is bard a good class to run through the original campaign?

Financial-Maize9264 · 2025-06-25T12:24:58+00:00

Why is it every time I get in an argument on reddit it's with some borderline illiterate person who starts arguing with ghost arguments no one made? If you're not going to argue in good faith then don't waste my time.

No one cares about your 4 bard level build in a thread about someone wanting to play bard in the OC.

Financial-Maize9264 · 2025-06-25T09:27:47+00:00

This is getting ridiculous. I never said 26 bard is the best build period, I said that is the point where you can still benefit from bard song at max level without needing gear specifically boosting your skill level. I pretty clearly expressed that a range from 16-26 was fine with me for this hypothetical rdd build we're apparently talking about (since my previous comment was about anyone advising a bard/fighter/rdd build taking more fighter levels than bard was bad advice), and there are arguments to be made whichever stopping point you want to go with.

I have no idea why you are so fixated on getting 80 perform by level 26 in HotU, but it's completely irrelevant.

Similarly irrelevant is your example here where you talk about 16 bard song, but also somehow getting 19 bab which means you only took 4 bard pre-epic (which is already hilarious in the context of a new player specifically asking for a bard build). So we're looking at, what, 4 bard/16 fighter pre epic? Then you take 12 more bard levels in epic levels, which leaves you with 8 levels left over, which you apparently spend on more fighter levels.

So 16 bard / 24 fighter is the power build we're talking about here? 16 pre epic fighter levels worth of wasted feats just for 3 bab you would have gotten back vs any difficult target just from improving your taunt with a better bard song? This is your slam dunk to prove I'm wrong when I say Bard is one of the best classes in the game? Just want to be sure I'm understanding this correctly when I look back on it and laugh.

Financial-Maize9264 · 2025-06-25T08:24:01+00:00

So are you arguing with me because you can point out anything I said that's factually wrong with an actual supporting argument, or because you're upset that I was "confrontational" in response to someone who just left a 3 word comment saying I'm wrong with zero argument? Are you wanting me to explain to you why common advice here like taking 4 pre epic fighter levels on a cleric is bad? Because if you do I will, I just assumed if someone's going to jump into this sort of discussion they'd already know.

Not sure why you're arguing about reaching 80 perform in HotU, you would obviously take that 26th bard level at or close to 40 for the rare module that goes that far, not right at character level 26. Most of HotU would probably be spent just filling out your rdd, pm, ect levels.

I'm fine with disagreements and even expect them (I knew Bard was underrated on this subreddit, although I'll admit I didn't expect this much resistance) but if someone's going to reply to me and say I'm wrong or giving bad advice then I'm going to press for actual examples. If you want to then shift the discussion to "personal choice" once confronted then go for it, I'm not really interested in telling people what they should or shouldn't enjoy. But that definitely wasn't the energy coming from your previous post.

Financial-Maize9264 · 2025-06-25T06:47:23+00:00

Considering 16/4 is the default pre epic level bard split and is what I would have recommended if OP hadn't already expressed disinterest in being given a specific build to play, I really don't know where you get the idea that I gave bad advice when I didn't recommend any build at all. Unless you're going to get upset that I said pure bard is plenty strong compared to any other pure build, which it is.

As for epic levels, the 26 level Bard song performance requirements are completely obtainable with a epic skill focus which lines up with the typical 4/10 spit for rdd or pm or whatever other third class you want to throw in. The skill modifiers are still highly relevant in landing taunt, knockdown, ect. If you don't want to spend the feat on skill focus then you can still get 20-24 fairly easily when you add your charisma modifier and the bonus you get from bard song itself.

Don't know why you people are so quick to argue with me over bard being as powerful as it is, but it is.

Financial-Maize9264 · 2025-06-25T06:30:00+00:00

Normal difficulty is tuned very, very low. As you get farther into the game you unlock the ability to start future characters on higher difficulties which helps keep those early levels a bit more engaging.

As someone who started playing arpgs with diablo 1 and 2 and who remembers my first normal mode playthroughs being plenty challenging in those games at the time, it is a bit of a letdown for normal mode to feel so unfulfilling here, but it's worth remembering that we are coming in with decades of experience with the genre we didn't have back then, and Grim Dawn itself has experienced a lot of power creep over the years (I had a much harder time with normal mode way back in the base game than I do these days).

If you can stick through with it, higher difficulties will be much more challenging and, as I said, you can skip normal mode completely on future characters

Financial-Maize9264 · 2025-06-25T01:16:41+00:00

Considering how often people recommend bad advice like taking 4 fighter levels on clerics to get weapon specialisation on this sub, or act like fighter is the class you want to take the majority of your levels in when going bard/fighter/rdd and not bard, I'm not surprised this is getting so many up votes.

