Bella Sara Charter Superscriber
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I let a player run an artificer in my campaign, and am reading the class description in the Eberron Campaign Setting, and, well, I don't get it. How does this class work? Do they buff/advance their homoculous until it is useful? Do they effectively have 1.5x treasure and derive usefulness from that? They just seem to be worthless as a player character in combat. I can see how they would be useful to make your stuff, but I don't know that I would want them in the dungeon with me.
Thoughts?
They're useful in a few different ways:
First off, don't ignore their ability to find and remove traps (for some reason I want to say it's called something other than Trapfinding). An artificer should have a high INT, so they should have enough skill points to devote to Search and Disable Device. This frees up the rogue to devote skills elsewhere (and the rogue has alternative abilities in various books for which they can give up Trapfinding).
Second, UMD. Give this guy the wands and scrolls, and let him be the one using them. A wizard or sorcerer is really only going to ever need one or two for backup in the odd chance they run out of magic or run into a sitch where their spells available don't cover it. Plus, he can make use of other items that have some special requirement (like alignment, race, etc).
His item creation skills at low level aren't going to be much, since all he gets for the first couple levels is one shot items. After 3rd, his usefulness goes up a bit (and never underestimate the value of a 3d6 fireball at level 3), since he can make wondrous items. This is where he shines, because if you let others donate XP, he won't fall too far behind while being able to deck the characters out in slightly better gear for less.
Buffs. He doesn't get a lot of infusions, but he can buff weapons, armor, and so on which frees up the cleric in some respects, and the wizard in others.
Finally, he has a cleric attack bonus. He shouldn't suck that bad in combat.
I think there are to basic types of Artificer. The "Bufficer" and the "Blastificer". Both of them work around the ability to apply metamgic feats to wands in exchange for using up more charges.
The Bufficer basically makes wands of buff spells (Probably Righteous Might), then takes the persistent spell metamagic feat, burns the 7 charges of the wand to run aorund with a persistent righteous might (and other buff spells) all day.
The Balstificer makes wands of blast spells (Scorching Ray I think), and then applies feats like maximise, twin, empower etc, to shoot spells that do 200d6 damage (That might be a bit of an exageration, but the number of d6s definently gets up there). Sure this may burn an entire wand in the process, but it elaves the encounter demolished.
Another rather powerful (and low level) tactic is to make use of the personal weapon augmentation infusion to imbue your current (melee or ranged) weapon (doesn't even need to be magic) with Bane (Whatever you are fighting), effectively giving you +2 to hit and +2+2d6 to damage for the "cost" of 1 infusion and one Action Point.
The guys on the Character Optimization boards over at wizards can probabaly give you more details, but they reckon they rival the Wizard, Cleric and Druids in terms of Power.
For one thing, an artificer can use infusions to, for example, temporarily grant you Eyeglasses of Giant's Strength at a much lower level than you would be able to buy such a thing. For another, as was noted, they can use Metamagic Spell Trigger to do some patently absurd things with a Wand of Scorching Ray, and don't underestimate their ability to draw on any infusion on their spell list without preparation.
Finally, they get some infusion at relatively low levels -- I forget what it's called -- which allows them to imbue an item with any spell by making a Use Magic Device check with a scaling difficulty determined by the level of the spell. Given the importance of the Use Magic Device skill for Artificers (approximately equivalent to the importance of the Truespeak skill for a Truenamer) it's reasonable to assume that they will be able to, with reasonable frequency, use a single low level infusion to emulate whatever low to mid level spell they happen to need -- particularly when they later gain the ability to take ten on the check.
Basically, though, so long as he's given enough downtime and resources to make use of his craft reserve, he'll be useful. If you can keep him from abusing Metamagic Spell Trigger to burn through an entire wand in the first round of combat, you'll be able to keep your BBEG from being turned into a smoking crater before he finishes his monologue.
