Librim Eternia: Tome of Epic Prestige (Completed)

[AvatarVecna]

I recently attempted to build a Grand Creator, and came to a rather stunning realization.

Caged Miracles is broken.

Not Broken as in 'this ability is so strong it shatters any semblance of game balance' but broken as in 'this ability has a fundamental flaw which renders it non-functional'. Bad Broken.

First, the text of the ability

Spoiler: Caged Miracles (Su)

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Starting at 2nd level, a grand creator can perform the otherwise impossible and create items that utilize or imitate epic spells. Doing so isn’t cheap, however, for the spell’s gp cost to develop is used in place of [caster level x spell level] when calculating the price of the item. The grand creator must make a successful spellcraft check when creating the item but people using epic spells in scrolls and similar sources need not make such a check. A grand creator may have up to one such epic item in creation at a time at 2nd level and one additional such item every 5 levels afterwards. Creating such items beyond this limit disenchants another item of the grand creator’s choice. Epic spells written onto scrolls can’t be copied into spellbooks.

On the surface, it seems straightforward and appropriate. An Epic Item Crafter can make gear with Epic Spells, sounds perfect. But it isnt.

Lets start with an example. Suppose that We take a 30th level Grand Creator, and they decide they want to make a scroll that casts an epic spell. The formula for the price of the magic item is [Spell Development DC x 9000] x [Item type multiplier]. So for a scroll (or any single use spell completion item), that formula is 25 x Spell Development DC x 9000 gp.

So with our 30th level crafter wants to make a scroll, and lets not be greedy, and say the epic spell has a DC of 30. This is pretty low, all things considered. At 30th level, a crafter could reliably make epic spells with DC's closer to 50 or 60. But again, keep it simple. So DC 30 into the formula gives the result of 6,750,000 GP. WOW That is a LOT. But thankfully, that is the price of the item. The cost to create the item is only half of that (as per normal crafting rules), so that drops it down to only 3,375,000 GP.

3,375,000 GP is crazy. At level 30, the WBL is expected to be around 4,300,000 GP. So for a mere 78.5% of your expected wealth, you get a single scroll that can cast a spell once. That is NOT ok. Even if you only intended to ever cast the spell once, you'd be better off just researching the spell normally. Doing so would only cost 270,000 GP, and afterwards you would know the epic spell Forever and be able to cast it multiple times per day, if you felt like it.

Now, I suspect some people will point out that if you are playing a dedicated crafter, you'd probably have access to feats and items and effects that work to reduce the cost of item crafting. Its kind of par for the course. So then, perhaps the expectation is that any Grand Creator worth their Golems would already have those effects in place to bring the cost down?

I'll go into the math on that in a second, but before I do, I think that argument is flawed. Class features should not be designed so that the Expectation is that the player will have to optimize themselves just to use them. Nobody looks at RAW truenamer and says its good build design. And this should be doubly true when applied to the already broken optimization that can be brought about via crafting and WBL manipulation.

But lets try it anyway, just to check. Using The Cost Reduction Handbook and stacking every applicable modifier to cut costs down, we get a reduction (after already applying the 50% reduction for crafting it ourselves) of 90% (Item Requires Specific Skill) x 70% (Item requires a specific class or alignment) x 90% (Apprentice (Craftsman) Feat) x 75% (Extraordinary Artisan) x 80% (Binding a colossal elemental) x 75% (Magical Artisan) x 90% (Guild Membership) x 95% (Favored In Guild) = 21.82%.

So with excessive build design, we can reduce the cost by 21.82%. Pretty good! And furthermore, Grand Creator gets to select 8 epic spell seeds which reduces the cost to develop spells with that seed by half. Lets make sure our scroll uses one of those!

Applying all these benefits we get the following scroll cost.

[DC 30 x 9000 x 0.5 (Spell seed reduction)] x 25GP (Scroll) x 0.5 (Crafting) x 0.2182 (Crafting cost reduction) = 368,212.5 GP. That is a significant improvement from the initial 3,375,000 GP. But, and I want to stress this, It doesn't matter. Because even though 368,212.5 GP is a lot cheaper, if we apply the spell seed reduction to the cost of developing the epic spell instead of making the caged miracle, it'd only cost [DC 30 x 9000 x 0.5 (Spell seed reduction)] = 135,000 GP.