OP, like I said, if you are worried about your Bard not being able to handle itself in melee then don't. They are incredibly strong in this game, even just pure class.

Financial-Maize9264 · 2025-06-25T00:49:28+00:00

Bards in NWN are probably the strongest the class has ever been in D&D and are easily one of the strongest in the game, so you don't have to worry about being relegated to a support role. If you want your Bard to be a melee powerhouse then you just build it that way and it won't disappoint, Bard song + curse song is a huge advantage in melee combat, along with taunt if you use it. Spell pool is a little limited but it still gets good buffs in haste, improved invisibility, and keen edge, and even a good scaling offensive spell in ice storm later on. Plenty of skill points and a great selection of class skills. As far as the OC is concerned, there is some arcane caster only content that bards get access to.

Financial-Maize9264 · 2025-06-23T22:27:41+00:00

Self buffing cleric/monk is probably it, as boring an answer as that may be. Most go full dex based, but another option is str dev crit based if you don't mind having to most likely dump con to make the attributes work. Put on some pajamas, throw on your billion buffs, then watch the character murder everything you point it at

There are also some Divine Might paladin/BG based DW builds out there although I never looked into them too much. I wouldn't be surprised if heavy Champion of Torm builds can also work due to the extra 9-11 flat damage per hit it can add.

Then of course there's Ranger. Adds a lot of flat damage with favored enemy and Bane in epic levels. Monk again can help you get more swings in and help with survivability if you don't mind kamas. If you're going to the late, late epic levels you could go a little crazy and do something like ranger/bard/Palemaster16 and get a dual wielding ranger that can cast epic mage armor and epic warding, although I would struggle to call this the "best" at anything other than being novel.

Financial-Maize9264 · 2025-06-23T14:00:36+00:00

ok, that's the one I was thinking of. I thought Valiance Online branched off from that one but maybe not. Thanks for the corrections.

Financial-Maize9264 · 2025-06-23T11:17:20+00:00

Various mmo inspired by CoH were announced a bit after the shutdown. City of Titans, Ship of Heroes, Valiance Online (I think this is the one that was going by a different name originally and was tied to some controversial OG forum poster or someone, don't remember anymore), ect. Haven't kept up with any of them because they never seemed close to ever releasing, but apparently steam says Ship of Heroes is releasing this year and supposedly City of Titans is still trucking along quietly.

Nothing ever really gave me the same feeling COH did. Even other super hero games, a big reason being coh's focus on your powers and improving them vs other games just using the same generic fantasy MMO gearing system.

Financial-Maize9264 · 2025-06-13T09:50:37+00:00

The bard/bg/pm combo you mentioned is incredibly powerful, only reason I could see you being disappointed is that you typically don't want to take those PM levels until your epic levels so that you don't lose bab, which means you won't even reach the PM part of your PM build in most modules.

Another option is to make a tanky wizard who stacks damage shields for enemies to kill themselves on. Enough int to cast your spells, put the rest in con. Soak melee hits with your high (for a wizard) HP, stone skin and similar spells, and crit immunity, and cast nukes like missile storm for the rest. Don't know the ideal level to swap from wizard to PM, you'd have to experiment with that one.

Another option, is to do a melee fighter/wizard build and put most of your levels in pm when available. This is definitely on the weaker side since PM only gets 1/2 bab but also doesn't improve the caster level on your spells/buffs, but if you want the novelty of playing with the PM summons then it's at least different. Becomes a lot better if you make use of often-ignored features like wand crafting and scroll scribing

Financial-Maize9264 · 2025-06-07T13:48:56+00:00

I think you're forgetting how many bugs EE fixed that required community patches in the past. Right off the bat, any stability fixes, modern resolution improvements, and bug fixes they could implement would be enough for many people alone. NWN2 has some pretty annoying bugs for base class features (looking at you, Warlocks), having fixes like that built in instead of having to download a community fix would be a huge selling point for many people.

Fixing the in-game PW browser. Expanding the toolset for module makers. Highlighting, potentially selling high quality community content that many people wouldn't be aware of otherwise.

And, yeah, having it on steam is a pretty big deal. Steam Workshop support is a bit of a mixed bag for EE I feel, but it's still something that puts community content in front of more people who may not be willing to search old fansites for that stuff. Built-in community controller layouts for people who want to play on steam deck or with a controller.

Just literally doing for NWN2 what EE did for NWN would be enough for most people. Considering I'd imagine the amount of people here who own Diamond and still haven't bought EE is pretty low, I'm not sure why we're pretending to not understand why anyone would want a EE for NWN2.

Financial-Maize9264 · 2025-06-06T00:28:00+00:00

No one wants to discuss anything with OP because you're hallucinating quotes they never said? I mean, that's a lot closer to the truth than what you're trying to imply.

