Bard Subclasses 5e
Published on December 5, 2024
Explore the best Bard subclasses in D&D 5e. Discover how each College shapes your character’s style, abilities, and storytelling potential.
Randy Gallegos - Wizards of the Coast - Instrument of the Bard
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Learn more.Your Guide to DnD 5e Bard Subclasses
The Bard’s subclass is where your character truly comes alive. While the core mechanics of the class remain consistent, your choice of College shapes how you inspire, perform, and leave your mark on the story. Your subclass abilities, from magical secrets to cutting words, give your Bard a unique flair that defines how they captivate the world around them.
What is this guide?
This guide is meant as a deep dive into the 5e bards subclasses. For the full overview of the bard class, check out our bard class guide.
To allow you to scan through the options quickly, we use the following color rating scheme:
- Red : Isn’t going to contribute to the effectiveness of your character build at all
- Orange : Situationally good, but a below-average option otherwise
- Green : A good option
- Blue : A great option, you should strongly consider this option for your character
- Sky Blue: An amazing option. If you do not take this option your character would not be optimized
College of Creation
The College of Creation focuses on creating items and animating them with the Song of Creation.
Check out our
College of Creation 5e guide for a more in-depth breakdown of the College of Creation subclass, including build recommendations, playstyle breakdowns, and an example build.
3rd level
- Mote of Potential: All three of these options are awesome bonuses to your Bardic Inspiration and come at no additional cost:
- Ability Check: Rolling Bardic Inspiration die spent on ability scores with advantage. Typically this option will be used outside of combat.
- Attack Roll: Not only can your Bardic Inspiration turn a miss into a hit, but it can apply thunder damage to any creature within 5ft. Your martial party members will love this one.
- Saving Throw: Free temp hit points after making a save. Yes, please.
- Performance of Creation: This is one of the most open-ended class features ever published. You can create any non-magical item that is less than 20 times your Bard level gp and is Small or Medium. Other than that, the only limitations of this feature are your imagination. Even at 1st-level, you can create things like a halberd, brewers supplies, smiths tools, or a sled. By the 2nd-level, you can create vials of acid and gunpowder, as long as the DM approves.
6th level
- Animating Performance: This feature follows the formula of the other TCoE summon spells by using your proficiency bonus and Bard level to scale the creature as you level up. It’s got pretty good survivability because of the decent AC and hit points, has a fly speed, darkvision, battlefield control, and an attack the deal force damage. You need to use your bonus action to command the dancing item, but the caveat that you can use the same bonus action as your Bardic Inspiration prevents any conflict it could have with your primary class feature. Seeing as there isn’t a range on this effect, you can create a keg of gunpowder with your Performance of Creation feature, animate it, and float it into a baddy’s lair and tell it to run into a fire for 7d6 fire damage.
14th level
- Creative Crescendo: This takes Performance of Creation and dials it to 11. You can create up to 5 items, depending on CHA, and are no longer limited by gp value. By the time you get to this level you can create one Huge item, though the rest still have to be Small or Tiny. There are an uncountable amount of possibilities here but the baseline is 1 powder keg and 4 gunpowder horns for a whopping 19d6 fire damage.
College of Eloquence
The College of Eloquence provides massive buffs to the Bard’s Bardic Inspiration. Bards are already amazing support casters but this takes them to the next level.
3rd level
- Silver Tongue: Turn every Persuasion or Deception check into a minimum of 15 (assuming you get to 17 CHA during character creation). The Rogue gets a similar bonus at 11th-level, which helps put this into perspective.
- Unsettling Words: Use this as a bonus action before you cast a spell you really want to land. Subtracting an average of 4 (until your Bardic Inspiration die increases) from the creature’s save can go a long way to making sure the save fails. Unfortunately, this feature can’t be held until you see the result of their roll so you may waste a Bardic Inspiration on a nat 1 saving throw.
6th level
- Unfailing Inspiration: Unlimited uses of Bardic Inspiration for 10 minutes? This feature has insane value.
- Universal Speech: Allowing a creature that doesn’t speak your language to understand you may come in handy once in a blue moon. If this wasn’t a full action, it could be used as combo piece with command but two full actions to command a creature is likely not a good use of action economy.
14th level
- Infectious Inspiration: This makes your Unfailing Inspiration even more of an amazing option. FREE uses of Bardic Inspiration as a REACTION anytime a creature with Bardic Inspiration succeeds AND they get to keep it for 10 minutes. This is insane value.
College of Glamour
Harness the powers of the Feywild to take magnificent forms and enthrall crowds.
