3.x - Worst Possible Artificer?

[unseenmage]

What does the build for the worst possible artificer look like
AND
is it at all significantly less powerful/versatile than a regular artificer with the same number of artificer class levels?

What choices have to be made to reverse optimize said badificer? Least optimal race? Worst gear? (pure gp is still.super versatile so spending it poorly is still important)

How can we make the best class suck the most?

[Telonius]

What does the build for the worst possible artificer look like
AND
is it at all significantly less powerful/versatile than a regular artificer with the same number of artificer class levels?

What choices have to be made to reverse optimize said badificer? Least optimal race? Worst gear? (pure gp is still.super versatile so spending it poorly is still important)

How can we make the best class suck the most?

Feat: Vow of Poverty.

Intelligence: 9.

[liquidformat]

Feat: Vow of Poverty.

Intelligence: 9.

Vow of Poverty on a feral half-ogre
Intelligence: 3.

[unseenmage]

Does VoP prevent the use of found or donated single use items like scrolls and wands?

[Mike Miller]

Vow of Poverty on a feral half-ogre
Intelligence: 3.

All remaining feats: Toughness

[daremetoidareyo]

Blood artisan from OA update found in dragon 318. everything you make is cursed.

[unseenmage]

Am not real sure VoP keeps the artificer from using borrowed tools to charitably create equips for others either.

[liquidformat]

Does VoP prevent the use of found or donated single use items like scrolls and wands?

yes it explicitly does prevent you from casting them yourself but not recieving the benefits of them:



To fulfill your vow, you must not own or use any material possessions, with the following exceptions: You may carry and use ordinary (neither magic nor masterwork) simple weapons, usually just a quarterstaff that serves as a walking stick. You may wear simple clothes (usually just a homespun robe, possibly also including a hat and sandals) with no magical properties. You may carry enough food to sustain you for one day in a simple (nonmagic) sack or bag. You may carry and use a spell component pouch. You may not use any magic item of any sort, though you can benefit from magic items used on your behalf—you can drink a potion of cure serious wounds a friend gives you, receive a spell cast from a wand, scroll, or staff, or ride on your companion's ebony fly. You may not, however, "borrow" a cloak of resistance or any other magic item from a companion for even a single round, nor may you yourself cast a spell from a scroll, wand, or staff. If you break your vow, you immediately and irrevocably lose the benefit of this feat. You may not take another feat to replace it.

[Kelb_Panthera]

Feat: Vow of Poverty.

Intelligence: 9.

This is the correct answer. It prevents you from using literally -all- of your class features except disable trap. VoP says you can never have or use most things, including all magic items, and int 9 kills your infusions. You're just a pile of HD and the related values.

You can make something comparatively better or worse than something else once you've knocked out those two details but as long as they're both in place, everything past that is just splitting hairs.

[AvatarVecna]

Player>Build>Class. The easiest way to suck as an artificer is to, as the player, refuse to build items or use infusions. Refusing to use your class features, incidentally, is a fine tactic for making the worst possible iteration of any class.

If the goal, instead, is to build an artificer in such a way that you could hand the build to a player who knows how to optimize and have them have a bad time, you've got a few things you can do:

1) Race: Vril (DotU 126). +2 Con/-2 Int/-2 Cha. Small size. Light blindness. Vulnerability to poison. Common as neither a base language nor a racial bonus language.

2) 32 point-buy should go into 18/18/8/8/8/8. Become Venerable for 12/12/4/9/11/9 after racial adjustment. Never let Int be higher than 10, so infusions are never an option.

3) No more than UMD -1 ever. This prevents them from crafting items requiring spellcasting as part of their creation (also known as "all magic items"). No ranks in craft skills prevents them from crafting any non-magic items too.

4) Take the flaws "Weak Will" and "Pathetic Wisdom". Take the "Brawler" and "Illiterate" traits; blow your free +1 on some obscure profession.

5) Spend all the feats you can on "Skill Focus: [some obscure profession]".

6) All skill points get invested one rank per obscure profession; ideally, these shouldn't overlap with the Skill Focus feats.

7) Artificer bonus feats should be spent on lame and/or circumstantial metamagic feats. You can use them with wands by burning through charges, and you can use them with scrolls if you make a hard UMD check (only possible if you get a boost from somewhere). Enlarge Spell, Rapid Spell, Ghost Touch Spell, Earthbound Spell, and Fell Frighten are all pretty good for this goal.

