[Quick] Artificer

[Antoine]

Hi

Thinking about implementing a new class in Quickband and hoping for suggestions.

The class would be called the Artificer and would be a weak warrior with a selection of spells (*) that boost their equipment. They would be able to enchant and brand equipment, recharge devices, and create a selection of basic jewelery (=RFire, etc). Maybe to copy a scroll (duplicate an ? in inventory).

Dwarven Artificers would be able to make dwarven armor, Elven artificers would be able to make armor of Elvenkind. Possibly any class would be able to make DSM after killing an appropriately colored and sized dragon...?

They'd also get utility spells - no healing, haste, damage-causing spells or monster detection - but various forms of ID and Remove Curse, Detect Objects, perhaps some more novel stuff like a temporary disenchantment resist or a Rapid Deconstruction spell that does 999 damage to golems.

I see the class as strong around CL10-15 with early access to elemental brands, resists, and good AC. Quite weak in the endgame, though unlimited access to branded ammo would help.

There would have to be measures to stop them from making items and selling them to shops to get unlimited gold - I figure I can stick an X% discount on all items they modify, and I also wondered about giving them a limited supply of 'construction points', earnt when they gain XP - the higher Int, the more CPs gained.

Thoughts?
A.

(*) I originally felt they should not have spells, rather abilities that are usable in town only - perhaps in a new 'smithy' building - but of course that's no good for ironman.

[Antoine]

Shameless bump

A.

[artes]

This sounds fun, but not very useful. If this class is to be viable, I think it has to be competetive all the way into the end game, which is difficult with all the available artifacts.

What if a high level ability would be to take two useless artifacts and from them create one random artifact? That could be useful, while one gets a limited number of tries since the total number of artifacts is lowered by one each time.

Also I think that all kinds of jewelery has to be possible to make, like Ring of poison resistance. That is one of few useful piece of jewelery that one would like to be able to make. RFire and so on are so cheap and common anyway. A crown of telepathy would also be nice to make.

Copying scrolls sounds like an interesting idea.

[Djabanete]

Nice idea, crafting classes are the best. You should definitely check out Weaponsmith implementation in Hengband if you haven't already; you might try playing one. Also, Hengband has a spell realm called Craft that you'd be interested in. Craft spell spoiler here:

http://www.kmc.gr.jp/~henkma/heng-e/magic/enchantment.html

I like your idea of construction points, but other ways are available. The "infinite money problem" is no issue because you can always attach a 99% discount to crafted items. Example methods:
(a) Your mana never gets used up: if you have enough mana ("skill") to craft something, you can craft as many as you want. But your mana is a lot lower than a mage class --- it represents a ceiling for how good your crafted items can be.
(b) You don't have mana. The enhancements you can make depend purely on your level.
(c) You gain construction points by sacrificing ego items and artifacts. Then you can spend construction points on enhancements.
(d) You gain construction points when you score gold and/or experience.

Edit: Look into the artifact reforging ability from PosBand; that lets your crafting class interact with artifacts in an interesting way. Also check out the "Artifact Creation" ability in Heng; basically you turn an average item (preferably a sexy one like a blade of chaos or similar) into an artifact. Also look at the Horadric Cube recipes from Diablo II, maybe that will give you some inspiration for interesting interactions. Gems are the best thing ever, by the way.

http://classic.battle.net/diablo2exp/items/cube.shtml.

Have fun. It's hard to go wrong with crafting, everybody likes making their equipment better and making super-items.

[artes]

Nice idea, crafting classes are the best. You should definitely check out Weaponsmith implementation in Hengband if you haven't already; you might try playing one. Also, Hengband has a spell realm called Craft that you'd be interested in.

That sounds fun. I'll try it. At the moment I'm cavalry in Chengband. It's my favourite variant because one can do so many fun things.

Another idea about smiths: what if they could modify the basic stats of the weapon or armour. For an armour increase the basic AC by one. But each time they try to increase it, if they fail the armour is destroyed.

[EpicMan]

ADOM had something similar that was called smithing. It allowed you to increase the hit/damage/evasion/protection of equipment. It required several hard things to get, and pretty much required you to also do mining to get the needed ores. You had to have an anvil (rare item though you could kill one of a couple of NPCs to get it), find a forge (terrain feature you couldn't take with you), and have ores for the same type of metal as the item you were smithing.

Once you had all the needed materials you could uber-ify your gear (it could make a big difference in fighting; there weren't diminishing returns on things like AC or hit). It took a lot of effort to find the needed materials though, and there was a bug that made it extremely dangerous to drop any ores (dropping a stack usually crashed the game and ruined your save file).