Looking for 13rogue/3Bard build *Help*

[Suavedevil]

I have recently opened up drow elf and wanted to find a charater that would play to the races str. I was thinking at lvl 13 the rogue gets his final 2 feats, crippling strike and his final boost to sneak attack. Bard 3 would grant some CC and basic heals to the mix as well as Inspire Competence to assist in trap skills. If I stayed sword and board instead of following suit too the TWF that everyone loves so much and work with rapiers which drow get free skill with I'm hoping I could become a compitent trapmonkey and still stay viable as support DPS to some degree. I'd like to be able to handle the Cabal elite traps but dont want to totally gimp myself for all other use... If anyone has a build they think would work for me please post me a link or add it to the thread, I have messed around with the planner but seem to lack the aptitude with it to come up with a build that I feel would hold up, Thanks in advance for any help to all.

[AxeM]

You cannot inspire competence yourself, you can heal fine off of wands/scrolls with UMD and your crowd control is unlikely to stick on much with only 3 levels of bard, why don't you consider going the other way around and going 3 rogue/13 bard.

[Suavedevil]

Yikes, well in that case the 13 rogue/3 bard makes little to no sense what so ever :P Didn't know that it wouldn't give me the +2 to skills, thanks for the info, time to rethink what im after then, Thanks !

[Hvymetal]

Well the one plus is fascinate will still work.

[Suavedevil]

That is true but if thats all I get out of the mix I'd only need 1 lvl of bard.

[Hvymetal]

That is true but if thats all I get out of the mix I'd only need 1 lvl of bard.

Aye that is true, I was just looking for a bright side

[Bragnor]

Simple rule with Bard: Either go heavy with bard or don't go bard at all. Bard is just not a class that "splashes" well.. Best to go bard and splash rogue if you want a bardic rogue. Otherwise you're just gimping yourself long term. You can splash 2 levels of ranger and get great benefit from that. Or you can splash 2-3 levels of paladin to get benefit from there. Or splash a level of cleric, mage, etc. But Bard just doesn't give enough benefit to bother splashing it. It's an 'all or nothing' type of class as it's already a 'hybrid' class of sorts. So you don't gain much by splashing it.

There are some very nice Bard/Rog builds though that will give you the trap/detect abilities of the rogue with the cc and other abilities of the bard.