Best skill monkey / support / everything-but-fighting build

[ahsanford]

I've happily played the L1 Life Cleric / L11 Lore Bard move through two campaigns and it's SO much fun:

Face
Thief
Buffer (most L1 staples + guidance + Haste)
Healer (+ bonus heal from Life + bonus heal from gear + blade ward from gear)
Counterspeller
Crowd-control
The odd fireball or two
Cutting words
All the INT skills if you get the headband from Lump

...and because of that, I can leave the cleric and thief at home. 2 big melee hitters on GWM + Advantage for all attacks, Gale bombing away and my main keeping everyone alive and the enemy under hypnotic pattern.

The only thing that character sucked at was dealing damage. But they could do just about everything other than that.

Is there a better multi-faceted support build than that? Curious what others have tried on this front.

- A

[ahsanford]

Am I wrong in thinking Lore getting two bites at Magical Secrets is just amazing to build an all-around support dude?

Each time I've run this character, I've chosen:

Counterspell
Haste
Fireball
Spirit Guardians

It's like bolting some clutch missing pieces to make a support character really sing.

- A

[Pan Darius Cassandra]

https://youtu.be/FiUF2QIwGNU?si=X2_3qJFB0QhuQPYo

[[TG] zac]

Usually have asterion go Rogue thief 5 + swords bard 7 on my play throughs.

Tons of skills, tons of utility and damage aint horrible if your using duel hand crossbows.

[ahsanford]

This run I promised no barding, so I started as Rog 1 / Warlock for the rest as a skill monkey with CHA.

Not as all-bases-covered as the L1 Cleric / L rest lore bard, but still fun. Got to about L8 and finally said 'I want to fight differently' so I went Rogue 4 / Fighter Champion rest and made a ginsu dual-wielding finesse dude.

Lost all my crowd control and counterspelling of the Warlock, but I kept my CHA high enough to be a workable face. So this char (now at Rog 4 / Fighter 8) is:

Face
Thief
All INT skills (got Lump's headband)
A very solid force in melee
No slouch with two hand crossbows when I can't reach folks in melee

But it means I need a proper cleric in the party + Gale + 1 GWM melee (rotating between Minth / Ast / Laez).

- A

[jonnin]

gith (astral knowledge) 8/15/10/8/16/16 stats (can swap 15 and any 16 as you like)
+ urchin (stealth and slight of hand, all that matters from dex)
+ knowledge cleric (+2 skills of choice)
+ choose carefully which astral knowledge you will use
+ round out your skills around those ^^

for example, arcana, nature, religion + persuasion, and astral knowledge your wisdom set to get Animal Handling,Insight,Medicine,Perception,Survival all buffed. As a cleric you can cast your own buff with guidance and personally i consider lights to be part of the support job so both light (throw fire one and regular light one) gives you a ranged attack and lights.

now you can do bard, which gets you music (distractions!), your extra short rest and some skill specializations later. A little bit of other classes, like warlock, can help too as you could get 2 talking skills from the passive list. The trouble with this is if your lockpicking is your bard, someone else needs to learn music for distraction, as you will be the one doing something while they throw money.

I think that would get you off to a good start, but what multiclassing you do will matter depending on what you must have in your build.

If you don't want bard at all, you don't need it.
What you do NOT have to do is be bad at combat. Your skill monkey can do quite well as a warlock or archer of some sort. Not uber combat machine, but how much do you need to dual xbow, 1 feat (+10 damage), kagha's necklace (poison each attack), acid ring, stuff like this... it will do...

[ahsanford]

In all my playthroughs, I've never burgled while a bard was distracting with music.

Goodness, I love this game.

- A