@ Beechams: Bards are great skill wise but their main problem is damage.
They have lots of spells but very few of them do damage, they focus mainly on buffs and CC.
I want to chose lore bard because it improves the stuff that bards are good at: skills and magic.
Valor and swords get an extra attack, lore gets fireball at lv6 (you can chose another spell but I definitely recommand one damage spell)
Bards are "Jack of all trades, master of none"
It is good that BG3 has tons of uses for all kinds of skills, thats why I want to be a bard, among other reasons.
It is bad that BG3 combat is obsessed with max damage alpha strike before the enemy can act.
You can instantly die when you run into combat and the enemy acts first or you can kill everything with 3 fireballs or 6 attacks per character in the first round.
BG3 is based on DnD 5E but Larian puts their own idea of fun over DnD rules.
I like their approach out of combat, but in combat it seems to be: Do the maximum amount of actions and damage in the first round, then rest.
back to bards in general:
You can surely make a bard with lots of strengh and non finesse weapons.
Best result may be a bard10/fighter2: Then you have a "fighter" with way more spells and skills than an eldritch knight.
But I chose a regular single class bard as caster and skill monkey instead. Not because it is the most effective char ever but simply because I want to.
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