hazur
09-11-2007, 04:20 PM
Greetings,
I decided to make a 32 point halfling version of my Sex Appeal 2.0 build. Why? Because halflings look cool, and they dance cool, and well, they're just cool. I enjoy being pint-sized, and this build just brought it all together. In all seriousness though, I looked into the dragonmarked halfling healer builds and decided to try and integrate it into the bard/cleric builds I have been toying
with.
This build is going to use Dragonmarks for extra healing ability. Along with Empower Healing Spell, these marks should do quite a bit of healing. Couple this with the bard's cure serious and moderate wounds, heal scrolls and wands and you have quite the healer. Unfortunately the UMD on this build is going to be a little low due to the fact that we cannot take the skill focus. However, what it lacks there, it makes up for everywhere else.
The basic design of this build is to max out potential resources. You will be getting 200+ extra SP from spellsinger and the cleric level. Along with this you should be sporting 10 DVs pre-mod 5 and about 14-15 post mod 5. This comes out to around 175+ SP currently and 250+ post mod 5 on average. This gives you a total of 275+ current and 350+ post mod 5 to the total spell point pool of the party. To couple with this, the dragonmarks will give you quite a few free heals. This equates to quite a bit more SP (I don't know the exact figures on it, I have seen figures as high as 800 SP worth of healing, but I think that is with empower and maximize.) Even still, it should offer quite a bit more than Mental Toughness and Improved Mental Toughness.
Also to help with resource conservation, you have spellsong trance. This will give you 10% off all your spells. Make sure you keep it up at all times if you can. CSW with Empower Healing costs 30 SP base, only 27 with spellsong on. Its kind of like buy 10 get the 11th one free. When you're looking at a spellpoint pool of 1000+ its like it gives you another 100 SP.
Now for what I have on the build so far:
Halfling Bard 13/Cleric 1
32 point build
STR: 10 (Only so you don't get encumbered easily, drop if its not a problem.)
DEX: 10 (We're not really going to fight anything here, think caster.)
CON: 14 (Extra 42 HP doesn't hurt, can go DEX instead.)
INT: 14 (We want lots of skills, if you don't like skills, drop this.)
WIS: 8 (I wanted to make this higher, but couldn't bring myself to do it.)
CHA: 18 (Our bread and butter stat.)
The stats are really up to you. I would really like to see this build achieve maximum charisma though. Feel free to min/max however you want. I picked up int so I could max: UMD, Perform, Hide, Move Silently, Jump, Balance, Concentration and Tumble. If you don't want so many skills, don't bother with INT. You're going to end up with 17 perform and 17 UMD with 16s in everything else.
Feats:
Least Dragonmark of Healing
Empower Healing
Lesser Dragonmark of Healing
Extend Spell
Greater Dragonmark of Healing
Feats are tight, hope they raise the level cap soon! Some people like Maximize and/or Empower for the marks. Empower Healing works on the marks and also your healing spells so, I feel its a better fit. Extend Spell we obviously need or people will complain about our hastes. If you don't care about giving 2 minute hastes and whatnot, you can drop this for Skill Focus: UMD or whatever. Along with spellsong trance, it does make casting buffs more mana efficient most of the time.
Spell Selection:
This is always a tough one, most people have a set of spells they really like, I'll give a brief rundown on some spells and why to take them.
First Level:
Cure Light Wounds: Good to take early and replace later. Early groups will want you to have this, especially where you're going to advertise as a healing bard. Once you pick up CMW and CSW or feel like you have enough dragonmarks, drop this.
Charm Person: This spell makes early quests easy and still works okay in higher level. Without Heighten it kind of sucks though with the other charms being a lot more potent.
Otto's Dance: Decent crowd control at early levels. Good for those groups who like to pound everything in sight. Good for bosses if you can land it.
Hypnotism: Really good at low-mid levels and higher levels if you have Heighten or a lot of spell focus/charisma. Hits many targets, yay!
Expeditious Retreat: I love taking this spell at lower levels. 25% striding is beautiful for the long wait for haste.
Focusing Chant: I like this spell, I highly recommend it for this build. It will give your UMD that extra oomph now and then since it will be lower.
(Cleric) With your 1 level of cleric you can take Remove Fear and another spell for free, so don't grab this with Bard. Remove Fear is awesome all the way up, I carry it on my 14 pure bard. The other spell you should grab will vary from person to person/quest to quest. Remove Fear will last 20 minutes with extend, even the level 1 cleric version, the other 1 cleric spells will only last the base 1 minute or 2 with extend, so not quite as useful. Nightshield can be nice for pesky missiles.