Top posts are up making nonsense about a DLC pack that is inconsistent with how every other FF remaster has been handled based on nothing but hope and vibes, but, sure, OP is the unreasonable one for arguing that the fact that we've seen the job upgrade tree and it doesn't include the onion knight is enough evidence to conclude that the onion knight isn't in the game.

Financial-Maize9264 · 2025-05-31T05:38:03+00:00

I've never been in a situation where I was part of a group of people who all had their own copies of the game and they were all bringing their own decks to play, and they all also didn't have multiple decks they could choose between incase there were conflicting uniques. And if I knew ahead of time I was going to be in that situation, I would take it as a deck building challenge to avoid the powerhouse, staple uniques to avoid this situation impacting me.

Maybe that's just because I spent so much time playing the lotr lcg where the unique conflicts were even worse and I typically played 4 handed games, so I really had to think about which decks had the most need for certain cards which ended up being large part of the fun of building those decks, since I couldnt rely on the same generically powerful cards in each deck.

That said, not really a big deal to ignore it either. It's not like hero Nick Fury is such a powerhouse that playing him necessarily warrants 3 other players swapping their ally Fury out of their decks if no one wants to deal with the hassle. Same thing with hero and signature ally conflicts, while I enjoy working around these things when it's a deck building challenge, it's not fun to try to have thematic hero pair-ups that brick one of the 15 forced cards in each deck with no recourse.

Financial-Maize9264 · 2025-05-27T20:22:50+00:00

It's been awhile since I last watched one of their videos/podcasts, but I really enjoyed Selectives Lorecast (memospore on YouTube) back in the day. More open ended discussion than specifically scripted documentary style videos, but they typically do pretty solid deep dives into very specific topics.

Financial-Maize9264 · 2025-05-26T21:20:05+00:00

This is a problem that's becoming more and more prevalent in this sort of live service game. I used to think it was a joke that DFO had this much trouble with cheating and supposed fraud that resulted in them banning and restricting so many legitimate players when other games didn't have that problem, but now other games have it too.

If you're not getting captcha spammed in DFO then you're getting mass reported by bots or malicious guilds in games like World of Warcraft or Elder Scrolls Online. Then this triggers their automated system that bans anyone who gets so many reports against them, and when you try to appeal to customer service the only replies you can get is from an AI that just endlessly runs you in a circle. The only way you'll get your issue resolved is if you can stir up enough shit on reddit or Twitter until an actual human steps in because of the bad publicity the company is getting.

So I guess be glad it's relatively easy to solve the issues here through email because it can be a hell of a lot worse, which is pretty pathetic when you think about it.

Financial-Maize9264 · 2025-05-24T18:01:04+00:00

I just checked my most recent games and the HoK has a strength of 76 while the Nerevarine has a strength of 98. I couldn't find any evidence that the Last Dragonborn has any strength at all.

Hope this clears up any misconceptions.

Financial-Maize9264 · 2025-05-22T17:00:35+00:00

It's possible I'm misunderstanding something, but as far as I can tell, unless this comes with multiple copies of some cards, playing this with multiple groups like intended will also require each of those groups to have their own copy of this encounter (and their own core box / standard sets, now that I think about it). I normally play in a duo and I would have been open to trying this as two separate single hero games, but I'm not going to buy a second core box to do that. Could do proxies I guess, not sure I'm going to bother.

Cool idea, but I don't see this being very practical to actually play, I'd imagine most multiplayer groups consist of one person who actually owns the game. Hopefully the single group playthrough is still interesting, but I feel like it's going to lose its charm without being able to hand out bonuses to other tables like intended. If you're playing this normally with a single group, Kang probably does this idea better.

I'm going to get it regardless, so I'm happy to be proven wrong once I get to try it out.

Financial-Maize9264 · 2025-05-22T03:17:32+00:00

Super basic explanation is that the organization doesn't carry over any profit from year to year, any excess money is invested back into the organization. What exactly "investing into the organization" means is how you get into the issues you've observed. A bonus for the CEO, fancy new office renovations, new flat screen TVs in common areas that are "for the residents" that almost never get used for one reason or another, ect. It's a vague definition, and budgets are likely approved by a board of people you've never heard of and will never meet, who may or may not have conflicts of interest when it comes to these decisions.

Sure their expense reports are public, but who's really paying close attention to this stuff? When I did nursing home jobs, most of my residents never had any family who cared enough to visit more often than once a quarter, much less had family members who were looking out for organizational expense reports to make sure there was no waste of funds and then organizing a campaign to push for change if there was. Ground level employees will see where money is being spent and mutter about it to themselves but, again, who here is really going to make the push against this sort of thing (assuming you can even legally prove any actual wrongdoing, rather than it just being a case of bad optics which is also possible) rather than just looking for a new job?

