Sorry if these points have been brought up, but I didn't catch them on my search over this board. I'm one of those weird people who actually likes bards and seeing the skald meld bardic party-wide enhancement with a Nordic theme instantly hooked me. Then I read through it and was... underwhelmed. It's an awesome idea, but I had a number of opinions on it.
- The big one was the use of the Perform skill, or rather the lack of it. It's mentioned once at the start of the Raging Song description and then never brought up again for the rest of the class' description. Not only that, but it states that you can't use cha-based skills while raging and Perform isn't on the excluded list. So it gives no benefit and can't be used with the class' signature ability. You could create a Skald with no ranks in Perform and do just fine.
- I'm not sure if it's intentional, but Dirge of Doom has no save DC mentioned. It seems that any targets vulnerable to it automatically gain the shaken condition. Not too extreme, but odd.
- The Raging Song and the Dirge of Doom are the only two songs for this class. While you can customize Raging Song with Rage Powers, this just seems kind of lacking when compared to the bard's wide range of songs. I'd like to see a bit more variety here.
- The skald's 20th level ability is dissapointing. All it does is remove penalties from other abilities. It doesn't do anything new. Every other class had an awesome ability that makes players want to strive for that peak. The skald just gets a bit better at what it already does. Yeah, level 20 doesn't play much of a role in the majority of the game and few groups really reach it. It's more about having a goal worth working toward than the ability itself.
I really want to see this class do well and I welcome anyone to point out any oversights I made.