Armorer Preparations

    The long-running D&D campaign I've been playing on Sundays (with my Eldritch Knight Fighter) is going on a longterm hiatus - we're getting near the end of the main story, but a lot of it is tied up in our paladin's character backstory, and that player became a dad a few months ago, and hasn't been able to play much. While I hope we eventually get back to that campaign, our group has decided to start anew.

The plan is for a game set in Realmspace - our DM asserts that it is a Realmspace campaign, and not a Spelljammer campaign, which I think is splitting hairs, but oh well. Realmspace is the region of space in the Spelljammer setting that contains Toril, the world known as the Forgotten Realms.

She has told us not to read up on the setting at all until she has a packet to show to us, and to allow us to be surprised in our exploration of the region (I am, I'll confess, infamous for knowing a lot of "meta" knowledge, though in my defense that's mostly because I'm also a DM).

Anyway, after starting off my triton wizard in our Wildemount campaign, I've fulfilled the requirement I set for myself, which is to make sure I play a pure caster. Now, I'm going to make the Armorer I've wanted to play since reading Tasha's Cauldron of Everything.

Now, I've kind of obsessed over this, so I already have a strong sense of how I'd like to set the class up, but I put some thought into a level-by-level plan.

First off, the first two levels I'm going to grab Fire Bolt as one of my cantrips. While there are a lot of optional rules that allow for more flexibility in picking cantrips, Artificers explicitly get to swap them out when they level. So, to start with, I'm going to use Fire Bolt as my main attack and then probably swap it to Green-Flame Blade when I hit level 3.

The infusions I plan to run early on will be Goggles of Night (I'm planning on going variant human with the Tough feat at level 1) and Enhanced Defense. Enhanced Weapon is definitely nice to have, and we'll have to see how I feel about it overall, but the fact that my weapons will deal thunder or lightning damage means the pressure to get a magic weapon is somewhat lessened in those early levels.

Level 3 to level 8 will mean being stuck only infusing one thing into my armor, which does mean having to choose between buffing armor or weapon. I suppose one option here is also to stick Enhanced Defense on a shield, though by level 6 I can just put Repulsion Shield for what, at that level, will be a superior option. I suppose level 3 to level 5 I can buff a shield with defense and my weapons with the enhanced weapon, though given that I'm not going to be the main damage dealer, I might even just give a party member the enhanced weapon instead (for the time being).

I am, of course, operating as if we weren't going to get any magic items during the campaign - which is very unlikely. But at least for the planning stage, it's easiest to look at it this way.

An armorer only really needs Intelligence and Constitution to work properly - because you can ignore strength requirements on heavy armor, there's no need to get Strength up to 15. I am still hoping at least to get a +1 or more to Strength to carry my heavy suit (though I don't think we'll be tracking that, it feels fair.) If I wind up with the Standard Array, I suspect my Charisma will be the dump stat. I will want to get at least a +2 to Dexterity to make sure I can make full use of Medium Armor for those first two levels. And actually, frankly, medium armor could serve me until I can get my hands on plate armor. That said, Splint armor is significantly cheaper than Half Plate, so that'll be the easier route to get a base 17 (before infusions). But there is no need for me to pick up Chain Mail if I have the +2 to Dex, as I'll get the same AC with the Scale Mail starting equipment.

I've found that the Infiltrator mode on the armor doesn't seem to need as many infusions to maximize its effectiveness - so I'll likely keep most of the infusions the same and just be a very hard-to-hit ranged damage dealer if I wind up in that role. This has the added bonus of letting me swap to tank mode on a short rest, as I won't need to reset any of the infusions (Enhanced Weapon gets transferred between Lightning Launcher and Thunder Gauntlets when you switch modes).

At its core, I think the tanking build will want Enhanced Defense, Repulsion Shield (assuming I don't get a better magical shield,) Enhanced Weapon, and then eventually Cloak of Protection and Ring of Protection, which, by the level you can get all of them, gives you a combined bonus of 5 AC, which is how we get the 25 AC with a set of plate and a shield.

Again, unless I roll really superior stats (here's hoping!) I'll be using my ASIs purely to fill out Int and Con. As a variant human, I can put a +1 into two stats, so with standard array, I'd start off with the 15 in Intelligence bumped up to 16, and then put the 14 into Dex and the 13 into Con bumped up to 14. That leaves the 12, 10, and 8. Likely 8 to Charisma, and then maybe just 10 into Strength and 12 into Wisdom.

While I do have an instinct to just pour as much into Con as possible and ensure that I have a massive amount of HP, I do think Shield Master could be a reasonable feat to pick up, effectively giving me +3 to all Dex saves and potentially evasion as a reaction (without the Shield spell, I don't really have much to do with reactions until I hit level 15).

I might also pick up Resistant Armor as an infusion, not necessarily to use all the time, but if we're facing a red dragon or something, and I know we are going to during the night before, I figure resistance to fire damage might be more useful than the +2 to AC. That is, of course, largely contingent on how much our DM lets us know what we're up against ahead of time - the last game we very much stumbled into most dangerous situations without much of a clue to what was coming.

Depending on the rest of the party, of course, I imagine I'll also want a few infusions to hand out to them. Repeating Shot is great for powerful weapons that you can't necessarily get ammo for easily - if we find a Laser Pistol, for example.

I actually think it's unlikely I'll go for Enhanced Arcane Focus for myself - as an armorer, my spells are really primarily utility, and more often saving throw-based. If I can get an All-Purpose Tool I'll be very happy, but mostly use it for things like Faerie Fire (or Lightning Bolt).

Thinking about Cantrips, Green-Flame Blade does seem like a pretty good one to get - I'd argue that even if the Thunder Gauntlet isn't its own independent thing, it is considered a simple weapon, and presumably that part of the armor costs at least one silver. The cantrip does become fairly useless in Infiltrator Mode, to be fair, so I am almost tempted to eschew it in favor of more utility.

Still, by level 5, if you have two targets, you're hitting for 2d8+3ish on one target and 1d8+3ish on another. By level 17, even in single target situations, you're hitting for 4d8+7, compared to 2(1d8+7), so 25 versus 23 on average (and crits are going to be bigger).

Anyway, this is, of course, all on the mechanical side of things.

My general concept for the character, at least for now, is that I want to play someone with a pretty stable home life. I have a backstory that I wrote a while ago in which he's a married civic engineer who has an old colleague who was killed when experimenting with some sort of necromantic power source for his own artificer projects, which my character tried to convince him to stop working with. And then, years later, he gets a letter from this dead friend who seems to blame him for what happened and implies a threat against his family, so he has his wife and kids stay with his wife's family (who are a badass orc clan) and tries to find the friend who rose from the grave, it seems.

Anyway, we'll see how well that works in the setting. I'm hoping I can coordinate with other players to possibly have a pre-existing relationship with one or two of them, as I think that can be fun to play. Really, I want to have a very down-to-earth, gruff but with a heart of gold kind of vaguely old-school Brooklynite vibe to him. (I guess I'm actually kind of synthesizing my two grandfathers here, as one grew up in Brooklyn and the other was a really talented engineer/tinkerer who would never buy something if he could make it himself.)