Ok, I love my Armorer concept, of course, but as I acknowledged while building it, it's not going to be taking home the prize for topping the damage meters (sorry, I know those don't exist in D&D, but I've been playing WoW nearly twice as long, so that's the term that comes to mind).
Battle Smiths have a big advantage over Armorers for their damage because they can use any kind of martial weapon, and that means that they can take advantage of the many weapon-focused feats that can really enhance your damage potential.
However, one issue they run into compared to 2024 martial classes is that they don't get access to weapon masteries. This means that they either forgo powerful abilities like Vex, Graze, or Nick, or they have to find it some other way.
When it comes to Feats, they also have the following issue: these feats will tend to boost Strength or Dexterity, and we'll probably want to focus on Intelligence, because we can actually use Int for our weapons (they have to be magic weapons, but we're Artificers, so they will be magic).
As I see it, you have two options: You can actually push Strength or Dex (Strength is probably the way to go for damage output) and treat Intelligence more like the way a Ranger would treat Wisdom. But I think the better call, honestly, is to just get enough in a physical stat for your minimum requirements and then push Int, which will help with both spellcasting and our fantastic Flash of Genius feature.
Now, if we had total free-reign to do whatever we wanted, and had a super-chill DM, this would be an Antimatter Rifle build. The Antimatter Rifle, found in the DMG, does 6d8 Necrotic damage on a hit, which I think is just going to blow past every other possible damage-boosting feat we can find (Great Weapon Master, which I think is the most powerful damage feat for a martial class, lets you deal 6 extra damage per hit at level 17+ on your turn. A Greatsword or a Maul are the highest-damage weapons in the PHB. They deal 2d6 damage. 2d6+6 (the Int bonus is a wash) is 13. 6d6 is 21.) We could even make a Repeating Shot version and never run out of ammo.
But it's very unlikely that a DM will allow this. So we'll assume that we're going to go with PHB weapons.
In this case, the Greatsword is probably our weapon of choice. I'm going to say not a reach polearm because we already have a use for our bonus action, so Polearm Master is devalued.
However, if we take Great Weapon Master, we can actually be quite powerful as well with a Heavy Crossbow, which also has the Heavy property.
The trick, though, is that we need to have 13 in Strength to get the feat and wield the Greatsword, and also 13 in Dex to wield the Heavy Crossbow.
We'd want to get at least 14 in Dex anyway to max out our AC using medium armor, though, so the latter isn't much of a challenge. It's the Strength that becomes a little tricky: we're spread a bit thin, needing at least 13s in Strength and Dex, and then trying to get a 17 in Int, so we probably have to dump Wisdom and Charisma and will probably only wind up with 14 Con.
Now, we want to get Graze, which is an amazing weapon mastery, but spending a whole general feat on a single weapon mastery is probably a bit too much.
Yeah, I think we're starting off as a Fighter.
This will delay certain things, but I think in the long run, it solves a lot of our problems (much as it does for a Bladelock).
With one level in Fighter, we can get the Greatsword's Graze mastery, as well as potentially the Heavy Crossbow's Push. We'll also get heavy armor training. For now, that's not going to help us very much as we'll probably be doing just as well in Medium Armor, but if we can eventually push our Strength to 15 (which might not happen until level 12 or something) we can upgrade to Plate. We'll take Defensive fighting style to compensate for the fact that we're going to probably be in Half Plate from level 2 to, like, 12 or 16. And we get Second Wind (we also might consider taking a second Fighter level at some point, but we do want to focus on Artificer for the most part).
Now, the first few levels will be rough. We'll probably want to stick to cantrips for our main damage for levels 2 and 3, and then by 4 (Artificer 3) we'll sort of come online. We'll make a +1 Greatsword and have our Steel Defender.
At level 5 (Artificer 4) we'll take Great Weapon Master. Our Int is still just going to be +3, but the +1 bonus to our weapon will mean we're now hitting for 2d6+7, though only once per turn until the next level. Technically, True Strike will give us slightly more damage than the bonus from Great Weapon Master (which requires us to use the Attack action - this is why it's so damn good for Eldritch Knights, who can do something like Booming Blade as part of the Attack Action,) but we'll soon set aside True Strike.
Level 6, we're going to start feeling less hamstrung by our multiclassing now that we have Extra Attack.
At level 7, we'll have more magic item replication options. We can change out our +1 Greatsword for a Dazzling Greatsword (which still has the +1 bonus plus other stuff).
At 8, we'll get Flash of Genius.
Finally, at 9, the level I wanted to build this to, we're going to get a second feat. Now we probably want to pick up an Intelligence half-feat. War Caster is the obvious choice. Fey Touched can let us get Hunter's Mark, but I think we will probably be better off with my Homunculus Servant/Dragon Breath combo. We'll have +4 to Intelligence now.
So, if we look at the hypothetical encounter from my Abram Locke post, we can imagine that we're doing the same damage with the Homunculus/Breath attack. We ultimately landed on an average damage of 13.3875 against two Cloakers for the cost of a 2nd level spell slot and a bonus action (assuming we already summoned the Homunculus at some earlier point).
We're now hitting with a +9 to hit and for 2d6+9 on a hit (though still 4 on a miss).
So, as usual with Graze, we can just ignore the 4 from Int for now and add it at the end. So a hit is now worth 2d6+4, or 11 (this four from GWM) and a crit adds another 2d6, or 7.
We have an 80% chance to hit an AC of 14. So, 11x80% is 8.8 and then 5%x7 is .35. So that's 9.15, and then add the guaranteed 4 each attack to give us 13.15 per attack, or 26.3 total damage per turn from our Greatsword.
We then add in the Dragon Breath to get 39.6875 damage per turn.
Now, round one, that's it. But once Dragon's Breath is up and running, we can add our Steel Defender to the mix. It's only going to have a +8 to hit, hitting for 1d8+6. So, with a 75% hit chance, we're looking at 10.5x75%, or 7.875, plus 4.5x5%, or .225, for a total of 8.1 damage from the Defender on rounds 2+, which would bring our damage per round up to 47.7875.
Honestly, I think that's pretty damn respectable, actually.
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