Make Artistry automatic

[bagori nd]

i.e., let any character with weaponsmith/armoursmith improve the stats on smithed weapons/armour automatically.

rationale: As it stands, Artistry is a not a great long-term investment, since it is (and should be) duplicated by Artifice. As such, this wouldn't impact dedicated smiths much, but it would make would putting a few points in Smithing and just taking one of these abilities (along with maybe Enchantment) a more viable choice, since with a lucky pair of smithing gauntlets and a bit of mithril you could make pretty decent stuff with a reasonably low XP investment.

[seraph]

i like this idea. the only problem would be balancing the early game. for 300 exp a fëanor could make a fine longsword and longbow. a little more investment and you can make them double-fine or add an ego and +3 arrows become available too. however i think the difficulty needs to be adjusted anyway. so once that is done it wouldn't be unbalanced.

another option would be to add stuff onto artistry: either +1 to the number of uses on forges or -1 to the number of uses to make an artifact; a reduction in smithing time; etc.

[wobbly]

I'm just going to note that artistry/enchant is actually the easier way to go on the Nogrod then artifice - mostly because less smithing investment is easier & 3 fine enchanted bits of gear as opposed to 1 mediocre artifact. Also stealth runs can get anything they'd ever want from artiface (x3) from enchant/artistry. Add jeweler (1000xp on top of armour/artistry/enchant on the Nogrod) & you get the feanorian lamp of brightness at 16.

Otherwise I pretty much agree. Fine gear already requires the raw skill to build, I don't see what artifice adds to the mix. Ordinary fine is easy to find in dungeon. Low weight fine also takes a lot of skill, again you'd still need to invest raw points.

[Infinitum]

Seems fair enough. Smithing does have too many must-have abilities as is. Makes me wonder if the other smithing abilites could be consolidated as well, eg Blacksmithing (weapons, armour, artistry) -> Runesmithing (jewelry, enhancemens) -> Artifice. Granted with Masterpiece that's just 4 abilites + Grace in the tree, but hey new design space. It would also ensure that characters could actually afford proper artifact smithing prior to the endgame.

[Psi]

For info Artifice doesn't supercede Artistry - they stack. For high end smiths you really want both to make the nicest gear.