Level 2:
Cure Moderate Wounds: You're a healing bard! Take this right away! You will keep this one forever most likely. Cure Serious Wounds is better and more SP efficient, but this gives you an extra button for burst/speed healing.
Blur: This saves you a lot of SP on healing. This is especially good for all the high hp/ low AC barbarians and fighters that have been showing up lately. I would take this right away.
Heroism: This is a good filler until you get Good Hope.
Rage: Fighters and Barbs love this usually.
Invisibility: This will help you for sneaking around, which you may be doing a lot. You won't have a lot of battle prowess, so sneaking by things and sneaking to cast CC spells/fascinate will be your friend.
Glitterdust: Good spell at low/mid levels and can be useful even at high levels. Blind mob can be fun!
Hypnotic Pattern: I like Hypnotism better, but some people swear by this. Its basically slower than hypno and doesn't last as long as it used to.
Soundburst: Nail those pesky high-will caster mobs. Hits vermin too.
Level 3:
Cure Serious Wounds: Its tough to take this one right away with Good Hope and Haste available. I usually wait until the next spell slot to take this. This is going to be your bread and butter healing spell at later levels.
Good Hope: My favorite spell. I keep this even after I get Greater Heroism. Most of the time you can get away with simply throwing a Good Hope on the party and they won't complain. Plus it has the +2 damage.
Haste: Everyone loves crack. Take this one ASAP.
Displacement: Can save you a lot of SP on heals in a lot of situations. Especially good for tanks with no AC. :)
Charm Monster: Solid charm spell. I like to fit this in if I can.
Level 4 spells:
Otto's Sphere: Most powerful CC in the game right now pretty much. Well, at least tied for most powerful I'd say. I take this right away for sure.
Dimension Door: Useful for a lot of quests. Its also fun and can be used to do some really cool tricks.
Dominate Person: A very powerful charm spell. Use with caution - its hard to break! I like to fit this in if I can but its nowhere near essential.
Freedom of Movement: Solid spell, good for a healing/buffing bard to have. Its useful for Tor among other things.
Level 5 spells:
Greater Heroism: This spell is quite potent. While you won't be throwing it around like candy, its great for rogues and yourself!
Mass Suggestion: Very potent charm spell. Great for crowd control in many quests. I take this spell because I am all about the charms. However, where non-pure bards only get two spell slots, I might instead take:
Mind Fog: This rules in conjunction with Otto's Sphere. It helps the fact that we can't take spell focus and heighten on this build.
If I missed anything, let me know. These are just spells that I find myself most often taking on bards. Most of these would be a good fit for this build. Pick and choose for your own personal taste.
Finally, I'm going to talk a little bit about the playstyle and mentality for this build. It takes a disciplined and controlled mind to play a bard correctly, especially this build.
A general rule for bards is, always keep control of any situation. You are the babysitter, keeping the party on their feet and looking out for any dangers. You see a stray mob going nuts on a caster who can do nothing but flee in terror because they have no concentration? Throw a charm on it. Party strategy completely fail and everyone is getting owned? Fascinate and throw up a disco ball. Always keep things under control, this will save you a lot of SP on healing.
If you are main healing, its hard to crowd control simultaneously for some. It is a process of learning when its best to use crowd control and when its best to just heal it out. You can plow through some quests without having to heal anyone, simply using solid CC. Others, CCing is more difficult, and you need to keep the party up to keep things under control.
This build is designed to be a powerful healer and good for PUGs. You can make it more specific to your tastes easily. Many (especially in PUGs) will ask if you can heal, and it will get annoying after a while. Simply state: "Not only can I heal, I can DV!" And there will be much relief. There are a lot of bards out there who choose not to heal, and it makes people wary of bards main healing.
The only problem with replacing a cleric with a bard is resists really. You can take care of status affects with wands, but we do not get the resists. The answer to this at low/mid levels is House P buffs. The answer to this at high levels is group with a high level paladin, ranger, wizard or sorc who has resist energy. You can give them your DVs in exchange for hitting the party with resists. I have not been in a group yet that didn't have one of those four classes to cast resists pretty much (on my drow build).
