College Of Glamour Bard: D&D 2024 Optimisation Guide

Have your enemies bowing in fear/adoration using your charm and skill to enthrall the masses.

What is the college of glamour?

With origins in the magic of the Fey, glamour bards are alluring musicians, performers, and well versed in magic that can charm and command. These bards can turn the hearts and pull at the emotions of even the most hard-hearted warrior.

Glamour bards are most closely personified by popstars. They can easily find themselves revered by adoring fans due to their eclectic performances and their charming personas.

Originally introduced in Xanathar’s Guide to Everything, the glamour bard has had a refresh for D&D 2024. This includes updated features as well as broader changes to the core bard class too. My optimisation guide will take you through exactly how this new bardic subclass work and how you can optimise your own glamour bard.

At a glance

Subject enemies to your will with your impressive majesty
Adept as a spell-focused bard
Charm and frighten your foes
Make heavy use of your bardic inspiration and your charisma with additional features

What’s changed for a glamour bard in D&D 2024?

Expect a fair few changes to glamour bards including the following:

Beguiling magic: This replaces enthralling performance and gives you charm person and mirror image as prepared spells. It also means that when you cast an enchantment or illusion spell, you can attempt to charm or frighten someone.
Mantle of inspiration: Reduces the number of temporary hit points you grant.
Mantle of majesty: Gives you the command spell and allows you to restore this feature with a level 3 spells slots or higher.
Unbreakable majesty: Now causes the first hit an enemy makes against you to require a charisma saving throw, otherwise it misses.

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College of glamour features

Beguiling magic – Lv3

How it works

You always have the charm person and mirror image spells prepared.

You can also cause the charmed or frightened condition on someone when you cast an enchantment or illusion spell if they fail a saving throw. You can do this once per day for free and expend uses of your bardic inspiration to use it more often.

Tactics

Make sure you choose some enchantment and illusion spells for your spell list. This takes up no action economy so is literally a bonus effect on top of your spell.
Target low wisdom creatures as they are the most likely to fail the saving throw.
This is likely to be more impactful than your standard use of bardic inspiration as you’ll essentially pull enemies out of combat for multiple rounds. It may also free up your bonus action for other things too. Though in theory, you can do both in the same turn, but you may want to balance your uses of bardic inspiration on the things that will be most useful. Still, at least one use of this feature is free per day.
While you may only have a few uses of bardic inspiration at low levels, once you hit level 5, you recharge your bardic inspiration each short rest (so between most encounters) and can trade spell slots for it too meaning you should have a plentiful supply to charm and frighten enemies consistently.

Mantle of inspiration – Lv3

How it works

Expend a bardic inspiration die and a bonus action to grant temporary hit points equal to twice your bardic inspiration roll to a number of creatures equal to your charisma modifier. Affected creatures can then use their reaction to move without provoking attacks of opportunity.

Tactics

A great way to help allies in a tight spot. The number of temporary hit points is decent and could help them survive another turn. Being able to move out of danger, if timed right, could be hugely beneficial for characters over-run by melee enemies.

Mantle of majesty – Lv6

How it works

You always have the command spell prepared.

You can cast the command spell as a bonus action without expending a spell slot. For the next minute (or until your concentration is broken) you can cast the command spell as a bonus action on subsequent turns without using a spell slot. Any creature charmed by you, automatically fails their saving throw against this command. You can only use this feature once per day unless you expend a spell slot of level 3+.

Tactics

A worthy alternative to using your standard bardic inspiration for your bonus action as it’s capable of taking an enemy to completely miss a round.
Consider casting illusion or enchantment spells with your action to charm with beguiling magic, while commanding others for double the battlefield control.
Doing this every turn can really play havoc on your enemy and the battlefield. Consider making melee opponents grovel to help your allies gain advantage or have terrifying melee warriors run away from you (or weak spellcasters move towards your barbarian). You could convince a powerful wizard to drop their magic staff and take it for yourself.

Unbreakable majesty – Lv14

How it works

Activate as a bonus action and for the next minute, the first hit a creature makes against you on their turn initiates a charisma saving throw, which, if failed, means they miss you. This can only be used once, but is recharged on a short or long rest.

Tactics

This doesn’t even take up a bardic inspiration use, and because it’s a bonus action and rechargeable on a short rest, it’s worth using at the beginning of most encounters.
It can also stack with mantle of majesty so you can use both simultaneously.
Just make sure your charisma is high to make this even more difficult to resist.

Building a college of glamour bard

Glamour bards are more spell-focused than the likes of valor and dance bards. As such, you’ll want to hone in on spellcasting elements in your build, especially as many of their features rely on a strong charisma. This includes needing a large pool of bardic inspiration to use their features consistently. Below I’ve given a load of advice on how to optimise a glamour bard:

Ability scores

Recommended options

Charisma: Important for spells, features (like unbreakable majesty and beguiling magic) and face skills. You should expect to be casting a fair number of spells too to best take advantage of beguiling magic.
Dexterity: You’ll need this to get your AC decent. In theory, it’ll help you out with finesse and ranged weapons which could be useful early on, but cantrips like starry wisps will be better from level 5 onwards as their damage scales with your level.
Constitution: Not mega important for a glamour bard, but it will increase your durability so makes a solid tertiary ability.

