E6 Party Artificer Wish List

[Black_Zawisza]

Whisper Gnome Factotum
Human Crusader
Human Psion
Gnome Cleric
Dwarf Artificer (me)

Most of the other players are playing pretty sub-optimally, and I want to use my power to balance out the party and make sure everyone always has something interesting and fun to do. To that end, I want to focus on party buffing and item crafting. Our net worth as a party is roughly 1700gp. What are good items to craft in an E6 environment (with an important caveat: hard caster level requirements on items don't exist), now and in the future?

[Tvtyrant]

Bag of tricks! You can get a summon that doesn't disappear in a single turn! (kidding).

[Alienist]

Item of +UMD for yourself
Beads of karma for your cleric buddy
Beat stick for the crusader
The psion is out of luck for the most part
Not sure about the whispergnome factorum... Are you sure that's suboptimal?

At low levels scrolls and pots
Lvl 3-4 you can maybe fit 1 item in each
Lvl 5 is arms and armour and maybe a homunculus or two

[Alienist]

Bag of tricks! You can get a summon that doesn't disappear in a single turn! (kidding).

I like the various amber amulets for that

[Black_Zawisza]

Item of +UMD for yourself
Beads of karma for your cleric buddy
Beat stick for the crusader
The psion is out of luck for the most part
Not sure about the whispergnome factorum... Are you sure that's suboptimal?

At low levels scrolls and pots
Lvl 3-4 you can maybe fit 1 item in each
Lvl 5 is arms and armour and maybe a homunculus or two
Thanks for the suggestions! I was the one who suggested she play a Whisper Gnome Factotum. She's kind of new, so I've been trying to help her along.

[RaggedAngel]

Thanks for the suggestions! I was the one who suggested she play a Whisper Gnome Factotum. She's kind of new, so I've been trying to help her along.

Just remember that using a Gnomish Quickrazor is a fairly difficult thing to pull off when you're getting used to flatfooted rules and things like that. She may not be going that route, but if she is you can craft her a +Iajutsu Focus magic item, and you can use Wands of Grease to help her set up attacks.

[Mystify]

When possible, infusing bane is highly effective. And anything else enemy specific, given the chance.

[Alienist]

When possible, infusing bane is highly effective. And anything else enemy specific, given the chance.

Bane is both better than it looks at first, and worse.

You might look at Bane and go, oh yes, it's like those other things that add 1d6 except it adds 2d6. Right?

But wait! There's more! It also adds +2 enhancement bonus, which is worth roughly another half a d6 (not to mention hitting 10% more often). So the whole stack is worth like ~3d6 extra damage.

Unfortunately, how good it is depends on your research and/or ability to outguess the DM.

Examples
Your mission: attacking a goblin encampment. They may also have Wargs. If you selected humanoid - goblinoid as the bane, then you picked the wrong one. Additionally, the 'boss monster' may not even be a goblin.

You research a dungeon and find out that there are 'lots' of fire elementals. So you go for bane elementals. But what if 'lots' is only 40%? Or 30%?


Magic Item suggestions:
Level 1 scrolls
Level 2 potions (or level 2 scrolls like Knock, Invisibility, auto-pass ridiculously hard skill checks etc.)
Level 3 wondrous items
Level 4 more wondrous items
Level 5 arms and armour
Level 6 wands. Ohhhhh yeaaahhhhh.

At level 6 you can shove 4th level spells on wands, this alone is pretty amazing (no one else can do this, only Artificers) but it gets better. I haven't triple checked the fine print, but your cleric buddy should be able to use these
Break Enchantment, Dispel Evil, Flamestrike, Mark of Justice, Scrying
Which are fifth level cleric spells, but that come in 4th level flavour so you can put them on a wand.

At level 3 you get some interesting choices.
Don't make Healing Belts!!!

Yes, Healing Belts are awesome, but that is partly because WotC screwed up the price of them. Might as well buy them off the shelf.