3rd level
- Mantle of Inspiration: Make yourself look so hot that it inspires your party, giving them temp hp. The temp hp scales with your level and, when combined with the reaction where they can move without provoking opportunity attacks, it can be useful for rearranging the battlefield to better suit your party.
- Enthralling Performance: A free “Mass Charm Person” that takes one minute to cast. Can be useful for out-of-combat situations where you need a bunch of fangirls and guys to hype you up. The best part about this is that the target doesn’t know you tried to charm it if they pass the save, which won’t endanger you of provoking animosity when in delicate or political situations.
6th level
- Mantle of Majesty: The 1-minute duration and additional action economy this feature provides makes it useful inside and outside combat. Inside combat, you can use it to lock down a creature for up to 10 rounds. Of course, they get an attempt to save each round but the effects of Command are more variable than a typical condition. Outside of combat, this can easily be combined with Enthralling Performance to make thralls of your charmed crowd. The biggest limitation of this spell comes from the little-known rule that you can’t cast two leveled spells in a turn. If you want to use the Command bonus action, you will only be able to cast Cantrips using your action.
14th level
- Unbreakable Majesty: A similar effect to the Hallow spell, but allows you to attack and cast spells as normal. Even when creatures manage to attack you, you’re able to make them pay by hitting them with a nasty spell due to their disadvantage on saving throws.
College of Guidance
Use the power of spirits to help guide your actions and gain extra abilities.
3rd level
- Guiding Whispers: Guidance is one great Cantrip and extending the range to 60ft makes it even better.
- Spiritual Focus: The 3rd-level feature doesn’t have any mechanical effect.
- Tales from Beyond: Due to the randomness of this feature, it’s hard to judge. Because there are buffs, healing, and attacks that can happen randomly, you can’t depend on what you receive. It would really hurt to expend a use of your Bardic Inspiration only not to have a use for the effect.
6th level
- Spirit Session: This feature allows Bards to temporarily learn a necromancy or divination spell. Obviously, the most flavorful use of this spell is to learn a resurrection spell like Revivify at lower levels (make sure it’s stocked before someone dies) or True Resurrection at higher levels. Otherwise, you can grab some spells to help improve your party’s action economy (Summon Undead, Danse Macabre, etc.) or some pure damage spells (Negative Energy Flood, Finger of Death, etc). Hopefully, your party members don’t mind that you pull them into a seance every night.
- Spiritual Focus: The extra d6 is nice for any spell it applies to but only spells containing non-monetary materials can be channeled through your creepy new focus. This heavily limits the spells that this applies to. As this is likely an oversight in the design of this feature, I suggest speaking to your DM to see if you can apply this feature to all your spells.
14th level
- Mystical Connection: Again, randomness in a core class feature isn’t a good thing. Unfortunately, this really hurts the College of Spirit’s effectiveness. That said, getting advantage on your rolls on the table helps.
College of Lore
Bards are already one of the most versatile classes in D&D 5e. The College of Lore is focused on making you the Swiss Army Knife of your party.
3rd level
- Bonus Proficiencies: Getting 3 additional proficiencies is plain nasty. At this point you are proficient in 6 skills, have Expertise in 2 and can add half your proficiency bonus to the rest. Gross.
- Cutting Words: This is an amazing ability that can prevent huge chunks of damage at lower levels and help you dodge those nasty hits at higher levels. Note that this excludes saving throws.
6th level
- Additional Magical Secrets: This will allow you to take fireball only one level late which is almost necessary if you don’t have a damage caster in your party. See the section on Magical Secrets Spells.
14th level
- Peerless Skill: Being able to use your Bardic Inspiration on yourself, without taking up a bonus action or reaction is stupid good.
College of Swords
This is for those swashbuckling bards that want to get into the fray.
3rd level
- Bonus Proficiencies: Medium armor and scimitars are pretty good proficiencies to pick up seeing as you will likely be in combat quite a bit, it is a shame that shields are not included in this. Using your weapon as a focus for Bard spells is nice, but it doesn’t prevent you from needing War Caster to make a Two Weapon Fighting build viable.
- Fighting Style: These styles add a lot to the Bards viability in combat.
- Dueling: Great way to allow you to match martial classes with two-handed weapons while keeping a hand free for somatic components.
- Two-Weapon Fighting: You will likely need War Caster to make this viable, unless you want to mess around with dropping/sheathing weapons when casting. Also, the damage compared to Dueling is negligible and eats your bonus action.
- Blade Flourish: Unfortunately, this is the Swords subclass feature and it’s not terribly impressive until you can pick up Master’s Flourish at 14th level. When your Bardic Inspirations can be the difference between your Paladin hitting or missing, the pitiful damage offered by these flourishes doesn’t really matter.
