Best Feats for Creation Bard 5e
by Prince Phantom
Sometimes I look at the immensely disproportional amount of words that comprise this subclass and compare it to something like the Valor Bard, and really start to question which intern it was that phoned it in that day. The sheer quantity and quality of stuff this subclass gets is unparalleled among all the Bards, so it should be no surprise that this is my pick for the strongest of the subclasses and the one I would pick if you forced me to play a Bard in my next campaign.
Right away we get the ability to create anything we want that is medium or smaller (large at level 6 and huge at 14), and if you can’t think of ways to abuse that then you aren’t creative enough to be playing this class in the first place, but if your in a creative block, a simple use would be to conjure an adamantine wall to block a passageway, or an adamantine box at higher levels to trap creatures inside. Oh and also our inspiration is just better than everyone else’s. All this without even mentioning that at level 6 this becomes a pet subclass, giving us a living item that can attack and do all sorts of amazing and useful things. Not a lot of this is changing our feat selection, but I promise that I do have one option that should surprise you!
Best Feats for Creation Bard 5e
Moderately Armored (ASAP): Sadly the one thing that this subclass does not fix is our defense. A mind as creative as ours should know that going into combat in nothing but some slightly-tougher-than-normal leather isn’t going to cut it. Pick up half plate and a shield and thank me when you actually manage to survive early levels.
Fey Touched (Lv 4): Bards have very few known spells at these low levels, so adding two more will feel like a massive improvement. Misty Step is a great option to escape bad positions, and we have great flexibility with our 1st level spell since we already have access to Silvery Barbs. Bless and Gift of Alacrity are standouts among spells that we don’t otherwise have access to. It also helps that this boosts our Charisma.
War Caster (Lv 4): For a more defensive option, War Caster provides us advantage on concentration checks, which is crucial to being an effective control caster. You may potentially find that you need this slightly less than other Bards however. To explain, I need to talk about another feat.
Mounted Combatant (Lv 8): If you’ve never thought to use the Dancing Item feature on a carpet and turn into Aladdin, then I offer you my condolences for the death of your imagination. Yes that’s right, I plan to ride my dancing item high up into the sky where I am typically safe and my concentration is secure, as the vast majority of printed monsters in 5e have little to no ranged options. To be clear, you don’t expressly need this feat to ride the item, but it does confer some neat benefits. We aren’t making melee attacks, so we’re mostly concerned with this feat’s ability to protect our item by allowing us to redirect attacks from it to us and giving it evasion. This is important, as an enemy killing our item would mean us plummeting into the ground, so maybe also learn Feather Fall if you plan to employ this strategy.
Inspiring Leader (Lv 12): Our item does understand the languages that we speak, meaning they can receive this temporary HP as well. This is just a fantastic buff to your entire party that massively increases their survivability. Think about it this way, if your enemies need 1 extra turn to bring your party down because of this feat, you’ve just taken a feat that gives your entire party an extra round in combat. In reality the math is a bit more complex than that, but either way it is still a massive improvement to everyone and everything in your party.
Resilient Constitution (Lv 12): In higher levels we will start to see more flying enemies and more ranged attacks, so it’s time to secure our concentration before we get to that point. Make sure your Constitution is at an odd number so this increases your modifier as well.
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