Kind of depends I guess. I feel that all the item creation feats have their place. Yes, wonderous item is great, and if I could only pick one item creation feat, that would probably be it. Statboosters are just too darn useful... That's mainly the only reason for it, statboosters. Secondarily, cloaks of resistance, and then whatever else random that is fun and cool in wonderous items.
However, magic arms and armor is nearly equally good... though it just so happens that if the wizard wants to craft stuff for himself, this is almost entirely useless. Will make you lots of friends in the party though. Also great for "Beat-Down" clerics who can up their armor quickly and get a badass weapon.
Craft Rod is very decent at high levels because metamagic rods are both amazing and super expensive. Once you hit CL 16 or so, picking up craft rod is almost a must. Before that its almost useless.
Craft Wand isn't too bad, here's something that benifited from the removal of XP costs from items. Great for low-level utility spells (knock?), or whatever you want really. Great stuff you can do with nigh ulimited 1st and 2nd level spells, and if you want to pay more.. then go ahead. All in all though, not as good as the previous ones IMO.
Craft Staff is a feat I always felt was a little misplaced. Halfway between a wand and a wonderous item, nobody really knows what to do with a staff. Most popular use for the staff that I've seen? The Heal Stick. Sad really. But maybe the new rechargable staves will help that a bit.
Forge Ring is another unfortunate feat. There is very little divide between what is a ring and what is a wonderous item except the game designers said 'that gets to be a ring'. Perfect example: Ring of Protection (ring) vs. Amulet of Natural Armor (wonderous item). Mechanically they are almost identical. There is no reason they should not both be the same thing. Also, it seems that the rings are a bit pricey for what they do a lot of the time, and you're ususally better off going with a wonderous item if it can fill the same role... which it usually can.
Brew Potion is... eh, it's ok. Better than Forge Ring probably, because its useful to deal out a few potions of Remove Blindness/Deafness, remove Fear, remove Curse, lesser restoration, or low level cure spells amongst the party. Potions of Fly are infinitely useful to the party as well.
That was long winded. I guess I was just trying to say that the main thing is that Craft Wonderous just happens to be very useful to everyone, where all the others are generally useful only to a few classes. Maybe they should dump wands/staves/potions all into one category and throw in rings with wonderous items.
RPG Superstar 2008 Top 32, 2011 Top 16
|
I just had a thought about Forge Rings - what if it was re-done similar to Craft Staff was so that Rings are to Wondrous Items as Staves are to Wands. If rings allowed you to use your character level and charisma to determine saving throw DCs isntead of having a static DC or something like that.
There are some rings that wouldn't really be changed by that, such as rings of protection, but maybe the answer is that rings that just sit there and provide a bonus can be made with Craft Wondrous Item, but rings (and existing wondrous items that could be made into a ring slot) that needed to be activated and allowed a saving throw could be made with the Forge Ring feat and allowed for a level based saving throw DC.