Questions about Bard-building and music-making

[amber91]

Hello,

2 Topics of questions

Topic 1) I'm working on a new character concept with at least 23 bard levels with Practiced Spellcaster (Bard) for what I believe would be a total of CL27, and I'm looking for help understanding the significance of the CL27 threshold that a lot of people recommend?

Is CL27 the magic number (no pun intended) to become un-dispellable by NPCs or something? What about dispels from PCs?

The more specific you can get with details and examples, the better for me to understand

Topic 2) the TLK Performer -- I've been experimenting with the instruments with a non-bard character, and they're pretty fun and neat, but I'm guessing a lot of features are reserved for proper bards with appropriate Perform skill levels?
In particular, these features seem to be unavailable (for a non-bard/no-Perform-skill character): saving songs with tracks from multiple instruments etc, having lyrics associated with instrumental tracks, or inscribing songs onto paper for trading, etc.

I'm wondering if these features are disabled in general, or having a proper Bard with high Perform skills would make these features available?



Thanks for any insight!

[Tsidkenu]

The TKL performer works with full functionality if you have plenty of ranks in perform, yes. I never noticed the restrictions before as I've only used them with my bard (but I've given up trying to write flute music as I can never get it to sound right).

In terms of builds & dispel, most folks aim for CL 30 to be immune to Greater Dispel or lesser versions since the base dispel DC is 11 + Caster Level, meaning at CL 30 your dispel DC is 41 so a Greater Dispel rolled at full effect (20+20) will fail. For every CL below 30 you give your opponents a cumulative 5% chance of dispelling you. CL 27 would have 15% chance to (Greater) dispel.

Mordenkainen's Disjuction will still have a good chance at ripping your buffs to pieces, though, so no changes there. Usually only the odd boss mob has Mords tho, and usually annoyingly quickened.

[amber91]

Thanks for the explanation!

Mordenkainen's Disjuction will still have a good chance at ripping your buffs to pieces, though, so no changes there.

I'm a bit confused by how breach/mord works in practice (this is from a UMD scroll of Mord's perspective): I saw a video from this server where someone cast a Mords on a full 30 druid in dragon form. The 1st Mord visibly dispelled some buffs; the 2nd Mord didn't seem to do anything. The Mord also did not seem to affect the caster.

How does the breach part of Breach/Mord work relative to what gets dispelled?

The TKL performer works with full functionality if you have plenty of ranks in perform, yes.

That's super exciting to hear! Enough of a reason to take a performer to 30!


Thank you

[Valefort]

Mord works in two steps. If you target someone first there is a breach effect : it strips up to 6 spells, at random on our server, that are on this list then there is a second step where it tries to dispel every remaining spell on the target, making a dispel check for each spell

1d20 + Mord's CL versus 11 + Buff's CL

If you target an area it tries to breach 2 spells on every creature present, make a dispel check against all AoEs and then dispel the best spell it finds on every creature (best meaning highest level).