Yes, Armorers Are Fun

 Tonight, when my roommate's D&D game he runs for co-workers only had three people show up, they decided instead to run a one-shot and I joined in as the fourth player. One of the players, who also plays in a few other games I'm in, including the one I run, had a level 18 character rattling around, and so we rolled up high-level characters for the night.

I actually wound up rolling up a Wildfire Druid at level 18 but decided that there were too many spells to choose from for a character I hadn't leveled up the slow way, and so instead made the tank-focused artificer that I'd always wanted to play.

Our party actually wound up being pretty melee-heavy. We had the evocation wizard at the back while we had a paladin, my artificer, and a battlemaster fighter.

We did, admittedly, have some free rein on picking our magic items, which allowed both the paladin and fighter to pick up belts of Fire Giant strength (aka 25 Strength, for a +7 bonus.) The items I picked for myself were actually not very combat-focused, because I was an artificer anyway - the entire class is built around cherry-picking magic items.

So, I had the following:

Enhanced Weapon on my built-in armor weapon

Enhanced Defense on my chestplate (armorers get to infuse different pieces of armor separately starting at level 9, and also get to infuse two more items as long as those are part of the armor.)

Goggles of Night on my helmet (weirdly, everyone rolled a human)

Repulsion Shield on my shield.

Winged Boots on my boots.

Ring of Protection (on a ring)

Cloak of Protection (on a cloak)

And I used by last infusion on a ring of water-walking just in case (it didn't really come into play, even though we wound up fighting a foe who could swim.

Between all those things, I had an AC of 25. I was also a variant human and took Tough as my level 1 feat, and so I had 201 hit points.

We fought The Curator, an archfiend from Tome of Beasts 2 who is basically a large frog-devil who likes to collect souls. The fight only lasted about two rounds and change, so I only got two turns. But I've got to say, between landing Faerie Fire on him (with a +3 all purpose tool my DC was 22) and then hitting him twice with my thunder gauntlets, which then gave his attacks disadvantage against targets other than me, I think I managed to do a good job at support. After the paladin, wielding a Holy Avenger, crit and dropped a max-level divine smite, doing 93 damage in a single attack, the Curator did wind up attacking her despite the disadvantage, but missed on one of those thanks to the effect.

Meanwhile, the fighter had grappled the Curator (he was built all around grappling) and dragged him toward me and the paladin, and while she blasted him away with smites, the wizard (learning a little late that fire was not great against devils) finally wiped him out with a Sunburst.

Level 18 characters are very powerful.

Anyway, I'd love to play one of these in a long-running campaign so that I could do things like use downtime to build an airship for the party, but it was nice to see that my super-tanky character concept seems to actually work.