Items to Buff Out Spellcraft

[King Atticus]

I'm looking at trying to make the Incantatrix class features more easily used. The spellcraft DC's are really high and I keep reading about +20 items and differently typed bonus items. Short of taking the feats and making them yourself I was hoping that the vast knowledge of the playground could help form a list of spellcraft buffing items. Thanks

[GoodbyeSoberDay]

Well, there are the custom item creation guidelines. An item of skill +X supposedly costs 100*(X^2) gp, which is very affordable in the one digit range. Talk to your DM. To be honest, if you're making an incantatrix, you should make sure the DM is cool with everything you're doing before it comes to the table.

A certain cheesy interpretation of the Spontaneous Divination alternate class feature (Complete Champion) is that it allows you to spontaneously cast any divination spell, from any spell list. If your DM doesn't kill you for this, you could spontaneously cast Divine Insight from the cleric list for a one-time large bonus to a skill check. Useful for persisting high level spells.

Item Familiar (UA) is a feat that lets you invest skill ranks and turn them into untyped bonuses to other skills two-for-one. Warning: even cheesier than abusing Spontaneous Divination, and the familiar itself is a prime target for DM wrath.

A masterwork tool of spellcraft costs 50 gp and gives a +2 circumstance bonus. Cheap, easy, not so cheesy. Poetry.

Moth familiar from one of the dragon magazines gives you a +3 untyped (I think) bonus. Combine this with Elven Generalist racial substitution levels (Races of the Wild) to double that bonus.

Five ranks in Knowledge: Arcana gives a +2 synergy bonus.

Those are the ones I can come up with right now, but I might edit this post and add some more.

[Alleran]

Several artifacts can give you bonuses (of various types). The Nether Scrolls from Lost Empires of Faerun are the big ones, because the Arcanus Fundare scroll provides a +30 untyped bonus.

You can also stack it with an item of +30 Spellcraft (about 90k gp, I think), and use different types of bonuses (for a slight price increase) to stack them. A good list would be:

+30 morale
+30 luck
+30 sacred
+30 competence
+30 insight

Granted, the morale one is a bit iffy, but the other four are solid possibilities, and pumps it to a +120 before anything else. It does require homebrew magic items, though, and your DM might object. Incantatrix is already stupid powerful, but all you need is one or two ways of getting around a +50 to your check in total, since persisting a 9th level spell is a DC of only 60-70 (somewhere around there).

If you want to max out your Spellcraft by 20th level, then by dumpster-diving splatbooks, Dragon and Dungeon for artifacts, spells and items you can get the following:

23 ranks
+30 untyped (Nether Scrolls, Lost Empires of Faerun)
+37 competence (Extract Gift spell, FCI, robbing an Atropal of its knowledge)
+30 sacred (magic item)
+30 luck (magic item)
+30 morale (magic item)
+30 insight (magic item)
+3 Skill Focus (feat)
+2 synergy (5 ranks of Knowledge: Arcana)
+10 Epic Skill Focus (Codex Hammer, from Dragon #297)
+19 INT bonus (18 INT + 2 INT for a Gray Elf + 5 INT from levels + 5 INT from Tomes + 6 INT from an Headband of Intellect + 8 INT from Halruuan Great Elixirs + 1 INT from Soul Elixirs [another artifact item that gives an untyped INT bonus and stack with each other if you can find enough of them] + 3 INT from Venerable age)
+3 untyped (moth familiar from Dragon)
+2 circumstance (masterwork tool of Spellcraft)

That's a +249 modifier, and even rolling a 1 is still a horrendous +250. It's more than enough to never need to worry about your Incantatrix modifiers ever again.

You'll have to spam CL-boosters (circle magic, earth nodes, karma beads, ioun stones, and any other method you can think of) to get a caster level high enough for a +37 competence bonus (since the maximum bonus is 1/2 your caster level, you need CL 74 to push it through). And I didn't take into account using an Elixir of Eternity* to abuse the aging modifiers either.

(* Basically, you become immune to death by old age. For every 100 years past Venerable, your STR, DEX and CON drop by 1 point each and you gain another +1 to INT, WIS and CHA. The physical ability scores can't drop below 1, though. Mental ones can keep on increasing forever. Just lock yourself up in a demiplane and abuse time traits to age ten thousand years in the space of a single day on the Material, and you'll have +100 INT, which will further add to your Spellcraft modifier. Sure, you'll be weak as a kitten, but you'll have godlike magic to make up for it.)

[Lonely Tylenol]

All told, getting Skill Focus (Spellcraft), Masterwork Spellcraft tools, a synergy bonus from Knowledge (Arcana) and, say, a Ring of Spellcraft +10 (which would cost about 10,000GP by GoodByeSoberDay's figures) is a pretty simple, cheese-free way to get your Spellcraft up. If you've devoted 10 ranks to Spellcraft and 5 ranks to Arcana, and have an INT bonus of at least +4 you'll have 10+6+2+2+10+4=34 bonus to Spellcraft, which you can attain at level 7, effectively covering all your metamagic concerns. By the time you get to level 17, at which point you're making Spellcraft DC45 checks for 9th-level modified spells, you will have invested an extra 10 points into Spellcraft, for a total bonus of 44. Assuming you didn't gain *anything* to your INT modifier, you would still be able to auto-pass a Spellcraft DC45 check, so you're all good.

[Azraile]

And I didn't take into account using an Elixir of Eternity* to abuse the aging modifiers either.

(* Basically, you become immune to death by old age. For every 100 years past Venerable, your STR, DEX and CON drop by 1 point each and you gain another +1 to INT, WIS and CHA. The physical ability scores can't drop below 1, though. Mental ones can keep on increasing forever. Just lock yourself up in a demiplane and abuse time traits to age ten thousand years in the space of a single day on the Material, and you'll have +100 INT, which will further add to your Spellcraft modifier. Sure, you'll be weak as a kitten, but you'll have godlike magic to make up for it.)

Then use Polymorph Any Object two or three times to turn you into a red or silver dragon and give yourself awsome physical stats, 1200+ year old dragons are fully grown and scary!

[Azraile]

+37 competence (Extract Gift spell, FCI, robbing an Atropal of its knowledge)

O.o

GOOD GOD

A that would cost 1,369,000 gold... 136.9 TONS of gold.... O.o

and B... that deamon would just out right OWN you x.x