This character can't speak Common, and can't read at all. He can't make items that replicate spells or involves spells in the creation thereof, and can't make mundane items, but if he's got the base item already crafted by somebody else. He's got 1d6-3 (min 1) HP per HD, crap armor class (no dex, but no heavy armor proficiency), only simple weapon proficiency (and limited to small weapons), has no better than a +1 in any useful skill, and no better than +5 in any skill. Even if he's handed wands/scrolls/etc by somebody else, it's likely he either can't use his metamagic feats with them, or can but they're garbage not worth the resources...just like him! He takes a penalty on any attack that isn't unarmed or grappling...as a small character who isn't a monk. At lvl 20, he'd have +3/+7/+9 saves before items.

And even at the end of all of this...he's still probably got a few things on commoners. Medium BAB, a decent Will save past the mid-levels, and hell maybe he can buy a wand for a spell that's actually worth using with some of his metamagics. But he'll never be even remotely good at anything.

EDIT: "Why not VoP?" Because if you handed a VoP artificer to somebody, step one is breaking their vow. What do they care? And if the goal of the thread is finding somebody who is going to intentionally play the character badly, you don't need to hamstring the build for the character to suck in-game, the player will take care of that by playing badly, even if they've got a perfect build and straight 18s pre-race. Better to build a character who couldn't build items even if they wanted to.

[ChudoJogurt]

Can one get and break Vow of Poverty repeatedly?
That could be a way to waste even more feats.

[liquidformat]

Can one get and break Vow of Poverty repeatedly?
That could be a way to waste even more feats.

based on my reading of the feat once you break your vow you can never take it again nor get it back.

[SirNibbles]

You can just choose a race with a ridiculous LA/RHD that doesn't give an artificer much, like Stone Giant (14 RHD and +4 LA).

[daremetoidareyo]

on top of blood artisan, you could take extract demon essence and have a 10% chance of making items double cursed.

DOUBLe CURSeD!

[liquidformat]

on top of blood artisan, you could take extract demon essence and have a 10% chance of making items double cursed.

DOUBLe CURSeD!

To be fair cursed items can be quite useful...

[unseenmage]

You can just choose a race with a ridiculous LA/RHD that doesn't give an artificer much, like Stone Giant (14 RHD and +4 LA).

This is why I added that bit about the worst with the same number of artificer levels.

Because therwise clearly the worst artificer is a fighter with zero artificer levels.

[liquidformat]

This is why I added that bit about the worst with the same number of artificer levels.

Because therwise clearly the worst artificer is a fighter with zero artificer levels.

wouldn't a commoner with zero artificer levels be 'worse' than a fighter?...

[unseenmage]

wouldn't a commoner with zero artificer levels be 'worse' than a fighter?...

Nah. Commoners dont lull players into a false sense of security before cruelly not competing with fullcasters at higher levels. :smallbiggrin:

[Kelb_Panthera]

Can one get and break Vow of Poverty repeatedly?
That could be a way to waste even more feats.

Definitely not. Generally, you can only take a feat once unless it's noted otherwise in the feat description. There are, however, several more vows you can take and all of them have the clause to the effect of being unable to restore their benefits if you break them voluntarily.

[Telonius]

wouldn't a commoner with zero artificer levels be 'worse' than a fighter?...

If you can't solve a problem with an arbitrarily large number of chickens, you're not trying. :smallbiggrin:

[liquidformat]

If you can't solve a problem with an arbitrarily large number of chickens, you're not trying. :smallbiggrin:

True, they are the most dangerous thing known to dnd humanoid kind after all...

[ExLibrisMortis]

You can burn your craft reserve on scrolls of embrace the dark chaos/shun the dark chaos to shuffle all your artificer bonus feats into more obscure Skill Focus (profession) feats. That's about the only way I can think of to "improve" AvatarVecna's build. You would need someone else to do the actual crafting, of course--you can provide XP and GP only--so there will be additional GP costs to take into account, reducing available WBL.

