Bladeforged/Warforged Artificer advice?

[ADHDoug]

Hopefully this is the right place for this. Technically a returning player from like ten years ago but played so little I should be treated as completely new. I bought both warforged and artificer back then cause that's what I'm into, and I made a new warforged artificer last night. My intent is to play a warforged artificer, to use the iron defender as extensively as possible, and to play solo and be as self-sufficient as possible. HOWEVER. Bladeforged is also very appealing. After poking around online a little I have discovered the existence of the reincarnation mechanic, and also that you can be a bladeforged but also a different class, which confused me at first until I realized that being bladeforged doesn't prevent you from multiclassing.

I am a casual player, I am not seeking a "best" build and have no intent of gearing up to grind endgame content, assuming that's a thing in this game like most MMOs. That said, would it be unplayably detrimental to roll a bladeforged artificer? Should I give up the special snowflake syndrome and stick to the base warforged? In what ways would it be detrimental? One of my concerns is skill proficiencies, I know as an artificer I put a lot of points into spot, search, lockpicking, disable traps, that kind of thing. Would it be safe to assume the bladeforged forced paladin level would not be as good at these things?

Basically just dump everything on me you can think of, in the simplest terms possible, the synergies and incompatibilities between bladeforged and artificer, in comparison with a warforged artificer. If the difference would barely be noticeable to a casual player I'll go with bladeforged, if there's a large gap I'll stick to warforged.

[Dendrix]

Being a Bladeforged means you start with enough XP to be a 15th level character.
Being a Bladeforged means you always start with 1 level of Paladin. You can have other classes if you choose the refuse training option and go see class trainers after exiting the creation forge where you start. You can use a +1 heart to change that, after levelling to 15.
Being a Bladeforged means you have to level to 30 before you can True Reincarnate.

The racial tree does give you Reconstruct (Communinon of Scribing) but you do get that as a normal spell as well, you just get it earlier as a bladeforged, but hey in heroics, the healing you have from your free repair spells is enough in 99% of cases until you get 15th level and 6th level spells
Bladeforged get bonus cha and negative dex - which is a pain for an artificer wanting to buy bow related skills because of required minimum statistic requirements for a number of feats.

For an Artificer a Warforged is objectively a better choice IMO. A bladeforged doesn't really give you anything extra that you wouldn't get anyway.

[jskinner937]

Warforged is better as you do not need to multiclass. If you are going for multiclass, then 2 levels of pally is not a bad thing as you will get better saves.

You can get 2 reconstructs either way (1 SLA and 1 spell). Bladeforged has 1 in racial tree and so does renegade mastermaker

Iron defender will work in hard or normal content, but if you plan to run elite or reaper, they die pretty fast and you will likely be wasting time and mana trying to keep alive. Most use then for pulling levers.

In the hardcore forum there are some posts that show Warforged pure art builds that are all first life friendly. Or you may prefer to try a fleshy, in which case, my nine lives artificer build that uses repeaters was insanely fun on HCL as a first lifer. Tabaxi is a fun race to play and provides a lot of utlity to arty. Unfortunately that build does not take advantage of reconstruct like WF/BF, but leverages blood tribute like a barbarian as it’s main healing.

[ADHDoug]

Thanks for the advice! Guess I'll stick with warforged, the appeal of bladeforged was strictly to be a more unique variant of warforged but it sounds like that's far from worth the expense and effort, especially for a new casual player. Besides, I discovered the color I picked for my warforged was more saturated on the rest of the body than the head resulting in him being tinted green so I have to remake him anyway, and in the process realized I could play with bladeforged creation before buying it and it doesn't seem like bladeforged are bigger than warforged, which I thought they were for some reason.

[C-Dog]

... it doesn't seem like bladeforged are bigger than warforged, which I thought they were for some reason.

As a character Reincarnates for the first couple times, they become actually visually "larger", relative to a 1st life example of that race. You've probably seen Hero-status (1 reincarnation) or Legend status (2) BF's, and those were, in fact, larger than any 1st-lifer.

o https://ddowiki.com/page/Hero_status

After 2 reincarnations, all future builds will be the largest they can be. (Horses scale up too!)