Even with all the reduction and optimization, making a caged miracle of a spell costs 2.73 times as much as just researching it. And in fact, it will Always be the case that a caged miracle costs more (often much much more) than the cost of just researching and developing an epic spell. Because the cost of the caged miracle uses [cost of development] as an element in the formula, no matter how much item crafting cost reduction you can apply, it will never decrease the cost of development to lower than the cost of just researching. Stacking additional cost reduction multipliers (like the simple miracle epic feat) won't change that.

If C is the cost of a caged miracle, X is the cost of researching an epic spell, and Y is the product of the item type and all cost reduction multipliers, than it follows that C=X*Y, and that C=X if and only if Y=1.

Remember also, this math was done with the cheapest possible item to make. In a real game, a PC would probably want to make items that aren't single use, ideally being either at will or at least a limited number of times per day, especially since you can only have a (Grand Creator Level / 5) Caged miracle items at a time. I wont bother writing it all out, but making an item with 1/day use of a DC 30 epic spell as a caged miracle ends up costing 26,511,300 GP, which is 196.38 times the cost of researching that same spell and over 6 times the expected wealth by level.

Caged Miracle is broken, it does not work. It is a class feature which is mathematically less effective than just not using it.

I don't really have a great solution at this time. My best suggestion would be to make the formula for caged miracles [Item Type Multiplier] x 5 x [Epic Spell Development DC^2]. I arrived at this by looking at the different item types cost as a factor of wealth by level and saw that there was a consistant pattern, and used that to extrapolate out to epic levels. It results in caged miracles being comparable to magic items using 10th level spells or higher. You may find this cost to low, but I would argue that it should be low, because the number of caged miracles that a Grand Creator can have is already limited by level. It would be unfair to also limit it to a High expenditure of GP.

Caged Miracle is too expensive to use normally in any optimal way, otherwise known as "the primary problem with all epic spellcasting". Of course, this is the one class where it's less problematic, because not only can you build epic spells into items, you can build temporary items that take 0% normal gp, 0% normal XP, and 0.69% normal time to craft (and separately, your crafting speed multiplies by 10 every 5 levels, and is explicitly supposed to make that temporary crafting stronger). And the only real limit is your spellcraft bonus.

[spoiler=Examples]Lvl 26, you have 29 ranks, +15 from Int, item familiar for +29, and a +30 item for Spellcraft, and taking 10 via artificer. Crafting speed is x100 from Grand Creator, x4/3 from Exceptional Artisan, and...let's end it there, actually. Epic spells are effectively 10th lvl spells, so crafting some kinda item with an epic spell in it will have a starting Wondercraft DC of 30 going up 1 per round after. Assuming you stop once taking 10 would no longer meet the DC, you get 84 rounds of crafting at a rate of 133,333 gp worth per round. Final worth of the temporary magic item is 11,200,000 gp, and epic spells cost 4500 per DC to craft from your primary seeds.

11.2 mil can be a scroll of up to ~DC 99 epic spell.

Lvl 31, you have 34 ranks, +20 from Int, item familiar for +34, and a +60 item for Spellcraft (epic items making boosting this so much easier). Crafting speed is x1000 from Grand Creator, x4/3 from Exceptional Artisan. DC climbs until it hits 158 and then you stop, giving you 129 rounds of crafting at a rate of 1,333,333 gp worth per round. Final worth of this temporary item is 172,000,000 gp.

172 mil can be:

• Scroll up to DC 1528
• 50-charge wand up to DC 50

Lvl 36, you have 39 ranks, +30 from Int, item familiar for +39, and a +100 item for spellcraft (epic crafting gets nuts quickly). Yada yada DC yada yada craft rate yada yada item's final worth is 2.52 billion gp. That takes 19 minutes to craft and lasts either 190 or 1900 minutes, btw.

2.52 billion gp is an at-will use-activated item of an epic spell of up to DC 280. It is, alternatively, an item of +500 to one attribute, or 96 pearls of power for every spell level up to 20th, if that's your preference instead.

Past this point, Wondercraft basically makes the game unplayable - either you're a Grand Creator creating a pile of "temporary" magic items worth more than the planet's weight in gold, or you're not. The only reason the examples go so high into the levels is because Caged Miracles is expensive even for Wondercrafting. Because the example I didn't do is lvl 21.

Lvl 21, you got 24 ranks, Int +10, no item familiar, and a +30 magic item. You'll get at least 46 rounds of crafting if you're not making an epic spell, and that's at least 10000 gp per round, for a final temporary item worth 460k and lasting 46 minutes. By non-epic standards this is utterly absurd. This is where Wondercraft starts at lvl 21. This is assuming you're a pretty **** artificer. And it's still Batman pulling whatever nonsense he needs to out of his utility belt.