Your ability scores don’t really match your character description. You have little-to-no use for that Strength, that I can tell, and it sounds like your Charisma really ought to get an 18, since you’re staying on the back lines and focusing on song and spell.
Also, please consider my general recommendations for the bard class, as I’m going to avoid repeating myself.
And immediately breaking my claim that I’d not repeat myself: you don’t list Dragonfire Inspiration. You should; it is one of the absolute best feats for a buffer-bard, and is a very good reason to make your human character specifically a silverbrow human. Both Dragonfire Inspiration and silverbrow human are found in Dragon Magic.
Feats You List
Obtain Familiar/Improved Familiar
Decent, but you have to pay attention to your familiar, i.e. remember it’s there, maintain its stat-sheet, and so on. And then there’s the risk of it blowing up in your face and costing you a bunch of XP. Can be quite good, but I’d generally pass.
Song of the Heart
Very good, remember that you can get it as a bonus feat at Bard 3 instead of Inspire Competence. This is generally seen as a good trade, though Inspire Competence is OK enough that it can be worth it to take Song of the Heart as a feat so you get both.
Haunting Melody
By the time you can take it (6th), you’re starting to be really worried about the “mind-affecting, fear effect” aspect of the feat. The effect is decent, but not amazing at the levels it’s available, and it will become dead weight at high levels.
Lingering Song
In my experience, combat rarely lasts long enough for this to matter. The feat does nothing until, at the earliest, round 7, and most fights don’t last that long. I would pass.
Melodic Casting
The ability to cast while performing is eh for much the same reasons as Lingering Song. It’s better than Lingering Song, but ultimately it’s not much more likely to come up.
But that isn’t why you take the feat: you take the feat to replace Concentration with Perform. That is amazing for any bard, an ASAP pick up for almost all of them.
Versatile Spellcaster
It’s definitely not bad, but ultimately bards aren’t the best option for it. You just have fewer spells per day. Definitely don’t bother until high levels.
Lyric Spell
Meh? Ultimately, you almost-certainly will end up with way more daily uses of bardic music than you know what to do with, and this is a good way to burn through those – but you’ll burn through them fast. I like it better than Versatile Spellcaster, though, and would not take both.
Ironskin Chant
By 9th level, 5 damage is just... not a lot. If someone is surrounded by a bunch of low-damage, many-attacks enemies, then it can be golden, but a feat is a lot to spend on that possibility. Better for people to just, ya know, avoid getting surrounded. If it were immediate, you could argue it’s awesome for sudden ambushes, but as a swift you need to see the situation coming.
On the other hand, you do have a lot of uses of bardic music available after a while, and swift actions can be cheap. There are better options but it’s not bad.
Doomspeak
If this is worthwhile for a 6th-level character (and I’m not sure it is), it’s definitely not worth your 15th-level feat. You could spend another feat to get Intimidate in-class, but that’s way too much work for this. Pass.
Metamagic Song
Metamagic cost-reducers are one of the tried-and-true ways to true power in 3.5. This has far more sensible restrictions than Divine Metamagic, so I won’t call it out as definitively overpowered, but it is really strong.
The other issue is that the bard doesn’t really have the clear-and-obvious choices for metamagic that other classes do, and doesn’t get any as bonus feats. You have very limited feats to use for this.
Warning Shout
Reflex saves are the least-important of the three, but this is a pretty sizeable bonus, as an immediate action, and the cost to use it is not unreasonable. I’d definitely consider it.
Combat Panache
I love the name of this feat. And every time I read it, it disappoints me. Don’t bother.
Dragonsong
You really want to try to avoid mind-affecting effects if you can; too many things are immune. This bonus is small and niche. Pass.
Snowflake Wardance
This is a great feat, but if you’re not melee-focused, then it serves no purpose. Your ability scores are not exactly ideal, either, though the fact that you will be getting the largest cloak of charisma you can, and at high levels probably using wish or tomes for Charisma, mean the difference is going to wind up much higher than +2.
Sound of Silence
Deafening is not that bad a condition; the cost to inflict it here is just too high.
Point Blank Shot
Pure tax, plain and simple, and a bad one. The only reason to ever take this is just so you can take the actually-good things that require it, and you don’t need those that I can tell.
Precise Shot
If you are looking to use a lot of rays (not really a bard thing but you could), consider the rod of magical precision that allows you to buy Precise Shot for cheap. It’s in Complete Mage.
Aside from that, you only break out a bow when the battle is won and you’re taking potshots to pick people off. Don’t burn feats on that.
