Dear Arrow Recipient

Never gonna give you up, never gonna let you down!

This is an arcane archer build designed to compensate for the somewhat low damage of ranged characters with a signifcant amount of bard buffs - thus ensuring group placement via solid (if not top-tier) DPS and incredible support abilities. With both tiers of the Warchanter prestige enhancement, this build throws out Inspire Courage effects that grants an incredible +7 to attacks and +8 to damage, and can boost skills, damage reduction, and even doublestrike in a similar fashion.

With the heavy focus on archery - and without more than two ranger levels to provide for the feats without needing to qualify - the build requires a high starting Dexterity, and some slight further investment while leveling up. It needs a 19 Dexterity by level 14, and the assumption here is that it will achieve it via one level increase and a +2 tome - this can be tweaked to not require a tome, but it will reduce our Strength by two points and damage commesurately. In any case, we are able to pick up every ranged weapon feat, including the wonderful Manyshot, and supplement the arrow damage with Arcane Archer slaying arrows and 3d6 sneak attack from Dilettante, all of which should provide substantial ranged DPS. Because of the ranger levels, we also have Two-Weapon Fighting for when melee becomes necessary.

With a relatively low Charisma, this character can't rely much on offensive or controlling bard spells, so we instead focus on a goodly number of buffs and support healing. On the skills front, bards get a decent enough number that even with an Intelligence penalty, we can afford to keep several maxed. It takes a little shuffling around the ranger and fighter levels, but it's not overly problematic. We take both Bluff and Diplomacy for the threat dumps and the utility of pulling a single target with Bluff; if one prefers, either could be swapped out for another skill, or reduced to keep Concentration fully maximized.

A small, but significant, variation on this build would be to reduce the bard levels by 2 - thus losing Inspire Heroism's save/dodge bonus - and take an additional 2 levels of fighter, for Weapon Specialization: Ranged.

Baseline Information

Leveling Breakdown

Spell Selection at 20