Editing Artificer (section)

===3rd Edition===
The initial attempt to bring artificers to 3.0 came in the form of the Gnome Artificer [[Prestige Class]], in the ''Magic of Faerûn'' sourcebook. This version made exactly zero impact on the gaming community, and fell into shadow. The requirements are very weird, requiring a mix of otherwise useless skills, casting it doesn't advance and two feats. Its abilities are theoretically useful, but come slowly with weird execution and the requirements are high enough nobody bothered.

The archetype came into its own with the Artificer class in [[Eberron]]: as Eberron was built to explore the logical conclusions of D&Disms, magical engineers were a natural result, and this gave rise to the Artificer class. It was more or less an arcane buffer with a few extra things for making stuff (''fabricate'', ''wall of stone''), using a complex ruleset called "Infusions" to temporarily enchant items and augment constructs, as well as being better at making magical items and creating construct sidekicks.  While all this may seem a little ho-hum, the buffs could rack up some amazing bonuses for both the artificer themselves and their party, and their item creation abilities basically breaks the Wealth By Level standards of the game completely in half.

This latter point is the big deal here: 3rd edition artificers get a Craft Reserve pool of "free XP" for making items, and even better they can (starting at 5th level) "melt" existing magic items down to add their creation XP to the pool.  So next time you go on an adventure where the DM has you finding a bunch of otherwise useless items, you don't sell them for half-value, you melt those fuckers down into more XP to use on making customized items for you and your party.

It doesn't take a clever person to see how to cheese the everloving shit out of this class in 3.5 in various ways.  Not only can you get customized magic items you don't have to hope a DM rolled randomly on some table (that is, items you can actually fucking use well), you can also start relying a LOT more on consumable items like potions, scrolls, wands, staves, etc.  Several kinds of constructs, namely homunculi (from the MM and several Eberron books) and effigies (from Complete Arcane), are cheap enough to somewhat mass-produce for tireless and loyal guards/sentries as well as a cheap source of labor. In fact, your very first homunculus should be a Dedicated Wright from the Eberron Campaign Setting book, because it can do all your item creation literally while you are doing anything else.  And because you can throw on all kinds of buff effects for weapons and armor, your party wizard and cleric can save their precious slots for more battlefield control, debuffs, healing, etc.

One easily overlooked yet really powerful ability artificers have is the infusion Spell Storing Item. For the low price of a 1st level infusion and small amount of XP (spell level*caster level), that can be paid with your reserve, an artificer can have any 4th level or lower spell in the game without an expensive component/focus whenever he wants it. Locked door? Make a wand of Knock! Fighting poisonous enemies? Delay Poison! As you aren't limited by any spell list, you can apply spells at their lowest available level (such as [[Prestige Class#Trapsmith|Trapsmith]]'s Haste as a 1st level spell.). Note that unlike most formula that multiply by spell level, this one doesn't say cantrips multiply by .5 instead of 0 so they have no cost (aside from the infusion slot) here. Another class making infusion is Personal Weapon Augmentation, which allows an Artificer to give any weapon they wield ''any'' +1 weapon ability. The most obvious use for this is Bane (giving +2 hit/damage and +2d6 damage against anything you're fighting), but other situational boosts like Ghost Touch are also useful.

If Leadership is available to you, basically the super-powered option is you take an artificer cohort (effectively doubling your WBL), and make your higher-level followers experts who manufacture stuff (masterwork items, tools, clothes, vehicles, possibly even your stronghold).  Set them up in a nice, safe stronghold built to be a workshop with sleeping quarters, then put them to work between adventures.  Just have your party turn over all items for XP reclamation, divvy up the money equally, and just put in requests for which items they want made for them, and let the boys go to work.  Smart groups manufacture ways to really maximize the amount of loot they send back home for being sold or scrapped, such as ''portable holes'' (which have only volume capacity with unlimited weight tolerance) and (''planar'') ''ring gates'' (which, because the ''portable hole'' is basically just a piece of cloth weighing a few pounds, allows you to ship a virtually unlimited amount of stuff back and forth as needed).

So... yeah.  Artificer can be pretty broken.  It's even possible that, in the long term, they are as broken as full spellcasters are; they actually can get access to things like ''gate'' and ''time stop'' (via items), and while those items are usually one-shot things like scrolls, it only takes getting one off before the other guy casts a spell to seal their fate.  That doesn't mean DMs should necessarily ban the class, though: a CoDzilla or God-wizard still destroy balance past a certain level.  And truth be told, playing artificer effectively still takes some planning and smarts; clerics and wizards can just whistle up cheese on command at certain levels, right out of the PHB.

Oh, also there's something fun you can do.  If your DM is fond of having you encounter Evil-oriented magic items that are of limited use to your party, and was silly enough to let you have an artificer, you can melt those items for XP and use that XP for making Good-oriented items.  There is absolutely no indication or even any mere suggestion that the XP you recover is in any way "tainted" or otherwise aligned based on the item's original purpose or background.  So yeah, you can absolutely melt down that ''black robe of the archmagi'' and just turn around and use the XP to make a ''white robe of the archmagi''. The same also applies to any useless magic item that supposedly has a high price but has no interested buyers, such as the Apparatus of the Crab. Just be aware, bad DMs will react badly to this little turn of events in their campaign if they weren't prepared for players to figure this shit out, so do this at your own risk...