Battle Dancer
Tiny bonus is tiny. This is not worth a feat.
Disguise Spell
Here I disagree; Disguise Spell is awesome. And on a cowardly character? Perfect. Strongly recommend this.
Extra Music
You are going to have approximately 20 uses of bardic music in a day; for most purposes, Extra Song is pointless because you were never going to use all 20 in the first place. At low levels, it’s much better, though.
If you do go in for a lot of alternate uses of bardic music, particularly Lyric Spell and/or Metamagic Song, it becomes much more valid, but I still probably wouldn’t bother.
Extend Spell
Solid enough metamagic, reasonably priced. Good feat.
Sculpt Spell
Note that Sculpt Spell is not the same as the archmage’s Mastery of Shaping, nor does it make a spell (S) sculptable – it just switches area spells into other standard shapes (a cylinder, cone, ball, line, or series of cubes). This makes it rather difficult to use since you won’t be able to just pick and choose your targets, you still have to make it fit inside this shape. At +1 spell level, I’d much rather just cast a higher-level spell. Even with Metamagic Song, you couldn’t apply it to your best spells.
Other Feats
Chain Spell
This is an awesome feat for a buffer, allowing you to hit multiple people with usually-single-target buffs.
Charming the Arrow
If you are actually going to go in for that archery stuff, and can somehow finagle the Fey requirement, Charming the Arrow would be obviously-awesome for you.
Deceptive Spell
Fantastic opportunity for shenanigans, even more than Disguise Spell, but it costs a spell level.
Dragonfire Inspiration
Mentioned, mentioning it again. The feat is fantastic.
Enlarge Spell
is an awful feat you will most likely never use. That said, it is required for the excellent war weaver prestige class from Heroes of Battle – worth considering.
Invisible Spell
Possibly even more capable of shenanigans than is Disguise Spell.
Rapid Metamagic
This eliminates the casting-time increase of metamagic feats for spontaneous casting. If you are going to be using a lot of metamagic, you need this feat ASAP.
Unfortunately, taking it is another metamagic feat you aren’t taking. If you take this and Metamagic Song to enable metamagic, but only have one or two situational metamagic feats (like Extend and Sculpt), those two feats enabling metamagic are kind of wasted.
Reach Spell
Turn a touch-attack spell into a ranged spell, which can be very useful in conjunction with Chain Spell.
Song of the White Raven
You are not melee-focused, which makes this Tome of Battle feat seem odd at first, but there are more than sufficient opportunities to make this worthwhile. A single level of crusader gets you some excellent party-buffing options, like leading the charge and white raven tactics.1 Martial spirit and crusader’s strike or revitalizing strike also allow you to potentially heal allies if you ever do get in melee (or at least, use that whip), which seems appropriate.
But most of all, it allows you to take Song of the White Raven, which allows you to start your Inspire Courage as a swift action. That is a huge deal, and totally worth a level and a feat.
- Tome of Battle is, by far, the best-designed, best-balanced book in 3.5, but even the best books have problems. For Tome of Battle, the most notorious problems are iron heart surge and white raven tactics, but both are fine when used reasonably. For white raven tactics, simply disallow using it on yourself (as was likely originally intended), and it becomes strong, but not broken. For iron heart surge, should it come up, I like to just replace the entire text of the feat with BY CROM!! and then it seems to play fine.
Spellbreaker Song
Not a feat, but rather an alternate class feature replacing Countersong (which is absolutely useless), this allows you to disrupt other spellcasters. A good deal.
Talfirian Song
I don’t actually recommend this feat, but it should be mentioned. Combined with Metamagic Song, Talfirian Song allows bardzilla, very similar to a cleric’s use of Divine Metamagic. Even though it takes three feats instead of one, and is limited by the bard’s spell list, this is still overpowered for many games, particularly one described as low-power.
Recommendation
Assuming silverbrow human,
- 1st level
- Invisible Spell
- Dragonfire Inspiration (Human bonus feat)
- 3rd level
- Reach Spell
- Song of the Heart (Music of Creation bonus feat)
- 6th level
- 9th level
- 12th level
- 15th level
- 18th level
Up front, let me just suggest that this character is offensively devastating, but is frighteningly vulnerable (LA does that), and useless outside of combat. Moreover, these low levels are very much the best time to be playing this character. Depending on the pace of the game, it may be best to let him just enjoy it while it lasts. Unfortunately, it likely won’t last long. See an earlier answer about an overly strong barbarian.
