D&D 5E Artificer Alchemist / Warlock = Tons of Elixirs?

[FireLance]

I think it's fine.

If you want to add some kind of limit, you might say that you have to have at least one encounter between each rest.

Honestly, to rein in all the short rest exploits I've seen, I'm leaning towards a house rule that you can't benefit from a short rest more than once in a four hour period, or within four hours after you have finished a long rest.

 

[Shiroiken]

It's not nearly as awesome as some might think, mostly for social reasons. What is the party doing while the artificer spends half the day making potions? This is similar to the Hex ritual sacrifice: you can spend a short rest after killing something to pre-cast Hex. They work fine within the context of the rules, but unless the party (and any NPCs) are good with the fallout, it's just not reasonable to pull off.

 

[cbwjm]

It's not nearly as awesome as some might think, mostly for social reasons. What is the party doing while the artificer spends half the day making potions? This is similar to the Hex ritual sacrifice: you can spend a short rest after killing something to pre-cast Hex. They work fine within the context of the rules, but unless the party (and any NPCs) are good with the fallout, it's just not reasonable to pull off.

It just takes an action to create the potion with a spell slot so it would just be a bonus elixer when the party finishes a short rest so wouldn't actually take up much in the way of time.

 

[Mistwell]

It's not nearly as awesome as some might think, mostly for social reasons. What is the party doing while the artificer spends half the day making potions? This is similar to the Hex ritual sacrifice: you can spend a short rest after killing something to pre-cast Hex. They work fine within the context of the rules, but unless the party (and any NPCs) are good with the fallout, it's just not reasonable to pull off.

Again, an elf needs 4 hours rest for a long rest. So an elf PC is spending the other 4 hours everyone else is asleep doing this. No harm to the rest of the party. It's not half a day on the potions, and even the example was just doing it four times.

 

[Shiroiken]

It just takes an action to create the potion with a spell slot so it would just be a bonus elixer when the party finishes a short rest so wouldn't actually take up much in the way of time.

The OP was referring to making a bunch before the adventuring day begins, not during the day. Making elixirs before every short rest is just logical sense.

Again, an elf needs 4 hours rest for a long rest. So an elf PC is spending the other 4 hours everyone else is asleep doing this. No harm to the rest of the party. It's not half a day on the potions, and even the example was just doing it four times.

Ah, see I misunderstood. I thought this was an activity that would be repeated longer than 4 hours, since you said "can be done over several hours." I took this to mean several hours after the long rest, rather than just taking the 4 hours waiting for the rest of the party. If you do this during the party's long rest, I can't imagine it being a problem at all (although you might lose a short rest due to an encounter). If you wanted to maximize efficiency, you'd repeat this process for a total of 12 hours, leaving 8 hours of the adventuring day, plus 4 hours for a long rest, which would be really inconvenient for everyone else!

 

[doctorbadwolf]

I'm surprised that more exploits using warlock slots and the newer "made for games with few short rest" class abilities haven't been discussed around here.

There's a handful of new things that you can get more of by spending a spell slot, and it only takes 2 levels of warlock to get those 2 short rest slots.

 

[Grakarg]

Generally speaking, burning your slots on elixirs and refreshing/reburning them with warlock slots is fine
You can probably get away with doing a single 'short rest' at the beginning of the adventuring day if you're starting at an inn or in town, but you might not be able to do so if you're camping out in a dungeon or something, you'll have to choose carefully if you're 'long resting' in a dungeon (say in a Leomund's tiny hut or something) and then trying to do a short rest immediately afterward. Maybe you'll be able to, maybe not.
And you should always burn any remaining slots/warlock slots before starting a short rest. Thats fine too.

You likely won't be able to do multiple back-to-back short rests to stockpile a bunch of elixirs. The short rest rule is a 'period of time at least 1 hour'. Its at least 1 hour. It could be a longer period of time. So if you rest for 2 hours back to back, many DM's will rule that as just 1 short rest. Especially if you are doing something they think is abusive or bends the rules too far.

Jeremy Crawford commented about this in 'sage advice' so you can search that for specifics if you want. Essentially the short rest mechanic is to take a narrative pause, not be a refresh button to hit repeatedly.

Cheers!

 

[Flamestrike]

Honestly, to rein in all the short rest exploits I've seen, I'm leaning towards a house rule that you can't benefit from a short rest more than once in a four hour period, or within four hours after you have finished a long rest.

I just limit them to 2/ long rest, and reduce the time to take one to 5 minutes.

Works so much better.

 

[Swarmkeeper]

Warlock short rest "exploits" are tiresome nonsense, IMO, easily put down by a DM ruling, if necessary. They are also generally frowned upon at our table due to the spotlight hogging needed to set them up.

That said, if said exploits are fun for everyone at a particular table, knock yourself out (I mean, not literally - which brings up a complete tangent: could a Monk 6/Barbarian 1 accidentally Stunning Strike themselves while trying to keep Rage going?)

 

[The_cryo_wolf]

The multiclass rules exclude Warlock levels from the counting toward multiclass spell slot progression. To me, that means that Warlock "spell slots" aren't spell slots the way that other casters can conceive of them, and really ought to have been called something else to avoid the confusion. By logical extension I'd think that the intent is therefore that Warlock spell slots are incompatible with any non-Warlock feature mentioning spell slots.

Your DM could always rule otherwise, but I would not allow them to be "bottled up" into Artificer elixirs. The short rest recorvery exploit is clearly beyond the intent of either class feature, as its explicitly trying to contort the rules into giving you more spell slots than you should have. The only way to make bottling Warlock spells fair is for (1) the "bottled" spells to expire when you short rest and have to be remade, or (2) lock the Warlock spell slots so they cannot be recovered until the elixir is used.

The only reason warlock spells slots are treated different in MC is because it comes from a different feature. You can use spell slots from other classes when using class features.
Best example is Sorcerer points and warlock pact spell slots. Which has been confirmed by Jeremy Crawford.