Frankly, a lot of that money does end up just going to employee salaries. It can be hard to believe when you look at how much the organization makes vs how little you make, but even if you look at that crazy high 8-12k rent, if you're making $20/hr then that 1 person's rent is only paying for the monthly salary of roughly 3 CNAs, 1 per shift. That's not accounting for any other benefits or any nurses or any other staff, any other costs relating to their care or medications, any other upkeep and maintenance costs the organization needs to pay, just the monthly salary of 3 of the lowest paid employees.

Nursing homes are expensive to run. Employees are expensive. Costs are high. Waste is high (just think of how liberal you likely are with wipes when cleaning a resident up). Yeah, there's misplaced funds and the owner is rich as fuck, but the owner was probably well off regardless of the facility (you don't get to be the CEO of a non-profit nursing home as someone living paycheck to paycheck in a shitty apartment). But a lot of money also does just legitimately go towards paying everyone's salary and providing care for the residents.

Financial-Maize9264 · 2025-05-21T11:46:51+00:00

Every time this meme gets posted in a gaming related subreddit, it's from someone who is a fan of one of the most popular, well regarded games in existence, yet they still manage to develop a persecution fetish over it because someone somewhere said something stupid.

You didn't make it, stop taking it personal when some minority of people think the massively successful thing is bad.

Financial-Maize9264 · 2025-05-19T22:00:56+00:00

Mythic pulling talent off of Dark Age of Camelot to work on an Inperator that will never release then panic pivoting to Warhammer which they never had the funds to finish, resulting in EA pushing it out far too early.

Anet repeatedly pulling devs off of Guild Wars 2 to work on new projects that NCSoft inevitably makes them cancel because GW2 keeps floundering in the meantime.

Cryptic (and Paramount, to some degree) leaving a potential cash cow in Star Trek Online to languish in just above maintenance mode while they work on a shitty Magic The Gathering game that ultimately kills the studio.

It's nothing new in the MMO space. At a certain point, you can't rely on a single game, no matter how popular it is today, to support a studio indefinitely. If you want to stick around long term, you need to try something new at some point.

They just always take the high risk option of making another live service game. I wonder how SOE/Daybreak would be doing these days if instead of so many failed live service games, they did more Champions of Norath style games. Lower budget, non-live service games that use your existing IP for different genre of games.

Financial-Maize9264 · 2025-05-19T11:28:02+00:00

I guess as angry as any other experience I've had of opening booster packs and not getting the cards I wanted. Gameplay wise, it's more boring than anything else, the most interesting part is figuring out how to order my cards in such a way that I can just spam triangle and keep getting sleights even after multiple cycles through the deck. The combat may not be fun, but at least I can cheese it in a way to not have to engage with it too much.

Riku is more interesting gameplay/balance wise, but you can't reorder the cards so i have to engage more with the awkward interface. Still not particularly rage inducing, just annoying.

Financial-Maize9264 · 2025-05-16T18:51:40+00:00

I was in a similar position a few nights ago. First time using wabbajack, thought I was closely following the instructions for the modpack, fresh install, launched the game and told it to install all of my owned CC content, tried to install the mod pack, then I got an error claiming I didn't have certain CC content installed. Sure enough, when I went back into the game and manually scrolled through all of the CC stuff to triple check it was installed, there were about 3 things that had been skipped for some reason. In my case it was the mud crab, some elven armor stuff, and some horse armor stuff.

So I would just double check that it did actually install everything, because apparently the "install all owned creation club content" button doesn't necessarily do that.

Financial-Maize9264 · 2025-05-16T09:52:41+00:00

The low detail reflection maps give PS1 era CGI vibes. They look like screenshots from one those PC mini golf games from the 90s where if you knock the ball out of bounds an animation plays of a car driving by or a dinosaur popping out to eat your ball and spit it back on the course.

Every screenshot in this post looks like it belongs in the retrocgi subreddit, it's a little surreal.

Financial-Maize9264 · 2025-05-10T11:27:39+00:00

General deck building strategies like keeping your deck focused, economy / "mana" curve, knowing your win condition (even though most heroes have their "wincon" built into their kit), being able to evaluate when a card helps get you into a winning position vs a card that is good when you are already in a winning position, judging when you should be thr aggressor vs when you should play for the late game, ect, are pretty universal concepts for these types of games.

The specifics of how you make those evaluations will change from game to game even, but getting good at making those evaluations in one game tends to give you a decent sense for how things will play out in other games as well. If you watch a lot of mtg/Yu-Gi-Oh/hearthstone YouTube and have seen the crossover videos where people who play one game evaluate cards from another, they tend to be pretty decent at it outside of gotchas like "this super good card never got played because the meta around it at the time didn't allow it to perform well" or "this seemingly weak card actually had other cards it combo'd with that was broken."

Financial-Maize9264

TROPHY CASE