historian. It gives proficiency or expertise in History, and lets you make a History check whenever you use the Help action to boost someone's ability check (note: not saves or attacks), with a good roll giving them your proficiency as a bonus on the check (in addition to the Advantage the Help action gives by default). This is a good general way of boosting skills outside of combat, especially in conjunction with Guidance cantrip, but it can be employed in combat as well to assist with things like Acrobatics checks for moving, Athletics checks to shove or grapple, dispel checks, and so on. Really, the main advantage here is that it takes an action you can take at-will, and makes it better.

(Something I'm hoping to do one day is put together a Lore Bard 5/Mastermind Rogue 3 with the Historian feat: Mastermind Rogue 3 lets you use the Help action as a Bonus Action, and lets you Help an attack roll made on a target of your choice within 30 ft of you. If you also picked up Find Familiar at some point, such as via Lore Bard 6, you could potentially be handing out adv on attack rolls to three allies every round while maintaining bless, all while safely ensconced behind the front line.)

EDIT: If you're more looking for homebrew suggestions on "how a bard could be changed to make Bardic Inspiration their primary combat style", I'd probably suggest a new subclass that does things like this:

1) "As an action, you can expend a spell slot to grant a number of allies equal to the slot level a die of Bardic Inspiration, without actually expending any Bardic Inspiration dice".

2) Free up what Bardic Inspiration can be spent on - maybe they can choose to give up a Magical Secret or two in exchange for another subclasses special Bardic Inspiration usage?

3) Let people have multiple BI dice banked. Only being able to give one die per person at a time would limit this kind of playstyle.

[OldTrees1]

If you made Bardic Inspiration an At Will ability that required Concentration but provided 1 of several Qualitative buffs to all Allies, then the Bards would inspire their party throughout every combat.

Aka, bring back Bardic Music but balanced by reduced magnitude (rather than nerfed uses) for 5E.

Give the Bards enough options that they might decide to switch up and change the tone mid fight.
- A fast tempo giving allies a boost to movement speed.
- A slow heavy rhythm giving allies resolve and steady stance.
etc

[Contrast]

Short rest recovery of bardic inspiration or unlimited uses, increase in effectiveness (probably by affecting more targets) at the cost of making it an action.

Sounds to me like you're describing a glamour bard after 5th level.


But yeah to OP - you'd have to fundamentally rebuild it into some sort of cantrip if you want it to be your go to as otherwise its going to be intrinsically limited and you kinda may as well just be reflavouring spells.

[Anymage]

What would you want bardic music to do that isn't covered by just learning Bless as one of your spell secrets and calling it an inspiring song? You don't get the uberbuff effects you could get from 3.5 and it does eat your concentration slot, but concentration as a way to cut down on buff stacking was a core design choice in 5e.

I'm spitballing pretty hard here, but I might be able to think of a bard subclass that dumped the cleric list to the bard list for buff options, and allowed you to maintain multiple concentration spells but could only have one active at a time. (So you could could have Bless up on your allies and Shield of Faith up on your tank, and could chose which one was more important on a round-by-round basis without having to spend spell slots to switch.) That's probably the closest you could get to the idea.

[JakOfAllTirades]

For a viable "combat inspiration" ability, I think the Bard needs something akin to the Mastermind Rogue's "Master of Tactics" feature. The Mastermind can give advantage on attack rolls to his allies, as a bonus action, without expending any other resources at all.

I have to say I got a little irked when I saw the Mastermind archetype -- they made him better at aiding allies than the Bard!

[darknite]

One thing to recognize is that 5e puts reasonable bounds on nearly every ability to keep spamming down. Buffing entire parties all the time without limit is OP unless special reasons allow so.

[GlenSmash!]

Probably off topic, but I once made a Spell less Bard that could use Bardic inspiration dice to fuel Battlemaster maneuvers (and still use them as normal bardic inspiration dice). It made for a great Captain America type character.

Man I should dig that guy out again.