After a couple decades of gaming, I made my first bard this year. They are pretty nifty. The type of buffing and spells were all different than I had used before, so despite my previous experience I'm pretty much a novice building and playing one.
I made an intimidate build with a bunch of enchantment, compulsion and fire spells. It was pretty fun for a while, but ever since I hit 5th level or so, it is common that everything in the encounter is immune to every spell and ability I have. It's been at least two or three levels since the end boss of a scenario could be effected by an enchantment. Fear and fire immunity appears standard on every bad guy. At best I can take out a few mooks in an early speed bump encounter.
Is there any way to make enchantment useful against undead, constructs or any of the other things that are immune to mind effects?
You are right about the buffing. Generally I'll stick with that and have plenty to do. But there are times when something else i's pretty helpful.
Getting off a blistering invective that debuffs the enemy, does a bit of damage and potentially does ongoing damage can go a long way in some fights.
Being able to pick off a bad guy with and enchantment from time to time can be satisfying. And just once, I would love to hit a pompous undead BBEG mid monologue with a Shamefully Overdressed spell.
A Threnodic metamagic rod looks like a key piece of hardware for me. For those times when you just want to ruin an undead jerks day. Thanks.
If you plan on going with any fear spells, take a look at Draconic Malice
It requires you to be a little close, but removes immunities to fear.
Wow. Looks nice. Is that PFS legal?
Oh no! The Additional resources page specifically calls out Draconic Malice as not being allowed in PFS play. Sad day. But the other suggestions all seem quite viable. Thank you all for the great ideas. If you think of any others, please let me know.
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"For every fight-ending ability there is an equal and opposite immunity."
A rod of Threnodic Metamagic seems like a great place to start. Also, scrolls of command undead will at least make mindless undead easy to deal with. If you're running into things like golems or other more rare mind-effecting-immune critters, you'll need to diversify your spells prepared to deal with them.
I'm a fan of Shadow Evocation/Conjuration spells for flexibility (though they are higher level), and glitterdust for all-around function.
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I'm not sure bards are set up to finish bosses with compulsion spells. You fall slightly behind full 9-circle casters in actual spell level and therefore DC after all. (Also, there's a lot of debate about whether you actually want bossfights to be decided by "Save or Die" compulsion spells.)
But bards do have a lot of other ways to contribute.
- Obviously bards are good at buffing. With spells and performance. Extremely efficient at it really. Can keep it up longer than most classes.
- Bards can be good against groups of enemies, such as with Confusion spells. While you can't defeat the boss, you can make it easier for your team to get past his flunkies.
- Social and thievery skills. And spells to boost them and patch over weaknesses against divination. Those skills can get you past enemies without expending a lot of party resources, or even recruit allies.
- Information - bards have a lot of powerful divination spells, a Loremaster ability and rock at info gathering socially. Knowing what enemies you might be facing lets the wizard prepare ideal spells. Knowing what you've just been surprised by helps you survive.
- Illusions, especially figments. Figment illusions don't allow a saving throw until actually interacted with, aren't mind-affecting and SR is not happening either. This gets around a lot of immunities.
The point is to use illusions to make enemies make bad decisions. If you can make the evil wizard cast Hold Monster on your Silent Image tiefling ninja, he's wasted a higher-level spell than you and that's a turn where he's not doing horrible things to your real friends.
It's rather hard to outright destroy someone with illusions, and they require your party to play along. They're often better if the whole party has a cautious battle plan. If the barbarian is always storming forward to beat up enemies, it's much harder to distract them and draw away their firepower from the thing that's right in their face.
I've used illusions to great effect when we were in a dungeon crawl that had gone a bit sideways and the enemy had raised the alarm. With illusions I was able to split up some monster groups that were originally separate encounters that had clustered together. Facing them one by one we could handle them, if we hadn't split them they would have overwhelmed us.
Ascalaphus, I pretty much agree that it's lame to end a final showdown with a save or die. I have been pretty much content being a "face", buffing, and contributing a small amount offensively in combat. Even with most bad guys being immune to most of my stuff I've been able to contribute and enjoy myself.
In my last scenario though, my group faced off with a couple demons that had mind, fire and fear immunities, as well as significant DR. The two front-liners were taken out in the first couple rounds of combat. That left us three back-liners scrambling to pull our butts out of the fire. I had no one to buff. The bad buys were immune to everything I had. The best we could do was entangle the bad guys and blind them with glitterdust. But even blind and entangle they could lash out blindly, connecting from time to time, and spray round a nasty breath weapon. A fairly benevolent GM just beat us all down for a while as we gathered up bodies and ran.
That experience reminded me that you always need some sort of ace in the hole to pull out when things are going to heck in a hand-basket. I'm not trying to convert my bard into a front liner. Never gonna happen. But a little something to help contribute when the poop hits the fan would be nice.
Saldiven, the sorcerer dip is a good idea. I may go with it, but I've already done some dipping, so I'm a bit hesitant to slow down my spell progression any more. I'm still pondering it.