Battle Engineer, Renegade Mastermaker and Arcanotechnician tweaks

[PsychoBlonde]

I think Arti could use a few smallish tweaks to its enhancement trees to bring it up to date just a teeny bit more and undo some of the damage that Inquisitive did to repeaters as a functional build. Here's some suggestions I came up with:

Battle Engineer

Make Runearm Stable Charge Tiers an inherent part of higher-level runearms instead of requiring you to take multiple cores in Battle Engineer to get them.

Remove the "when your runearm is charged it gives you more spellpower" from BE and move it to Arcanotechnician.

Give a damage imbue similar to Eldritch Knight that only works with the main Battle Engineer weapons

Add 2 weapon buffs to the tree: one that makes your weapons immune to ooze damage and one that gives ghost touch. Also, add int-to-hit and int-to damage and a know-the-angles stance natively to the tree so you're not reliant on Harper to make your class functional. Tie it to the BE weapon selection so it doesn't become too general.

Arcanotechnician

IMMUNITY. BYPASS. If you want, make it so you have to hit it with your runearm to turn off their electrical immunity briefly.

Replace Palliative Admixture entirely with an ability that isn't godawful. My suggestion would be an Electric Loop SLA.

Thaumaturgical Battery is also garbage. Recommend replacing it with Lightning Bolt SLA and replacing Lightning Bolt in core 12 spot with Ball Lightning.

The lightning spells in Arti need a pass similar to what was done with wizard/sorcerer spells. Their damage is just too low.

Renegade Mastermaker

Need something to replace Conjure Component. I recommend an ability that makes your runearm count as a shield for feats and abilities.

Reconstruct SLA should only cost 1 point per rank, not 2.

[Carpone]

Nerfing Toven's cookies is the Artificer pass.

[shmagmhar]

I had alot of fun playing a pure spell based arti that does not use xbows or melee weapons . was good in herioc but in epics i felt under under-welming and had to depend on energy burst . I was still able to be supportive with lots of meta magic potion throwing . this was before alchemist came out and I wanted to practice my potion throwing aim .

What about the capstone that for arcano- tech it lets you use wands and staves with no max caster lvl or something like that? how are we suppose to take advantage of that ability? In table top crafting wands was fun

what if they added wand and staff crafting ?

I doubt it would happen . but it IS part of tabletop DnD and it can be very fun . we never thought they would add horses to the game .
at one point it seemed far fetched that they would even add druids or tieflings but eventually they where added to the game.

[FlavoredSoul]

IMMUNITY. BYPASS. If you want, make it so you have to hit it with your runearm to turn off their electrical immunity briefly.

This.

[Xgya]

I like the concept of Palliative Admixture myself.
I've been around a few newbs that swore by it and had a ton of fun knowing the temp HP they were handing out made everyone a tiny bit tougher.

The issue is those numbers quickly fade into irrelevance.

Make the temp HPs a lot higher (copy Blood Tribute? Blood tribute might not be AoE, but it's also less clunky to use and on a 3 second CD), remove the SP bonus and instead make it a 50% drop in spell point costs. It stops the eternal spellcaster aspect (the current Pallative allows an Arti that's short on mana to keep casting Tactical Detonations, albeit at a slower pace), but that kind of spell cost reduction has been granted before.

[cru121]

I also like Palliative Admixture. Use it self-targeted as your first ability when entering quest, when looting chests, and whenever it's off cooldown and your group isn't stampeding to the next encounter.
One of the problems with this ability is IIRC when your HP gets depleted, temp SP is gone too, and vice versa. That sucks.

As for bypass, yes, it would be nice. Arcanotechnician basically needs a few T5 abilities, right now it's extremely lackluster. Part of it is that Lightning Motes, the T5 SLA, is such a bad spell. Deals pitiful damage, costs 6 AP, and has an extremely slow casting time. If the spell was changed into a damage-over-time spell maybe.

Compare it to bombardier tree for example; that gets an excellent SLA, extra DCs, extra caster levels, extra damage dice to spells, vulnerability, immunity bypass. Plus, higher level alchemist spells can also help you with blasting.
As an Arcanotech, you get an abysmal SLA, extra DCs, spell power (locked to rune arm), and 3 dodge (until your dog dies). And no useful higher level damage spells.