Artificers and power playing

One of my players is making an artificer as a backup character for the campaign I'm about to start running. Truthfully, he probably knows that is evil peasant sacrificing cleric is going to get the slammer pretty fast. I'm thinking, upon hearing some things, that I'm going to have to do that to this character. I have grounds to refuse his character because I don't think the roleplay on it will be anywhere near adequate enough to bring it into my campaign which normally wouldn't have an artificer.

The problem lies in that he plans to construct two wands of twinned, quicked, scorching ray. He can somehow(some feat in the complete arcane, which I don't have with me) use both of the wands in the same round. He effectively can do 96d6 damage. Ouch. If this isn't powerful, I don't know what is.

I want to know if this is even remotely possible, and if it is, what other than barring and killing the character could I do about it.

Thanks

Viashimo said:

The problem lies in that he plans to construct two wands of twinned, quicked, scorching ray. He can somehow(some feat in the complete arcane, which I don't have with me) use both of the wands in the same round. He effectively can do 96d6 damage. Ouch. If this isn't powerful, I don't know what is.

I want to know if this is even remotely possible, and if it is, what other than barring and killing the character could I do about it.

Click to expand...

Barring oddness in feats I don't know anything about:

1) You can't quicken a wand.
2) Even if you could, a quickened scorching ray is a 6th-level spell, and wands can only contain up to 4th-level spells - this doesn't even consider twinning the spell.
3) There are feats that let you "dual wield" wands, however they also cause you to burn up charges pretty quickly.

The artificer can use additional charges of the wand the apply metamagic feats, including quicken and twin to the spells triggered. This is probably burning up 9-13 charges per use, giving him about 5 rounds with them, but that's still highly excessive. Especially when they can be crafted with minimal problems. Artificers are a tad gross in this respect.

Quoted for reference:

Metamagic Spell Trigger (Su): At 6th level, an artificer gains the ability to apply a metamagic feat he knows to a spell trigger item (generally a wand). He must have the appropriate item creation feat for the spell trigger item he is using. Using this ability expends additional charges from the item equal to the number of effective spell levels the metamagic feat would add to a spell. For example, an artificer can quicken a spell cast from a wand by spending 5 charges (4 additional charges), empower the spell by spending 3 charges, or trigger it silently by spending 2 charges. The Still Spell feat confers no benefit when applied to a spell trigger item.

So, to fire off a quickened twinned scorching ray, the artificer needs to a) have Craft Wand, b) have Quicken Spell, and c) have Twin Spell. Of course, by 6th level artificers have Craft Wand (per the errata), and even a nonhuman artificer can take Quicken Spell at 1st level and Twin Spell at 3rd.

If the artificer wants maximum damage, he would have a wand of scorching ray (11th), which costs 8250. Every round, he could fire off one quickened twinned scorching ray and one twinned scorching ray, each with 6 touch attacks for 4d6 fire damage. This totals up to 48d6 in 12 different bursts, and burns 14 charges per round.

For sheer wand power, the character could take the prestige class Cannith Wand Adept, in Sharn: City of Towers, and be able to use two wands at once as a full round action. However, this drains 1d4 charges instead of one charge. The character could use a quickened twinned scorching ray, and then two twinned scorching rays. This totals up to 72d6 in 18 different bursts, and burns 1d4+14 charges from one wand and 1d4+5 charges from the other.

Either way, he'll be going through wands at a terrific rate, and resist energy (fire) by a 7th level caster will reduce nearly every hit to zero damage. While this tactic would probably allow him to rapidly eliminate some creatures, remember the price of overkill - once he's let loose a twinned scorching ray, it just cost >2000 gp, even if the opponent only had a handful of hit points left. Intelligent enemies, on the other hand, can make him almost completely ineffective, and he's still throwing away that much per shot. If the treasure accumulated by the characters is kept under control, this tactic shouldn't be too worrisome, in my opinion.

Artificers can take feats that lower the cost of creation, but in the end, I would compare this tactic to sundering opponent's magic weapons - it may swing the fight in your favor, but it's very expensive as a standard method.

That feat that lets you use 2 wands per round burns '2 charges instead of 1' on the offhand wand. And you can't use quicken twice in a round. so he'd be doing a quickened twinned from the first, a twinned from the first, and a twinned from the 2nd for a total cost of 9+5+6 = 20 charges a round, or 8250x0.4 = 3300 gold per round (or 6600 if he didn't crafted them himself).

For that he gets 18 attacks for 4d6 fire damage each. Which are easily negated by most resistance, and some will probably miss too. Of course by the same token, some will probably get criticals.

Now of course, the Metamagic Spell Trigger ability of the artificer says 'an artificer gains the ability to apply a metamagic feat to a spell trigger item', so you'd be well within your rights to say you can't modify each firing of a wand with more than 1 feat. This would reduce you to 60d6 a round (15 attacks) as the quickened one couldn't be twinned anymore. This would drop charge usage to 5+5+6 = 16 charges per round (10 off one and 6 off the other).

He's probably not using metamagic trigger. Most likely he'll be using the infusion that allows him to place metamagics on a spell trigger item - it's cheaper.

Regardless of which he does (or anything else that introduces a wand of quickened anything) a wand, regardless of whether it's quickened or not, requires a standard action to fire off. This is as per the RAW - "casting a spell from a wand is usually a standard action that doesn’t provoke attacks of opportunity. (If the spell being cast, however, has a longer casting time than 1 action, it takes that long to cast the spell from a wand.)"

So - wands are 1 standard action OR MORE to use.

In the case of twin wand wielder, it's a full round action to use both.

So, you're down to two wands of twinned scorching ray, doing 48d6. That means each individual ray is doing 12d6. Which means they're 11th caster level. Each shot from a single wand is costing the guy (at least) 330gp. For the two wand shots in a round, he's spending 990gp (the second wand costs 2 charges) and most of his 3rd level infusion slots.

Additionally, the guy is not doing 48d6. He's doing 12 shots that each do 4d6 damage. So fire resistance is applying 12 times over.

To be honest, I can think of better tactics than spending 1000gp to take out a mook (ie - the only guys who don't prepare for the PC's coming, which is all this will work for). Like just hand the money to the guy for starters.

What they said. If the rest of the party isn't subsidizing his wand creation, he'll blow through his cut of the loot pretty darn fast.

Reminds me of an ability in Final Fantasy 7 that let you throw items or coins at the enemy to kill them.

Saeviomagy said:

So, you're down to two wands of twinned scorching ray, doing 48d6.

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Can he empower both of those?

IIRC, the problem with the Quicken thing is it's the EXAMPLE they use in the text, to describe the ability.

Otherwise, yeah, I'd say you can't quicken those wands.