Anyway, please no flaming or suggesting taking sorcerer instead of cleric. :)
Regards,
Booser
I decided to make a 32 point halfling version of my Sex Appeal 2.0 build. Why? Because halflings look cool, and they dance cool, and well, they're just cool. I enjoy being pint-sized, and this build just brought it all together. In all seriousness though, I looked into the dragonmarked halfling healer builds and decided to try and integrate it into the bard/cleric builds I have been toying
with.
This build is going to use Dragonmarks for extra healing ability. Along with Empower Healing Spell, these marks should do quite a bit of healing. Couple this with the bard's cure serious and moderate wounds, heal scrolls and wands and you have quite the healer. Unfortunately the UMD on this build is going to be a little low due to the fact that we cannot take the skill focus. However, what it lacks there, it makes up for everywhere else.
The basic design of this build is to max out potential resources. You will be getting 200+ extra SP from spellsinger and the cleric level. Along with this you should be sporting 10 DVs pre-mod 5 and about 14-15 post mod 5. This comes out to around 175+ SP currently and 250+ post mod 5 on average. This gives you a total of 275+ current and 350+ post mod 5 to the total spell point pool of the party. To couple with this, the dragonmarks will give you quite a few free heals. This equates to quite a bit more SP (I don't know the exact figures on it, I have seen figures as high as 800 SP worth of healing, but I think that is with empower and maximize.) Even still, it should offer quite a bit more than Mental Toughness and Improved Mental Toughness.
Also to help with resource conservation, you have spellsong trance. This will give you 10% off all your spells. Make sure you keep it up at all times if you can. CSW with Empower Healing costs 30 SP base, only 27 with spellsong on. Its kind of like buy 10 get the 11th one free. When you're looking at a spellpoint pool of 1000+ its like it gives you another 100 SP.
Now for what I have on the build so far:
Halfling Bard 13/Cleric 1
32 point build
STR: 10 (Only so you don't get encumbered easily, drop if its not a problem.)
DEX: 10 (We're not really going to fight anything here, think caster.)
CON: 14 (Extra 42 HP doesn't hurt, can go DEX instead.)
INT: 14 (We want lots of skills, if you don't like skills, drop this.)
WIS: 8 (I wanted to make this higher, but couldn't bring myself to do it.)
CHA: 18 (Our bread and butter stat.)
The stats are really up to you. I would really like to see this build achieve maximum charisma though. Feel free to min/max however you want. I picked up int so I could max: UMD, Perform, Hide, Move Silently, Jump, Balance, Concentration and Tumble. If you don't want so many skills, don't bother with INT. You're going to end up with 17 perform and 17 UMD with 16s in everything else.
Feats:
Least Dragonmark of Healing
Empower Healing
Lesser Dragonmark of Healing
Extend Spell
Greater Dragonmark of Healing
Feats are tight, hope they raise the level cap soon! Some people like Maximize and/or Empower for the marks. Empower Healing works on the marks and also your healing spells so, I feel its a better fit. Extend Spell we obviously need or people will complain about our hastes. If you don't care about giving 2 minute hastes and whatnot, you can drop this for Skill Focus: UMD or whatever. Along with spellsong trance, it does make casting buffs more mana efficient most of the time.
Spell Selection:
This is always a tough one, most people have a set of spells they really like, I'll give a brief rundown on some spells and why to take them.
First Level:
Cure Light Wounds: Good to take early and replace later. Early groups will want you to have this, especially where you're going to advertise as a healing bard. Once you pick up CMW and CSW or feel like you have enough dragonmarks, drop this.
Charm Person: This spell makes early quests easy and still works okay in higher level. Without Heighten it kind of sucks though with the other charms being a lot more potent.
Otto's Dance: Decent crowd control at early levels. Good for those groups who like to pound everything in sight. Good for bosses if you can land it.
Hypnotism: Really good at low-mid levels and higher levels if you have Heighten or a lot of spell focus/charisma. Hits many targets, yay!
Expeditious Retreat: I love taking this spell at lower levels. 25% striding is beautiful for the long wait for haste.
Focusing Chant: I like this spell, I highly recommend it for this build. It will give your UMD that extra oomph now and then since it will be lower.
(Cleric) With your 1 level of cleric you can take Remove Fear and another spell for free, so don't grab this with Bard. Remove Fear is awesome all the way up, I carry it on my 14 pure bard. The other spell you should grab will vary from person to person/quest to quest. Remove Fear will last 20 minutes with extend, even the level 1 cleric version, the other 1 cleric spells will only last the base 1 minute or 2 with extend, so not quite as useful. Nightshield can be nice for pesky missiles.
