I've been playing around with various types of debuff-and-control oriented builds recently, since I've hit a point where my stable of builds has quite a lot of builds of most other sorts.

I'm wondering what other people think of this... a good debuffer is turning out to be pretty hard to build (some spells you want are arcane, others divine, then there's curse song...) and even after you debuff, the enemy still has to be killed in order to get exp and treasure most of the time. So it would probably end up being a support focused character, or else have to have some combat ability in its own right.

I'm thinking a cleric/bard with the travel domain (for slow and web as a cleric) has a lot of potential in this vein. Curse song plus a number of good debuffs... focusing on wisdom and using divine power melee to put paid to the enemy once they've been crippled.
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Experience is the mother of good judgement; bad judgement is the father of experience. best debuffs are arcane spells. lesser spell breach, greater spell breach, and mords. also stuff like negative energy burst, ray of enfeeble, energy drain, bestoy curse, etc... are good to weaken foes. arcane also has the good control spells (control undead and dominate monster).

rogue is also good due to crippling strike. you could do fighter type/monk/rogue and get 10 attacks per round and crippling strike. will reduce the str of enemies down to nothing in no time when you can sneak attack. Hmm I didn't consider the spell breaches/mord's, and that's a very good point.

The way I saw it clerics do get alot of debuffs: energy drain, word of faith, battletide, poison, prayer, contagion, bestow curse, blindness/deafness, silence, doom and bane. Then they can get slow and neg energy burst and enervation as domain powers.

That leaves ray of enfeeblement, the spell breaches, mind fog, feeblemind, ghoul touch, and mass blindness/deafness as the arcane dbeuffing spells they can't get as clerics.

Those are some good reasons to make an arcane debuffer, but then he'd miss out on word of faith, battletide, prayer, silence, doom, and bane.

I was thinking by doing a 26 cleric/14 bard, then without stat debuffs (ie neg energy burst strength drain or bestow curse) the divine debuffs and curse song would stack up to -8 to hit, -7 to damage, -3 to AC, -6 to saves (-7 vs fear) and -5 to skill checks.

That seems pretty worthwhile... but yeah not having spell breaches/disjunction is an issue.
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Experience is the mother of good judgement; bad judgement is the father of experience. if scrolls or wands are available you should be ok with umd from bard. if you have another char that can craft lesser spell breach wands, then you'll be all set.

breach spells work the same from scrolls. mords won't dispell as well, but really the breach is the part that is most useful.