But I think we can do better than you have here. You see, being devastating offensively, but shockingly vulnerable and useless out of combat, does cause a lot of problems. LA causes a lot of problems, but the biggest one is exactly this: skew.
A simple improvement, in both directions, by suggesting the LA +1 goliath from Races of Stone—less LA, less power, and the character is less skewed and causes fewer problems. The goliath isn’t Large, but has powerful build that lets them count as Large in many ways—and then the goliath barbarian substitution level, also in Races of Stone, offers mountain rage, and truly-Large size for a limited amount of time per day. Having the player use the goliath’s stats, despite being a “half-ogre,” would be a straightforward solution with WotC support.
But really, I think we can do even better than that. The goliath isn’t a half-ogre, and powerful build isn’t Large size, and while mountain rage can cover most uses, it still isn’t quite the same. And in my experience, having played, played alongside, or run games for goliath barbarians in the past... the goliath doesn’t really earn its LA either, even with mountain rage. So what I propose is an LA +0 half-ogre. True Large size, while very very good, might be possible on an LA +0 race.
Therefore, I present an LA +0, Large size, half-ogre race. Races are relatively simple parts of the game, and I have designed races professionally for 3.5e and Pathfinder; I am reasonably confident in my design here. It goes off the established rails some (LA +0 Large size is verboten under WotC design guidelines, and even powerful build always came with LA +1), but I’m going to build in a lot of downside. Moreover, I have played (with) plenty of characters that were Large—it isn’t that big a deal. Even in gestalt games where the LA could all be put on one side (greatly mitigating the effect of the LA and making half-ogre et al. far cheaper to use), the Large size was only “good,” not “broken.” (The large ability score adjustments were far more problematic.) I am confident that the drawbacks of this race are at least as costly as the effort expended by those characters in becoming Large.
Half-Ogre Racial Traits
Starting Ability Score Adjustment: +2 Str, −2 Dex, −2 Int, −2 Cha.
Large: As Large creatures, half-ogres have a −1 penalty to Armor Class and a −1 penalty on all attack rolls. They also have a reach of 10 feet.
Speed: Half-ogre land speed is 30 feet.
Darkvision: Half-ogres have darkvision with a range of 60 feet.
Giant Blood: For all special abilities and effects, a half-ogre is considered a giant. Half-ogres can use giant weapons and magic items with racially-specific giant powers as if they were giants.
Automatic Languages: Giant and Common. Bonus Languages: Draconic, Gnoll, Goblin, Orc, and Abyssal.
Favored Class: Barbarian.
Level Adjustment: +0.
By drastically reducing the ability score bonuses and removing the natural armor, we reduce a lot of the skew in the character. And because the ability score adjustments turn out sharply negative, and the race really doesn’t have much of anything else going on, we attach some very heavy drawbacks on the Large size. I considered losing the darkvision (after all, ogres have both that and low-light vision, and Savage Species saw fit to toss out the low-light vision), but in my experience darkvision is minor in most cases, and the race block just looked bare without it. But it might be a target if you want to remove more.
Ultimately, this race ends up being very, very good for a barbarian, and several other classes (the lack of Wisdom penalty opens up interesting opportunities for, say, psychic warrior), but it doesn’t end up being necessarily the best option every time. That is, it joins the top tier of race options for melee characters, but it doesn’t establish an entirely new tier over and above a few of the best existing options. Dragonborn, human (and human variants), warforged, water orc are each competitive, for examples. A dragonborn half-ogre could be a problem (since you keep the best thing about half-ogre and then get real racial features from dragonborn), but no more so than a dragonborn warforged—so you should probably just ban both of those combinations (or allow both, but recognize that they start to look like the only reasonable melee options).
Best Answer
So, there is definitely a systemic problem here, that is impossible to fix and difficult to work around, as Theik says, and it’s certainly true that E6 will help keep things from getting worse, as kviiri says, because things are very much liable to get worse at 7th and beyond.
But that’s not the whole story.
I think you have systemic problems compounded by player problems. To wit, the stronger classes (read: easier to get working well, requiring less optimization skill) are being played by those optimizing more, rather than those who are optimizing less, which might help to balance out the situation. In particular, Divine Metamagic is probably much-too-high-power for a game in which the barbarian and fighter aren’t optimizing much and falling into many of the myriad traps before those classes.
And on the flip side, the weaker classes (read: harder to get working well, requiring greater optimization skill) are being played by those optimizing less, rather than those who were optimizing more. It’s counter-intuitive, since the weaker classes are also branded the “simpler” ones, but they are actually harder to play. There are just so many traps for a fighter or a barbarian.
