[3.5]How would this effect game balance?

[Eighthling]

How do you think giving full, unrestricted casters (so wizard, sorcerer, cleric etc, not beguiler, dread necro, and co.)the artificers infusion progression (with carries/orisons added in) for spells would effect the tier/power level of those casters?
EDIT: meant to put this in 3.x :( what should I just leave it or...

[Morcleon]

Cleric, Favored Soul, Sorcerer, Wizard, and Wu Jen drop down to mid tier 3. Since they only get 6th level spells, their spellcasting is on par with Bard, but they also get practically no other class features, and a poor chassis.

Druid only drops down to high tier 3, since it still can do Wildshape.

This now leaves Artificer and Erudite as tier 1, and Psion and Binder (w/ Zceryll) as tier 2. Also, a large portion of high level spells have been removed from the game, making Artificer and Warlock the only classes who can craft many of the magic items.

[Requiem_Jeer]

Psst, Morcleon. Artificers get 6th level infusions.

[Morcleon]

Psst, Morcleon. Artificers get 6th level infusions.

Fixed that. :smallredface:

[noob]

no artificier can no longer craft high level stuff since they can craft things by choosing their magic progression so they can choose to craft like any caster but since casters can cast only spells inferior to 6 he can not craft them except with
1:Ur priest
2:Divine crusader
3:that bard prc who gave ninth level spells very fast.
But maybe the thread creator wanted to ban them too.

[Morcleon]

no artificier can no longer craft high level stuff since they can craft things by choosing their magic progression so they can choose to craft like any caster but since casters can cast only spells inferior to 6 he can not craft them except with
1:Ur priest
2:Divine crusader
3:that bard prc who gave ninth level spells very fast.
But maybe the thread creator wanted to ban them too.

I see nothing in artificer that requires them to select a casting class in order to craft items as that caster. They may select any spell, so long as they meet the UMD check and the CL requirement.

Also, you can still get 9th level spells with artificer, you just need a much higher check than usual, as you can only get 7th, 8th, and 9th level spells at level 21, 22, and 23 respectively.

[Brova]

So the Artificer gets new levels of infusions at 1st/3rd/5th/8th/11th/14th. That means casters are essentially unchanged up to 5th, somewhat weaker up to 14th, and fairly weak past that point. Honestly, for a lot of campaigns its just not a debuff at all. If your game goes up to 8th or even 10th, casters are going to be basically on par with normal. Hell, they aren't even delayed access to PrCs (hell, Sorcerers get it sooner - this is actually a buff for them). A Cleric is still going to rock people's socks off in this world. He can take initiate of mystra, Dweomerkeeper, and rock out with permanent buffs in an antimagic field. Wizards are similarly okay, a couple of 5/10 PrCs might be relatively less bad because you still get casting up to your highest level. That lowered cost to lost caster levels also makes Prestige Bard from a kind of decent option for Beguilers to totally nuts. You get to double your spell list, and it no longer bumps you a full level behind other casters (if I was playing this I would play Beguiler 5/Mindbender 1/Rainbow Servant 1/Prestige Bard 1 close to 100% of the time). Sorcerers get a buff because they're no longer behind Wizards, but they still cry because they can't take non-combat or niche spells.

TL;DR - Spontaneous casters get better, so do PrCs that drop a casting level.

Honestly though, the problem has never really been that full casters were "too good", it's been that non casters suck and there are broken spells. Hitting casters with the nerfing stick is kind of pointless.

[dream]

This should be in the 3.5 sub-forum :smallsmile:

[Brova]

This should be in the 3.5 sub-forum :smallsmile:

Yah, can a mod move this?

[Anonymouswizard]

High level casters are brought down to lower tiers, as previously mentioned, because they lose access to their best spells, although not all the really good or useful ones. This doesn't solve the basic problem of mundanes being boring, but it reduces caster supremacy (but not particularly, magicians can still do a variety of stuff well and have more loopholes to exploit than mundane classes). It also makes pure casters such as the Wizard, Cleric, and Sorcerer rather boring, and you'd probably want to add some class features to compensate (let the sorcerer have a number of 'free' levels of metamagic per day and wizard bonus feats? It would make me happy to give up wizard for a campaign).

[Brova]

High level casters are brought down to lower tiers, as previously mentioned, because they lose access to their best spells, although not all the really good or useful ones.

Honestly, casters don't really lose that big. They still get dominate person, planar binding, polymorph, antimagic field, awaken, and animate dead. That's just core. And a caster can still be an Incantatrix, or take DMM, or have a mirror mephit familiar, or any number of other broken things.


It also makes pure casters such as the Wizard, Cleric, and Sorcerer rather boring, and you'd probably want to add some class features to compensate (let the sorcerer have a number of 'free' levels of metamagic per day and wizard bonus feats? It would make me happy to give up wizard for a campaign).

Not really. You're forgetting that the levels of Wizard, Cleric, and Sorcerer past where you get 3rd level spells don't exist because then you PrC into something with class features. While it is totally true that those classes need some class features past 1st, this variant doesn't really make that worse. In fact, it makes it better for Sorcerers because they can PrC out sooner.