How To Play A Battle Smith Artificer in Dungeons & Dragons 5e

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grammar brought to you by ghostfire gaming and now on to this week's episode greetings my name is monty martin and i'm kelly mclaughlin and we are the dungeon dudes welcome to our channel where we cover everything d including advice for players and guides for dms we upload new videos on tuesdays and thursdays so please subscribe to our channel so that you never miss an episode today we are taking a look at how to play a battlesmith in dungeons and dragons 5th edition this unique subclass for the artificer was introduced in tasha's cauldron of everything and is a very unique spin on the artificer because you get to build a mechanical companion that is really potent in battle that gives you a lot of different options for how to play an artificer and i think is one of the really flexible artificer subclasses out there this one in particular offers so much flexibility and when you combine the artificial build options with things like the infusion choices that you get the feats that you can choose as you level up and the spell options from the artificer spell list you can make really interesting and diverse builds with a artificer battlesmith so kelly and i have actually both built our own battlesmith artificers that we're going to share with you today we're going to walk you through the builds at third level a snapshot at 10th level and a snapshot at 16th level going over the feats infusions and spells that we take at each turn these are single class builds so we've just gone pure artificer all the way although i will say with both of our builds i think that there is an interesting case to be made for taking a couple levels of fighter yeah um there so there might be some interesting multi-class potential with with either of these options but we focused on just the pure build for today there's a lot to discuss today so let's get rolling so kelly what did you choose for lineage and ability scores for your battlesmith so i went with the war forged for my lineage i thought that the idea of a battlesmith who is a warforged who actually builds the armor and infusions onto themselves is a really cool concept so i really like that idea so with my warforged i gained a plus two to constitution and i took my plus one in strength now that might seem like an interesting choice but you'll see where i'm going with this in a moment for my ability scores i took my highest ability score in intelligence so we're using our standard array which is 17 15 13 12 10 8. so 17 in intelligence 15 in constitution 13 in strength 12 in wisdom 10 in dexterity and eight in charisma he's not going to be a charmer but he's going to have purpose on the battlefield um i went with the good old-fashioned variant human for for me um i did a very similar ability score spread to you um but i switched the strength and dexterity around um i have a feeling that you're going to be up close and personal and i'm going to be keeping my distance with these builds two of the great options for a battlesmith yeah because what i'm going to do with my variant human is i'm going to have 17 intelligence 15 constitution 13 dexterity 12 in my wisdom as well 10 in my strength and eight in my charisma so again these these these guys are going to be like like that rude grease monkey kind of kind of yeah um that that is more gruff and you know trust their their trusty hound more than they would ever trust another person but um with with my battlesmith because i'm a variant human i get to take a feat at level one and i'm gonna take gunner okay yeah i see where you're going with this uh yeah so this was a new feat introduced in tash's cauldron of everything that gives you proficiency in firearms um you get a plus one bonus to your dexterity um you um also get to ignore the loading property of firearms and you also don't have disadvantage on ranged attacks when you're within five feet of a hostile creature so this feat is very similar to crossbow expert except instead of getting an attack as a bonus action you get plus one to your dexterity the reason why that's going to be important is once we have our steel defender i'm going to be using my bonus action to command and control my steel defender there is a case for going with crossbow expert and if your dm doesn't allow firearms maybe i would take crossbow expert instead but but i'm gonna we're we're gonna be wielding a musket with this character so well you're out there with your musket my character is going up close and personal i've given them half plate and a shield and a warhammer so they are running up and smashing people with their warhammer in close combat next to their steel defender and as we build up the character this concept of being next to the steel defender it's gonna become more and more potent as it moves forward it's gonna be a little bit interesting for you because you're not gonna be proficient in that warthammer until you get to level three and actually gain proficiency in multi uh martial weapons so it would be an interesting uphill for you if you play at level one and two with your with your build yeah level one and two i might be relying on my cantrips and first level spells a little bit and letting my steel defender do most of the brunt work while i hang back but we're getting there and it's going to be good okay so let's look at what we have when we get to level three and actually become a proper battlesmith like all artificers you get proficiency in a set of tools by default this is smith tools but you probably took that already so you might get to pick another set of tools the other thing is just like all other artificers you get a set of spells that are always prepared for you these level up with you so you get two first level spells two third level spells and so on and so on uh up to fifth level spells and in the case of the battlesmith i think there's gonna be some really key ones that we're both gonna be relying on the most notable i think is that we get some of the paladin smite spells but we also both get shield yeah and shield is gonna be key for uh for protecting yourself as a battlesmith now the other thing that you're gonna get is the battle ready trait which is gonna give you a couple of benefits at level three first of all you're gonna be proficient in martial weapons but you also get the ability to use your intelligence instead of strength or dexterity when you are making attacks with a magic weapon now this is key with some of the other artificer abilities because you're going to be able to use your infusions to make the weapon that you're wielding magical if it isn't already so i think that that's a really important element of of making this work because neither of us have our strength or dexterity as our highest stat we're not using that to attack with though no also a third level you're going to gain the most important thing about the battlesmith and that is your steel defender this is a mechanical creature that aids you in battle the steel defender acts on your initiative count and