[3.5] Artificer: fix or ban?

[RealMarkP]

A player of mine wants to play a Dwarven Artificer in an upcoming all-dwarven campaign. The idea fits so well, that I'm almost tempted to allow him. However, the campaign will be low-magic and aimed at roughly tier 4, which would make the Artificer rather over powered. I'd like to explore ideas on how to nerf this class but keep it playable and fun.

1. How does the Pathfinder version of the Artificer compare to the 3.5e version? Is it less powerful? Can it be brought down to tier 3/4?
2. Are there any homebrew rewrites of the Artificer that balance it more?
3. Could you suggest any nerfs to the class in general?

The class comes form the Eberron campaign setting, which we won't be playing in. This is a big enough excuse for a rewrite or ban of the class.

[NM020110]

Hmmm...several suggestions to bring it down a bit.

1.) Reduce the xp pool. If the player has to spend their own experience to create items, there should be fewer magic items and more mundane items.

2.) Change it such that the artificer can emulate spells for item crafting as a primary caster of its level, instead of its level +2. This should curb things on that front, a little.

3.) Remove the feats allowing the crafting of spell completion items (wands, scrolls, staves) from the artificer progression, making them require feats to be taken.

4.) Remove that one infusion that allows you to imbue items with spells temporarily.

It might be a bit far, and someone trying could probably still do a lot with it, but without abuse I'd put an artificer with those changes on around the same level as a dread necromancer.

[Piggy Knowles]

I don't know anything about the Pathfinder version, but Artificers Become a lot easier to deal with if you remove retain essence, and you are not playing with XP as a river. (In my own games, I like to think of XP as a creek or maybe a babbling brook - you'll catch up eventually, but you can't do things like start at a lower level to nab more XP for crafting.)

Also, not allowing Dedicated Wrights in a portable hole makes a big difference - instead of constantly churning out new items, they'll focus on a select few and use their infusions to augment them on a day to day basis.

They are still a solid tier 3 character bordering on tier 2 with just Infusions and their base crafting abilities, and are still open to abuse, but that tames them by a good bit.

[RealMarkP]

I should have mentioned that I house ruled XP cost. It's converted into a flat gold cost instead; basically, like the Pathfinder system. Removing Retain Essence is probably the first thing I was going to do. Another idea I had was to force the Artificer to specialize into creating items, constructs, or potions. Maybe even curb the spells they know by having them specialize in either divine, nature, or arcane spells?

[lord_khaine]

Artificer is actualy a pretty hard class to play to its full potential, unless you are dealing with a really experienced player, then i would recomend you just implemented this suggestion, and didnt do anything else.


2.) Change it such that the artificer can emulate spells for item crafting as a primary caster of its level, instead of its level +2. This should curb things on that front, a little.


Of course, you might also want to ban the persistance metamagic feat, just on principle.

[Answerer]

the campaign will be low-magic
I hope you have already re-written large portions of the system to account for that. Because 3.x is incredibly high magic and the system does not work well if you just remove magic and call it a day. It's an incredibly fundamental change.

That said, starting by banning almost all decent spellcasters is a decent start. Now you have to worry about how on earth they're going to handle all the myriad challenges in the system that require magic...


2. Are there any homebrew rewrites of the Artificer that balance it more?
I like this one (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?t=146315), though I suspect it does not drop all the way to Tier 4.