- Defensive Flourish: The good news is that this is a semi-decent way of dealing some extra damage and boosting your AC for a turn. The bad news is that this is the best the Blade Flourishes get.
- Slashing Flourish: On average this will deal an extra 6 damage until 5th level , 8 until 10th level, 10 until 15th level, and 12 until level 20. This is quite a bit lower than the expected damage output from other martial classes getting a hit. In the situation that you are able to target more than 1 creature with the additional damage, then this is certainly a worthwhile use of a Bardic Inspiration die.
- Mobile Flourish: This can be a viable option if the creature is on a cliff or by some other hazard, otherwise it is as disappointing as Slashing Flourish.
6th level
- Extra Attack: Getting an extra attack a level late, and no way to make up for this lack of attacks hurts the viability of this class even more.
14th level
- Master’s Flourish: Being able to add a d6 of damage once per turn, on top of the other effects is finally an upside for this College, unfortunately that is as good as it gets.
College of Valor
Very similar to the College of Swords in the sense that you will be getting into melee combat a lot more than other Colleges. Valor focuses less on being a swashbuckler and more on being a badass war mage.
Check out our
College of Valor 5e guide for a more in-depth breakdown of the College of Valor subclass, including build recommendations, playstyle breakdowns, and an example build.
3rd level
- Bonus Proficiencies: Getting proficiencies with shields allows this College to already become more viable in combat than Swords. Make sure you pick up the War Caster feat.
- Combat Inspiration: This takes your Bardic Inspiration to the next level by increasing its versatility in combat. Party members you give this to will likely want to hang on to it for attack rolls over damage rolls, but avoiding nasty hits can be a solid use.
6th level
- Extra Attack: Valor still suffers from the fact they don’t get their extra attack until 6th level but somewhat make up for it with Battle Magic.
14th level
- Battle Magic: This has solid upsides and some small downsides. It allows you access to a full spell + melee attack bonus action 4 levels earlier than Eldritch Knight’s War Magic AND bards will be able to cast 7th level spells by this point. The downside is that Bardic Inspiration takes a bonus action so it can sometimes get in the way of getting your bonus attack in. To provide context, by this point, you will likely have 5 Bardic Inspirations to give out per Short Rest.
College of Whispers
3rd level
- Psychic Blades: Interesting feature that somewhat mimics a Rogue’s sneak attack damage and scales with levels. The damage is quite a bit more than what would be dealt by martial classes hitting so it is a viable use for Bardic Inspiration. Keep in mind that this doesn’t have to be melee damage so your hand crossbows just became a lot more powerful. This is a great option to make up for the fact that Bards don’t have access to strong damage cantrips.
- Words of Terror: This is an interesting mechanic, but I can’t necessarily see the upside especially when it takes 1 minute alone with the creature to create the effect.
6th level
- Mantle of Whispers: This is an extremely powerful option to gain access to a secure place. If you can get in and out within an hour, this is one of the most powerful infiltration features in 5e.
14th level
- Shadow Lore: Depending on the creature, this is insanely good and can be quite encounter breaking. If you are fighting a Legendary Creature make sure to wear down their Legendary Resistances first.
Sources Used in This Guide
- : 2014 Player's Handbook
- 2024 PHB: 2024 Player's Handbook
- BR: Basic Rules
- GotG: Bigby Presents: Glory of the Giants
- SotDQ: Dragonlance: Shadow of the Dragon Queen
- ERLW: Eberron: Rising from the Last War
- EEPC: Elemental Evil Player’s Companion
- EGtW: Explorer’s Guide to Wildemount
- FToD: Fizban's Treasury of Dragon
- GGtR: Guildmasters' Guide to Ravnica
- MotM: Monsters of the Multiverse
- MToF: Mordenkainen’s Tome of Foes
- MOoT: Mythic Odyessys of Theros
- PAitM: Planescape: Adventures in the Multiverse
- PHB: Player's Handbook
- SAiS: Spelljammer: Adventures in Space
- SCoC: Strixhaven: A Curriculum of Chaos
- SCAG: Sword Coast Adventurer’s Guide
- TCoE: Tasha’s Cauldron of Everything
- TTP: The Tortle Package
- WBtW: The Wild Beyond The Witchlight
- : Unearthed Arcana
- VRGtR: Van Richten's Guide to Ravenloft
- VGtM: Volo's Guide to Monsters
- XGtE: Xanathar’s Guide to Everything
Other Bard Guides
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