Options to avoid

Wisdom: Of little use to a bard.
Intelligence: Of little use to a bard.
Strength: You can dump this.

Ability score	Point Buy	Standard Array
Strength	8	8
Dexterity	15	14
Constitution	15	13
Intelligence	8	10
Wisdom	8	12
Charisma	15	15

Skills

Recommended options

Deception: Important for a face (which you surely will be as a bard) especially if you intend on lying a lot.

Intimidation: Another useful one for a party face.
Persuasion: Your most important face skill.
Stealth: Regularly useful and you often can’t rely on one character being good at this.
Perception: Important for anyone in the party and highly used.
Insight: Important face skill and you may find you need this to compensate for a lower wisdom score.

Options to avoid

Nature: Used far too little to be of much use.
Survival: Used far too little to be of much use.
Animal handling: Used far too little to be of much use.
Athletics: You’re not strength based so go with acrobatics if you want one of these.
Medicine: You’re better off healing magically.

Species/race

There are a couple of things to consider when choosing a species for a college of gamour bard:

Innate spellcasting: Bards can cast spells so this is a useful option for repeat castings and gaining some extra spell options. Bards can be a bit limited on damage dealing spells too so it can be worth trying to pick up one or 2 of these as well for better ranged combat options.
Keeping safe: Glamour bards aren’t built for the front lines (though you do gain some resilience by level 14). Instead, you’ll need to keep yourself safe and out of harm’s way. Anything that can keep you safe then is a great boon. This includes things like flight or misty step-like abilities.

Recommended options

Aasimar (2024): All the celestial revelation options are decent for a glamour bard. You can use flight when you need to get safe or use necrotic shroud or inner radiance in case you get surrounded (though you should work to avoid this). A bit of healing is decent too for a backup healer and you get necrotic and radiant damage resistance. Not that important for a backline spellcaster, but a nice bonus.
Dragonborn (2024): You don’t get many AoE spells as a bard so a Dragonborn makes a good option with their breath weapon (you won’t always want to be casting enchantment and illusion spells). It does mean getting a little closer to the action but with temporary flight, it’s easy to do this from some safety. Otherwise, just use your flight to stay completely out of harm’s way while you blast spells and inspiration about the battlefield. There’s also a resistance for better durability.
Elf (2024): An extra skill and darkvision will help you be a better scout and general skill guru. But you’re mainly here for the innate spellcasting. High Elf is a good option for misty step and an extra cantrip (toll the dead will make you more effective at dealing damage without expending spell slots, but you can change this around if you want too). Drow is good for buffs and debuffs with the likes of faerie fire and darkness. You could go for a Wood Elf for the better stealth, but it’s generally the weaker option.
Gnome (2024): Extra magic resilience is great. A Forest Gnome is best with speak with animals which works really well for a high charisma character while minor illusion is great if you want to get involved in stealth (which is easy to build for with a glamour bard).
Tiefling (2024): Repeat uses of 4 innate spells is great for a spellcasting class. If you take the infernal legacy, you gain access to firebolt for scalable ranged damage that will outstrip damage from a light crossbow. You get a resistance to a common damage type for extra durability too.

Options to avoid

Dwarf (2024): It’s all about being really resilient for a Dwarf, but that’s a little wasted on a subclass that tends to steer clear of danger.
Goliath (2024): If you desperately want to play a Goliath bard, go for stone giant ancestry for the damage reduction. Everything else is a bit wasted on a subclass that likes to operate at range.
Orc (2024): Orcs are all about durability which is generally wasted on a backline bard subclass.

Backgrounds

Backgrounds are much more important now with D&D 2024 as the ability score increases previously tied to your race/species are now linked to your background. Remember that you can either choose to increase one of the ability score options from a background by 2 and the other by 1, or you can choose to increase all 3 ability scores by 1.

You also get an origin feat linked to your background too.

Below are the options I think work best for a glamour bard:

Name	Ability scores	Origin feat	Skill proficiencies	Tool proficiency
Charlatan	Dexterity, constitution, charisma	Skilled	Deception, sleight of hand	Forgery kit
Entertainer	Strength, dexterity, charisma	Musician	Acrobatics, performance	One kind of musical instrument
Merchant	Constitution, intelligence, charisma	Lucky	Animal handling, persuasion	Navigator’s tools
Wayfarer	Dexterity, wisdom, charisma	Lucky	Insight, stealth	Thieves’ tools

Wayfarer might be your best options of the above, but charlatan also fit really well for a bard.

Weapons

Once you hit level 5, a damage dealing cantrip will be your best option for damage. You can get starry wisps as standard (a brand new spell for D&D 2024, giving bards their own damage-dealing cantrip). You can easily get other damage dealing cantrips too with toll the dead the highest damage option. You can either get this through magical discoveries, the magic initiate feat or by playing a High Elf.

Before this point, you may find that a light crossbow deals more damage. A dagger is your best option for the occasional melee combat you might engage in (as it happens to be your only finesse option) but this should be used rarely.