At 3rd level one of the things you can make is Necklace of Fireballs. Now you've previously probably done the maths on the NoF and decided that it is sucktacular compared to say a Wand of Fireballs.

At third level however, not only can you not make a wand of Fireballs, but any scroll that you did make would be less effective (it would cost the same as a caster level 5 scroll, but only have the oomph of a caster level 3 fireball (e.g. you only get 3d6).

What this means is that at level 3 as an Artificer it actually kind of makes sense to look at this, because price-wise it is in the ballpark of a scroll of fireballs.

And, unlike your scrolls, other people can actually use the necklace without making a UMD roll.

Speaking of UMD, check out the second level Bard spell Magic Savant. (Credit to Hober Mallow for this idea)

You gain a +4 insight bonus on Use Magic Device checks.
If you have 10 or more ranks in Use Magic Device, you can take 10 on Use Magic Device checks, even if the situation wouldn't normally allow you to do so.

Now, there's the rub, getting to 10 ranks would normally require level 7, but if you're up with the play on the whole quick-razor thing that shouldn't be a big deal.

In any case, if the DM balks at custom UMD devices, there's an easy and relatively cheap one to make. (Bonus: it lasts 1 round per level)

Plus as soon as you tick over to that 10th rank in UMD suddenly all your class features get a lot easier (or at least far more reliable) to use.

Now... although it is normally cheese incarnate, an item familiar for an Artificer who is spending his or her XP to make items for other players in the party is not unreasonable. Just make sure the 10% extra XP gets spent on items for other people and no one should complain.

You should establish with your DM earlier rather than later what kind of cost reductions should apply.

If you're in Eberron and hanging around Sharn you should consider joining either of the Magic Guilds, unless you're evil (there was a third guild that was shall we say 'pragmatic' aligned, and the other guys joined forces to wipe them out Silver-flame style).

The annual fees are outrageous, but the 10% discount on item prices is pretty good.

I recommend against playing with the optional 'class and skill' cost reductions to magic items, it makes them sufficiently cheap as to pretty much ruin the game.

For feats and reducing, my priorities are XP, time and lastly money. The thing with money is that you're spending other people's money when you make items for them, so 80% of the time it doesn't matter. Whereas time and XP always matter. Time more so as you start making bigger and bigger items.

[Mystify]

Bane is both better than it looks at first, and worse.

You might look at Bane and go, oh yes, it's like those other things that add 1d6 except it adds 2d6. Right?

But wait! There's more! It also adds +2 enhancement bonus, which is worth roughly another half a d6 (not to mention hitting 10% more often). So the whole stack is worth like ~3d6 extra damage.

Unfortunately, how good it is depends on your research and/or ability to outguess the DM.

Examples
Your mission: attacking a goblin encampment. They may also have Wargs. If you selected humanoid - goblinoid as the bane, then you picked the wrong one. Additionally, the 'boss monster' may not even be a goblin.

You research a dungeon and find out that there are 'lots' of fire elementals. So you go for bane elementals. But what if 'lots' is only 40%? Or 30%?

Bane is a +4 enchantment for the price of a +1. Hence, if you can reliably nail 3 types of creatures to bane, you will still come out ahead. I beleive infusing +3 levels is an option, but I'm too lazy to check the specifics.

however, the return/cost is great if you can manage to pin it correctly.

This makes scouting(magical or otherwise) very useful. The infusions are an extremely potent boost when used correctly. They last for a long time, but their casting time makes it infeasible to do in-combat without action points.

One trick I found is the etherealness enchantment. It lets the user cast ethereal jaunt, a 7th level spell, once per day. Its a 3rd level infusion. Not only that, but its even more powerful than the spell. Etherealness lasts as long as you want. You can argue that it will stop when the infusion runs out, but that is still 10min/level, compared to ethereal jaunt's 1 round/level.
And to top it all off, the infusion specifically names ethearealness as a valid enchantment to infuse.

[Alienist]

For the second level armour infusion you can get some of the best (low level) healing in the game. The awesome thing is it automatically kicks in if you drop below 0 hp