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Message: <blockquote data-quote="RealAlHazred" data-source="post: 6749927" data-attributes="member: 25818">Originally posted by Tempest_Stormwind:You still haven't said the magic word. I asked you twice for it when I first presented it. Are you reading what I wrote?It shows up for the first time after the only other appearance of "ad-hoc" on this page, beyond in this sentence.Setting aside that I wasn't talking about subclasses - I was literally talking about any other part of the class beyond "Acquiring Schema of 1st Level And Higher", such as the remaining class features, the spell slot progression, the unique spells, and Salvage Essence... I've shown, conclusively, that this is not a problem, and I have asked for data instead of more impassioned arguments about it. This is "rip me a new one", not "cry me a river". Which of the following do you disagree with? 1) Above, I have shown that if you assume 100% of the party's scrolls go to the artificer, that the artificer hangs on to them until she gets a spell slot capable of copying them, and that 100% of those scrolls are unique (not a given), then following the DMG's rules, you can expect about 33 schema. I have been stress-testing the artificer with as many as 35 and haven't found a problem.2) Even if you give the artificer ALL THE SPELLS, her delayed spell slot progression really puts a clamp on what's available to her. Generally, the spells that get used are low-level non-combat utility spells which other casters can't provide (typically due to poor preparation), with the occasional combat spell (if you have sufficient preparation), instead providing buffs, object support, and augmented weapon combat when initiative rolls.3) In conjunction with the delayed spell slot progression, the intense limits on arcane devices (craft reserve cost, creation time, single-use-only, action requirements, and no benefit from your Intelligence) and Prototype (slot cost, significant chance of failure (if used on higher level spells), and setup time (or HD cost for magitechnicians)) limit the artificer to pulling a rabbit out of their hat only with warning, and only occasionally. I'll address your concern below; I ask that you please identify which of those you disagree with. I do not like repeating myself, and this is at least the third time for most of those points. Clearly we're hitting a wall, and I'd rather not do that. And that's a good point. That's basically what I did with Salvage Essence, and why I introduced as many chokepoints (note the word change: these aren't negotiable like throttles are) as I did into Infuse Arcane Device and Prototype, and why I'm testing with 24 schema and 35. In a sense, I think the fact that the core wizard has an expandable spellbook is actually a good thing in this regard, because DMs will recognize that purchaseable scrolls imply an expanded repertoire. I would agree with you completely if I were introducing the only spellbook-user to the game. But I've got precedent, and that precedent is a warning. If you introduce a free item economy to the game, you violate a major assumption in the rules. If every fighter has +3 gear, the challenge curves go out the window - and any DM deciding to pass out +X gear like that should be aware that they are doing something the game doesn't anticipate. Since I can't anticipate how any DM will decide to break the rules, though, I'm forced to comport with the rules as they are written. I can make it as robust as possible - something I've actually been trying to do amidst all of the screams of "UNBALANCEABLE!!!111!!", by the way - but I can't prevent some DM from introducing a houserule that causes every other class to explode as well. The best I can do is design a system that won't break if the game's played close to the published rules. Why do you take issue with this particular goal? I find the problem with that is only the case if the two characters are in the same party. So long as the class is designed to function with 4 powers without failing and with 9 powers without breaking (i.e. the designer has done their job), then the only balance problem will be if they are in the same party. This is because different parties play with different expectations, while those in the same party have the same expectations and are in constant communication. You're also strawmanning, in that this is a roll that is set per campaign (shared among all players), not per character. Such rolls are already present in the game, by the way - if you only roll one magic short sword, who gets it between your fighter, your monk, or your rogue? OMG POWER IMBALANCE? Or part of the game that the game's rules account for (namely, that all classes work with the baseline, and the rates at which +1 weapons drop are frequent enough that the other characters will probably get theirs soon)? And, incidentally, the way to retain that campaign-level randomness while preventing player-level interparty conflicts? It's to have them share powers. Two wizards in the party will evenly split all the wizard scrolls you find. Ditto for two artificers. There will be a conflict for wizard scrolls in parties with both a wizard and an artificer, but the wizard is better situated to use advanced spells, spells that augment well, or combat spells (fast spell slot progression, specific features improving thosee spells), while the artificer (again, with the delayed spell slot progression and no way to leverage their Intelligence, let alone other features) is better suited for lower-level situational or non-combat spells, so the niches are different enough that the conflict for those scrolls is lowered. And that's just for the wizard scrolls; other scrolls have a different conflict (namely, do you pass that Raise Dead scroll to the cleric who can cast it, or sit on it for five levels until the artificer can copy it? That's a question whose answer is a function of how many dead PCs or important NPCs each party has.) The main reason I went with a spellbook in the first place was this chain of reasoning:1) Artificers used to have access to every spell, ever. This allowed them to pull out the perfect tool for the job, but it was super-easy to abuse, especially for item creation. (The item creation thought forked off into a different discussion which eventually led to Salvage Essence.)2) An easy way to limit what spells the artificer could emulate while still allowing for a wide array of unpredictable effects would be to use a spellbook.3) If I link the spellbook to what items they can build (this eventually became Infuse Arcane Device) as well as to what they could emulate (via Spell Storing Item, now Prototype), then I can use the same centralized resource for everything. This also shows how they can be ritual casters (something Keith and I definitely agree on, and I think everyone else would as well).4) However, artificers should not be able to freely cast any spell in that book. So I'll introduce a different mechanism for "spells known" and adopt a different terminology ("schema") for what's in the spellbook, so players won't get into arguments about "Why can't I cast Fireball if I 'know' it?". That's how I settled on the "spellbook" approach - an attempt to capture the broader versatility of the older artificer without porting over its brokenness. I always started with a half-size spellbook and plenty of chokepoints on their applications, but these have since been refined, through reasonably productive conversation with you (such as the blocker preventing wizards and tomelocks from poaching artificer's spells, or artificers poaching the faster spellbook progression of the wizard's). I'm hoping to continue that conversation now, but I can't do that if you're so absolutist about this particular point despite all the data pointing the other direction. Revisions Made:<ul> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">I removed Poison and Psychic from the expanded augmentation options, limiting high-level artificers to just the five common elements and radiant/necrotic (though a few other sweeps still show paladins and certain clerics as coming out ahead on the radiant front; the artificer's lower output comes at the benefit of greater efficiency, especially for a party). Constructs, the traditional tools and foes of artificers, are all immune to Poison damage, and that just left Psychic sticking out like a sore thumb. </li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">While confirming that, I also found out that, oddly enough, constructs aren't actually immune to disease. I've kept the old "disease -> curse" transition (i.e. Disable Construct) in the meantime, since artificers can remove such curses but not heal disease, but that could change. </li> </ul></blockquote>

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