Homebrew Character Class: OP, or very OP?

[Reogan]

So my DM allowed me to play a homebrew character class called the Cultivator. It gains spells as an Archivist, but surrenders Dark Knowledge for Artificer item crafting and bonus feat acquisition. That is, it's an Artificer whose infusions are replaced by Archivist spells.

Except it's also a high-magic campaign, so I get all my item creation feats a level earlier.

Except it's so high-magic that magic items cost 80% list price, which means that after feats, it costs me 30% list price to make anything.

How does this rate on the power scale? What fun can I have with it?

(P.S. This DM nerfed Planar Shepherd because he felt it was too powerful. Is this consistent?)

[JoshuaZ]

The Archivist is already T1 without any item crafting stuff, and the Dark Knowledge class feature of an archivist is nice (effectively an almost always on set of party buffs) but doesn't really alter their power level that much. The potential power level here could be very high. But it may help to keep in mind that the main thing that makes an archivist get a lot of their versatility is access to scrolls. If there aren't many of those accessible in setting, the power level will go down. But in a high magic setting that shouldn't be an issue.

[bekeleven]

Yep. It's not quite gestalting Tier 1 classes, but... maybe 1.5 of them?

[JaronK]

Pretty sure that combo means you can just make scrolls of any spell you want instantly and thus learn them instantly. So, take all the best spells ever from basically every list so long as it exists as a divine spell anywhere (which most do, once we factor in things like the Arcane Disciple variant Cleric from Dragon Magazine, the Divine Bard, the Hexer PrC, and so on).

So yes, stupidly powerful.

JaronK

[eggynack]

He probably shouldn't be buffing tier one classes at all, and he is, but power is relative, and this shouldn't break the game too badly in a tier one game. It's not like these changes aren't important, but they're not going to blow anyone's face clean off with sheer power differential. Nerfing planar shepherd at the same time is not inconsistent, because planar shepherd is utterly ridiculous in most conceivable ways, and this power boost is nowhere near that one.

Edit: Misread that as regular item crafting feat gains. Yeah, that's pretty powerful. Still probably not as powerful as a planar shepherd, but still.

[Roguenewb]

OP is OP; nerf plz. I'm literally incapable of thinking of something that class can't do. Enjoy buddy.

[Chronos]

So you're taking the best features of the two most overpowered classes in the game, buffing one of them up even further, and then combining them in a way that's particularly synergistic? Yeah, that looks fine to me.

[JoshuaZ]

Pretty sure that combo means you can just make scrolls of any spell you want instantly and thus learn them instantly.

That is a really good point. So there won't be even then the restriction of the archivist having to search for spells. Yeah, this is very easily extremely broken.

[Chronos]

Actually, come to think of it, the errata specified that scrolls made by artificers are neither arcane nor divine, and can be used only via UMD. Warlock scrolls still have the exploit, though.