Level 2:
Cure Moderate Wounds: You're a healing bard! Take this right away! You will keep this one forever most likely. Cure Serious Wounds is better and more SP efficient, but this gives you an extra button for burst/speed healing.
Blur: This saves you a lot of SP on healing. This is especially good for all the high hp/ low AC barbarians and fighters that have been showing up lately. I would take this right away.
Heroism: This is a good filler until you get Good Hope.
Rage: Fighters and Barbs love this usually.
Invisibility: This will help you for sneaking around, which you may be doing a lot. You won't have a lot of battle prowess, so sneaking by things and sneaking to cast CC spells/fascinate will be your friend.
Glitterdust: Good spell at low/mid levels and can be useful even at high levels. Blind mob can be fun!
Hypnotic Pattern: I like Hypnotism better, but some people swear by this. Its basically slower than hypno and doesn't last as long as it used to.
Soundburst: Nail those pesky high-will caster mobs. Hits vermin too.
Level 3:
Cure Serious Wounds: Its tough to take this one right away with Good Hope and Haste available. I usually wait until the next spell slot to take this. This is going to be your bread and butter healing spell at later levels.
Good Hope: My favorite spell. I keep this even after I get Greater Heroism. Most of the time you can get away with simply throwing a Good Hope on the party and they won't complain. Plus it has the +2 damage.
Haste: Everyone loves crack. Take this one ASAP.
Displacement: Can save you a lot of SP on heals in a lot of situations. Especially good for tanks with no AC. :)
Charm Monster: Solid charm spell. I like to fit this in if I can.
Level 4 spells:
Otto's Sphere: Most powerful CC in the game right now pretty much. Well, at least tied for most powerful I'd say. I take this right away for sure.
Dimension Door: Useful for a lot of quests. Its also fun and can be used to do some really cool tricks.
Dominate Person: A very powerful charm spell. Use with caution - its hard to break! I like to fit this in if I can but its nowhere near essential.
Freedom of Movement: Solid spell, good for a healing/buffing bard to have. Its useful for Tor among other things.
Level 5 spells:
Greater Heroism: This spell is quite potent. While you won't be throwing it around like candy, its great for rogues and yourself!
Mass Suggestion: Very potent charm spell. Great for crowd control in many quests. I take this spell because I am all about the charms. However, where non-pure bards only get two spell slots, I might instead take:
Mind Fog: This rules in conjunction with Otto's Sphere. It helps the fact that we can't take spell focus and heighten on this build.
If I missed anything, let me know. These are just spells that I find myself most often taking on bards. Most of these would be a good fit for this build. Pick and choose for your own personal taste.
Finally, I'm going to talk a little bit about the playstyle and mentality for this build. It takes a disciplined and controlled mind to play a bard correctly, especially this build.
A general rule for bards is, always keep control of any situation. You are the babysitter, keeping the party on their feet and looking out for any dangers. You see a stray mob going nuts on a caster who can do nothing but flee in terror because they have no concentration? Throw a charm on it. Party strategy completely fail and everyone is getting owned? Fascinate and throw up a disco ball. Always keep things under control, this will save you a lot of SP on healing.
If you are main healing, its hard to crowd control simultaneously for some. It is a process of learning when its best to use crowd control and when its best to just heal it out. You can plow through some quests without having to heal anyone, simply using solid CC. Others, CCing is more difficult, and you need to keep the party up to keep things under control.
This build is designed to be a powerful healer and good for PUGs. You can make it more specific to your tastes easily. Many (especially in PUGs) will ask if you can heal, and it will get annoying after a while. Simply state: "Not only can I heal, I can DV!" And there will be much relief. There are a lot of bards out there who choose not to heal, and it makes people wary of bards main healing.
The only problem with replacing a cleric with a bard is resists really. You can take care of status affects with wands, but we do not get the resists. The answer to this at low/mid levels is House P buffs. The answer to this at high levels is group with a high level paladin, ranger, wizard or sorc who has resist energy. You can give them your DVs in exchange for hitting the party with resists. I have not been in a group yet that didn't have one of those four classes to cast resists pretty much (on my drow build).
Anyway, please no flaming or suggesting taking sorcerer instead of cleric. :)
Regards,
Booser