Best Feats for Glamour Bard 5e
by Prince Phantom
I’m not entirely convinced that some real life celebrities aren’t actually just Glamor Bards. This is another subclass that leans super heavily into roleplay, interaction, and exploration, meaning its usefulness is quite campaign dependent.
There are a number of features that will be great for us no matter our setting, but this subclass thrives in environments where it can flaunt its stuff. This makes it great for a world exploring campaign where you visit a new town every few sessions, much less good for a dungeon crawl. I’ll try to suggest feats that cover both combat and out of combat, as we have a great potential to excel in both.
Best Feats for Glamour Bard 5e
Moderately Armored (ASAP): If you think you can’t be fabulous in half plate, you’re obviously not trying hard enough. Bards really lack defenses, and this is not one of the two subclasses that fixes that problem. Boosting our AC all the way up to 19 will make us much more durable and help us survive the early levels.
War Caster (Lv 4): At early levels, advantage on concentration saves is much better than proficiency in them. The other benefits of this feat will be more or less useful depending on your build and magic items. This subclass doesn’t lean us towards holding a weapon, but holding a shield and magical instrument would make some spells difficult to cast, and this fixes that.
Alert (Lv 4): There are a ton of advantages to a full spellcaster going early in combat, chief among them being the ability to lay down one of our amazing control spells before our enemies get a chance to act. We also get a feature that lets us give our allies temporary HP and lets them move their speed, allowing melee combatants to get into position early on so they don’t need to waste a turn dashing.
Inspiring Leader (Lv 8): Do you want to become a temporary HP machine? This plus our Mantle of Inspiration feature means our party has a massive total pool of temporary HP every day. We start the encounter with the temp HP from this, and then once our allies have used that up, refresh it with Mantle of Inspiration and continue this pattern as needed.
Fey Touched (Lv 8): This boosts our Charisma and gives us two great spells, Misty Step and one of your choice from enchantment or divination. We’ve probably already got Silvery Barbs, so I’ll probably take Gift of Alacrity. You might actually want to consider Charm Person as well, especially if you haven’t picked it up yet with your limited spell selection. Our 6th level ability lets us cast Command as a bonus action every turn, and our target auto-fails the save if they are charmed by us. This feature also takes our concentration, and Charm Person thankfully does not.
Resilient Constitution (Lv 12): Protecting our concentration as a Bard is crucial, as all of our best spells are concentration spells. Try to also have this round up your Constitution to an even number so you get more max HP as well.
Thank you for visiting!
If you’d like to support this ongoing project, you can do so by buying my books, getting some sweet C&C merch, or joining my Patreon.
The text on this page is Open Game Content, and is licensed for public use under the terms of the Open Game License v1.0a.
‘d20 System’ and the ‘d20 System’ logo are trademarks of Wizards of the Coast, Inc.
and are used according to the terms of the d20 System License version 6.0.
A copy of this License can be found at www.wizards.com/d20.