If you've got the Magic of Eberron book, then the Hordeficer becomes possible. Note that there is no limit to the number of homonoculi that an artificer can have at any time; the cost is the damage taken if a homonculi does die. Too many of them + 1 fireball = metric butt-ton of damage.
But a small strike force of well augmented homonculi can be devastating, as can some of the other homonculi for other uses. The living chest is an awesome feild medic, running about administering healing postions and such.
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Bella Sara Charter Superscriber
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So, basically, the artificer converts gp into damage? What about the low saves for manufactured magic items? Do you need to focus on spells w/o saves and buffs? Is the homoculous any good? Do you end up spending all your cash on one-use items just to remain marginally effective?
My brother is playing an artificer in my STAP game. He's got a thing for paperwork-type characters (the kind that require much more than will fit on a standard character sheet), so the artificer seemed quite natural. That the artificer needs so much paperwork, and they are unlikely to pursue any prestige class I can think of, seems like a negative aspect.
However, as has been mentioned above, the artificer redefines both versatility in the game, as well as providing the party a more "pro-active" role when it comes to salvaging second-rate treasure (such as +1 swords when the party already has +2 swords).
For example, my brother (same character) has taken the role of "treasure keeper", calculating and recording the party's treasure, and thus determining what stays and what goes. This gives him the ability to maximize his crafting potential by knowing where to allocate funds equitably. Ultimately, this is a subtle and innovative way of addressing an old problem in D&D, namely character wealth. (How do you split an Apparatus of Kwalish?)
If you know of a player who's into "bookkeeping", the artificer should be quite enjoyable. Let'em get their hands on a Magic Item Compendium, and your game will never be the same.
Contributor
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So, basically, the artificer converts gp into damage? What about the low saves for manufactured magic items? Do you need to focus on spells w/o saves and buffs? Is the homoculous any good? Do you end up spending all your cash on one-use items just to remain marginally effective?
Most of the infusions essentially create free one-use items, at no gp cost. I don't recall for certain, but I believe that these use the artificer's save DC. That said, the best at low level (as has been mentioned by two others) is the infusion that gives a weapon a temporary special ability, and the best ability is usually Bane (the monster I'm fighting now).
I found this strategy shockingly effective, until a failed a save versus fear, and ran off of a cliff into a hall full of chokers. Then I had to make up a new character. I bet a lot of you know exactly what adventure I was playing. If I didn't have on a ring of feather falling, I would have had to climb down, and would have survived.
I think they are on par with bards for the most part (trading magic items for music). They let you have one of every spell on hand (through scrolls). I took craft golem at level 6 to bring in a wood golem (Dragon 24something) and give us a little more fighting skills (itchin for the stone golem). Before then a wand of magic missile was about all I could do in combat-more effective then some rogues (sneak attack works best if you have the con to wade into combat). Though they can create buff 'items' for most characters, artificers pair really well with warforged making both more effective. To your original question: A single wand can make them dungeon effective, and outside the dungeon your party should be 50% higher than the average party when it comes to magic items.
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Bella Sara Charter Superscriber
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Thanks for the responses thus far. I think I'm starting to understand the class.
Now here's the real question that's behind all this. I'm trying to understand the class because I have a player who wants to basically manufacture a battlesuit (aka, mini-mech). For whatever reason, I find this to be very cool and want to enable it. That being said, I fear the power level. I was trying to figure out if giving him something of this nature would be too powerful and therefore needed to understand the artificer's niche. Any ideas on how to model such an ability?
The character currently has a pulverizer sidekick (MMII, pre-errata). Once he gets up to around, say, 7th or 8th level, he will be able to covnert the pulverizer into a suit of armor that will increase his physical stats to those of the pulverizer, increase its sonic cone ability, and grant him immunity to critical hits and blindsense. He will only be able to do this x times per day based on character level. My thought is that it should be similar in power level to the druid's shapechange crossed with the barbarian's rage.