Bard

A performer who fights with an instrument and runs a dance, a song and a stream of vocal barbs at once, flexing between tanking and party support.

The Bard is the most mechanically unusual class in Rogue, and the one that rewards fiddling the most. You do not carry a sword; you carry an instrument, and that instrument only hits properly while you are actually playing something. Standing still and swinging a lute is a dull thump. Playing an accompaniment while you swing turns the same lute into a real weapon with level-appropriate accuracy and sonic damage.

On top of that you are running two other things at the same time. A Dance is a sustained stance that sets your role for the fight, and Vocals are instant barbs and shouts fired between everything else. One Dance, one Accompaniment and as many Vocals as your cooldowns allow, all at once. Because the Dance decides whether you are dodging, protecting the party, holding threat or amplifying magic, a bard can switch from tank to healer to controller without changing gear, and that flexibility is the point of the class.

Resources#

The bard spends SP and EP. Combat abilities are priced in spellpoints; the roleplay and stagecraft toolkit tends to cost stamina instead, which keeps the two economies from competing.

Accompaniments are unusual in that they cost SP per round rather than once. A cheap one like march costs very little; an expensive one like doubletime costs a great deal. Running out of SP ends the performance, which means your SP pool functions as a duration timer for whatever song you have chosen.

scales is the entry point: an accompaniment with no effect other than waking the instrument into its played state, cheap enough to run permanently, and uniquely interruptible by starting any other accompaniment. Every other accompaniment must be stopped before you can begin a different one.

Your instrument itself is summoned with instrument, reshaped between eight forms with instrument <form>, and bound to you, so it cannot be dropped, sold or stolen and survives death. Some performances want a particular form, notably march and its drum. soundcheck reports an instrument's played statistics.

The bard also carries a kit of performance reagents and stagecraft props, managed with supplies and restocked at the Bards Guild supply counter using list and buy. Songs and vocals consume lute strings, rosin, drumsticks, lozenges and ink; tricks consume greasepaint, prop lath, smoke powder, juggling knives and flash powder.

Passives are equipped with passives, two at a time. Talents give one point every ten levels up to ten, spent with talents spend <tree>.

Talent Trees#

Performance#

The instrument line proper: the accompaniments that make your weapon work, the party-defence and magic-amplification dances, and the wail capstone. It contains the smallest number of abilities of the combat trees but the most load-bearing ones, since without an accompaniment running you barely have an attack.

Inspiration#

Healing and party support. shakeitoff is the class's heal and upgrades twice, soothe is an area heal-over-time song, dance grace turns you into a genuine support healer, and fromthetop resets every cooldown the whole party has. This is the tree that lets a bard cover for a missing healer.

Trickster#

Threat, control and burst, and the largest tree in the class. mockery is a taunt that stays relevant to the end of the game because its threat scales even though its damage does not. The tree also holds the evasion and threat dances, the interrupts, the fear and root effects, and the juggling line that starts as a party trick and ends up stunning a room.

Stagecraft#

Illusion and sleight of hand. Peeking into adjacent rooms, palming and slipping items, fog, disguise, ventriloquism, charm and lighting control. Much of it is non-combat utility, but fog, fear and seducethedragon are all real tools in a fight.

RP#

The roleplay toolkit. recite gives you a song book of numbered slots that grows from one to nine over the class's life, perform opens a freeform editor, fan summons an adoring follower who fights, carries loot and banks your coin, and eavesdrop listens through walls.

Lore#

Information gathering in three tiers: item lore, then creature lore, then area lore.

Passives#

Three equippable passives from the shared catalogue. You may run two at once.

Skills#

Passive rows show the level at which passives equip will accept them.

Performance#

Inspiration#

Trickster#

Stagecraft#

RP#

Lore#

Passives#

Playing a Bard#

Get instrument in your hands and scales running before you do anything else. This is the single most common mistake new bards make: they wield the instrument, walk into a fight, and wonder why they are hitting for nothing. The played state is not optional, and scales costs almost nothing to sustain. From level 5 mockery gives you a taunt with excellent scaling threat, and at that point you already have a functional low-level tank.

The three-layer structure means your rotation is really three decisions made at different speeds. The Dance you set at the start of a fight and rarely change. The Accompaniment you pick for the situation and swap when it changes. The Vocals you fire constantly. A typical mid-level fight looks like: dance evasion before pulling, dissonance once combat starts to halve incoming damage, then mockery on cooldown to hold threat with wickedburn and heckle filling the gaps. Watch your SP, because the accompaniment is quietly draining it every round, and switch to march when the pool gets low rather than letting the song cut out at a bad moment.

The class's real depth is in swapping roles mid-run. Dance of Evasion and later Dance of Defiance make you a dodge-based tank whose every dodge builds threat. Dance of the Line raises the whole party's defence. Dance of Grace strips away your own mitigation entirely and turns you into a support healer whose shakeitoff and soothe can carry a group that has lost its healer. If a party is short a role, ask which one, and pick your stance accordingly rather than trying to do all three at once.

Spend talent points in Trickster if you plan to tank and Inspiration if you plan to support; Performance is worth points either way because it holds the accompaniments that make your weapon function. For passives, Steady Rhythm early is a straightforward survivability gain, Counterpoint suits a melee-heavy tanking build, and Strong Lungs is the quality-of-life choice once you are burning through reagents. Keep the kit stocked; a bard with no lozenges is a bard with fewer options.

In a group your value is the things nobody else brings. doubletime halving every party cooldown and fromthetop resetting them outright are effects no other class has. intermission shutting down enemy casting for five rounds can decide a fight against a caster boss. incite hands a burst of free attacks to your heaviest hitter without taking the threat yourself. And even at maximum level mockery remains a viable taunt, so a bard can pick up an add or peel a target off the healer at any point in the game.