Which they must have fallen into, because a simple summon monster with Augment Summoning shouldn’t be enough for a summoned creature to be superior to a barbarian or a fighter. Are there options out there for a wizard to summon things so powerful that nothing a barbarian or fighter can do will help? Yes, there are—but they’re more involved than just the one feat.
For the bard, there is probably plenty of room for improvement just in feats and spells. This Q&A might be of assistance there. The bard isn’t cleric or wizard, but they can still definitely contribute.
The barbarian, fighter, and paladin are going to have a harder time.
So what I would recommend here is to consider suggesting that the barbarian, fighter, and paladin play better (read: easier to get working well) classes. Specifically, Tome of Battle was something of a revolution in D&D 3.5e design, finally working hard to ensure that there were no traps and things worked as well as they sounded on paper, giving martial characters nice things that enabled them to fight as well as mages cast (well, almost), and they’re pretty newbie-friendly.
Specifically, in my games, I have encouraged players’ class choices as follows:
These classes match the fluff and narrative role of these classes very well, to the point that they’re often considered just replacements for those classes (and third class in the book, swordsage, is a replacement for the monk or ninja classes). So what I recommend is that your 5th-level paladin, fighter, and barbarian become 5th-level crusader, warblade, and “crusader,” instead. The characters can stay the same, and gain substantially improved combat ability.
Tome of Battle also multiclasses very well—5 levels of barbarian, fighter, or paladin is hard to countenance, but the first 2 levels of each of those classes is quite good. That allows the barbarian to keep his iconic rage, the fighter to keep his armor and shield proficiencies as well as all but one of his bonus feats, and the paladin to keep detect evil, smite evil, and divine grace. Levels of non-Tome of Battle classes count half towards Tome of Battle “initiator level” (similar to caster level), so those levels also help their maneuvers (I have also had success with allowing fighter levels to count full for initiator level; fighter is a weaker class than barbarian or paladin). So these characters, if they did keep 2 levels in their original classes, would start with IL 2nd, get IL 3rd at their 2nd class level, and so on, allowing them to choose higher-level maneuvers sooner.
You can actually go further and take 4 non-initiating levels, so you start at IL 3rd and can select 2nd-level maneuvers and stances with your initial set of maneuvers, but this is minor and the three classes we’re discussing don’t get a whole lot at 3rd and 4th (the paladin’s doing a bit better than the others, and grabbing the aura of courage and turn undead might be worthwhile—and then they could go for the ruby knight vindicator prestige class, adapted as necessary, in the same book).
So I think if your party had a 2nd-level barbarian/3rd-level crusader, a 2nd-level fighter/3rd-level warblade (or just a 5th-level warblade, honestly), and a 2nd-level paladin/3rd-level crusader (or 4th-level paladin/1st-level crusader or 5th-level crusader or whatever), you would likely be in a much better place at 5th level than you are now.
The spellcasters should not have a lot of trouble with this; spellcasters are still more powerful classes. And they’ll still get (a lot) more powerful still at 7th level and beyond—E6 would still be a good idea. If you do that, I would lift the 3× restriction on Martial Study, and definitely suggest to the paladin that taking more than 2 levels of paladin (and thus never hitting IL 5th in 6 levels) would be very costly (and I might allow some feat to “catch up,” à la Practiced Spellcaster, though I would have to think carefully about what would be appropriate there because that might make their aura of courage and turn undead seem rather like freebies).
Note, Tome of Battle doesn’t spell it out and I think it should: the way to handle crusader maneuvers is with a little deck of cards. Wizards of the Coast made a free set you can print, if you want, or you can just pull scraps of paper out of a hat or just grab some playing cards and write down that the Ace of Spades is your mountain hammer or whatever. Point is, the crusader has some randomness with their maneuvers, and dice are the wrong tool to use to figure them out. With cards, you just draw cards as you get maneuvers, and then when the deck’s run out, you reshuffle the deck and start over: easy. With dice, you have to worry about odd numbers, and then which number is which maneuver discounting those already granted, and it’s just not worth it—cards are the way to go.
And if you do print out the maneuver cards, those have the extra advantage of having the full rules text of every maneuver right there in front of the players. They’ll know exactly what they can do and how it works, physically on the table in front of them. This is great for players who are daunted by the idea of resource management and special powers. These advantages, in fact, apply to all initiators, not just crusaders—swordsages and warblades never have to shuffle, but they certainly can keep cards in front of them to remind themselves what they have readied, and flip them over as they use them.