[nedz]

You can burn your craft reserve on scrolls of embrace the dark chaos/shun the dark chaos to shuffle all your artificer bonus feats into more obscure Skill Focus (profession) feats. That's about the only way I can think of to "improve" AvatarVecna's build. You would need someone else to do the actual crafting, of course--you can provide XP and GP only--so there will be additional GP costs to take into account, reducing available WBL.

Something like:
Obtain Familiar, Improved Familiar and then grab a Disenchanter as a pet.

[unseenmage]

Hm. Are there any diseases or curses one could become saddled with to further drop their artificer potentiality?

[AvatarVecna]

Hm. Are there any diseases or curses one could become saddled with to further drop their artificer potentiality?

Ooh, now there's an idea! Okay so building on previous build just with stuff from the SRD (http://www.d20srd.org/srd/magicItems/cursedItems.htm#specificCursedItems)...

Boots Of Dancing
Bracers Of Defenselessness
Stone Of Weight
Cursed -2 Sword (medium-sized)

All of these items can only be gotten rid of with Remove Curse, really. Altogether, you're looking at AC -9, Attack -6, Ref -10, half normal speed, unable to use any weapon besides the Medium-sized Martial weapon, and they provoke AoOs every round.

EDIT: Diseases are probably a mixed bag; most will eventually kill you unless you resist, and any way of avoiding the eventual death is probably going to avoid getting affected by it much at all.

[Zaq]

Are infusions enough like spellcasting that flubbing the Will save after using disjunction on an artifact would rob you of them? Because that could be a thing.

[ranagrande]

A low-int Ghost Artificer would be pretty bad. With an intelligence lower than 10 it can't use infusions, and it can't do any of the crafting and item usage because it's incorporeal.

[unseenmage]

...
EDIT: Diseases are probably a mixed bag; most will eventually kill you unless you resist, and any way of avoiding the eventual death is probably going to avoid getting affected by it much at all.

Is there any Lycanthrope or similarly monstrous transformational disease (ablleth mucus maybe?) that would make one less powerful?

*casts Bite of the Were-Suck, bites self*

[AvatarVecna]

Is there any Lycanthrope or similarly monstrous transformational disease (ablleth mucus maybe?) that would make one less powerful?

*casts Bite of the Were-Suck, bites self*

Honestly...not really. Templates, particularly acquired ones, are generally of the "improves you" type. Nobody puts effort into becoming worse. One of the classic exceptions is actually undead templates in general - most undead are categorically weaker post-template, but the template was applied so that a necromancer could control and buff them without having to deal with whiny party members. But a necromancer in a party of PCs usually doesn't need to rely on "murder and animate everybody" tactics because PCs you can trust are just objectively better than zombies/skeletons you directly control, just because even if you're a fighter, PC levels are awesome...of course, the key word there is "usually", and that's mostly what I'm making this post for. If you turned a noncaster type - rogue, barbarian, fighter, even a monk - into a skeleton or zombie, they're far less competent than they were before. But for this guy...

Bob The Worst Artificer goes from 1d6-3 to 1d12 HP per HD. Bob gains +1 Natural Armor, a natural attack he's automatically proficient with, and Damage Reduction. Bob also has lost his Light Blindness, and it no longer matters that bob can't speak or write because Bob receives commands mentally. Being unintelligent removes Bob's feats and flaws; between losing Weak Will flaw, his base saves remaining the same, and his lack of a Con penalty, Bob's Fort and Will saves have skyrocketed - to say nothing of undead immunities protecting him from all kinds of nasty things! In fact, if you made Bob into a skeleton, he'd get Improved Initiative as a bonus feat, one of the best Core feats that isn't inherently magical. The only way that Bob is directly worse is BAB, but he only gets one attack anyway, and if he was made a Zombie, he had double HD for massive BAB/Save gains (and an unfortunate hit in the action economy). And both templates get a slight boost to Str/Dex, Bob's best stats!

This is the sad fact of Bob's existence: even without suffering from a pile of cursed items or diseases, even with a theoretical +5 to some obscure profession, he's still got such garbage HP and such a garbage attack routine that a party member could seriously look at him and think "he'd objectively be more useful dead". Bob is so terrible that even the Skeleton and Zombie templates are direct and obvious upgrades in almost every conceivable way.

[unseenmage]

A poorly built tier 1/tier 0 character is worse than just playing a monster right out of the book.

That seems about right.