goes immediately after you in combat it can move and take reactions but you have to use a bonus action on your turn if you want it to attack or do anything else otherwise it just takes the dodge action now the steel defender has its own stat block which is presented in the rule book but the stat block does have some elements like its hit points its attack bonus and its damage bonus which scale based on both your level or your proficiency bonus so it is able to make its own attack which is kind of this force damage dealing melee attack it can also heal itself up to three times per day but it also gains a reaction when the defender uses its reaction for deflect attack it imposes disadvantage on an attack with from a creature that is within five feet of it as long as that attack is against something other than the steel defender in in both cases the steel defender is a great tool to run interference make attacks with its force-empowered rend which does 1d8 pleasure proficiency modifier damage so it's a decent damage dealing attack and it can also protect yourself or protect your allies by imposing disadvantage on key attacks as they come in um as we said before it can heal itself but you can also heal it with mending and you can rebuild it if it's destroyed with one minute of work i think the most fun part about the steel defender is you get to choose its appearance so what is your what is your warforged artif artifice or steel defender going to look like i imagine that my war forged is attempting to build another war forged so i have a mini me that's like half finished so like i'm the cool looking war forge but i have like a c-3po looking dude next to me who is my steel defender and he's a little bit more intense than c-3po was but uh yeah i picture myself building a variant version of myself as my steel defender you know the thing is the steel defender is a medium-sized creature so it could just be another you yeah in appearance i i love that that that you can actually run some really interesting tricks with that yeah if the dm allows me to play around with that there there's some there's a lot of fun to be had yeah um for me i'm gonna go with the the classic mechanical hound i'm really into kind of the um you know the the robodog kind of aesthetic and i think that'll be kind of cool with the way that i play the character so also at level three we're gonna get a few infusions you get to choose four infusions but you only get to have two active so what were the four you chose and which two are you mostly relying on here okay so with my artificer there's a really good case to be made that i could take the repeating shot infusion to give me a plus one bonus to attack rolls with my gun making a magical gun and technically speaking if i took that i wouldn't need gunner because it lets you ignore the loading and ammunition properties so we could flip things around but i don't actually think i need that so i'm just gonna go with the um enhanced magic weapon and that's gonna be my go-to i'm gonna have my magic gun keep that going the whole time yeah um for my other infusions um i think i'm gonna keep things pretty simple for me i'm just gonna take replicate magic item and get goggles of night um the other two infusions i'm probably gonna pick up the armor infusion now and i might pick up the mind sharpening infusion but i'm never going to use them so right yeah i also picked up um mine sharpener and enhanced arcane focus those are the two that are kind of there in case i decided that i wanted to be more spell casty but i'm probably not going that way the two that i'm going to be relying on are the enhanced weapon and enhanced defense now with the enhanced weapon that's just going to make me better at eventually getting into those front lines and smacking people with my hammer but the enhanced defense with um everything else i have going on being the war forged and and taking the half plate i already have an ac of 19 which is going to be pretty awesome especially with the use of shield so if i'm trying to get a teenage c at level three which you can bump up to level to 24 with a reaction yeah yeah that's tasty yeah so so now i'm standing next to my steel defender and uh it's gonna be tough it's gonna be tough to hit me so beyond that there's not too much that you're gonna be able to choose as your artificer at third level um one of the great things about all artificers is that you prepare your spells from everything else on the artifact or spell list but you only do get to pick two cantrips so for me i'm going to be taking guidance and mending as my first two and then probably the the biggest spell i'm going to rely on is going to be fairy fire that's going to be my go-to because i want to get that tasty advantage on my attack rolls with my gun i also took fairy fire and mending but i took reya frost kind of just as a fallback especially at those early levels where i'm not going to be able to be up front and center with everything going on with my character so ray of frost gives me a way to fall back and still deal out some damage because you're going melee do you think that you would take something like booming blade or sword burst or green flame blade for the first couple levels and then maybe retrain that out um those those are something that i might consider but uh yeah at later levels they're gonna become less less important yeah so with that let's rock it all the way through tier two and level our artificers up to level ten we're gonna get a lot of stuff in the process of doing this um so we're gonna kind of take it in phases yeah i think along our way to level 10 we're going to get two main features from our subclass we're going to get extra attack which is i think it's going to be just clutch for both of our characters yeah and you're also going to get arcane jolt which allows you a number of times per day equal to your intelligence modifier to deal a little bit of extra damage when you hit with an attack or to cause a little bit of healing as well and what's cool about this is that you can apply this on whether your attack hits or your steel defender's attack sits we're going to gain two feats or ability score increases within that time so for my character this is where things start to turn up my first fee choice i took heavily armored so now with my strength score that i did boost and my heavily armored feet i get a plus one to strength now making it appropriate for me to wear full plate armor now my other feet choice that i'm gonna take is sentinel and the reason why i'm taking sentinel is because this is going to play really well with my steel defenders deflect attack ability now when i run up and i'm standing next to my steel defender and we are attacking a creature that creature when it's their turn has to choose which one of us it's going to attack if it attacks me it has to do so with disadvantage because of the reaction from my steel defender if it attacks the steel defender i get an extra attack against that creature so it's a losing battle now you have to choose which one of us you're going to attack either way you have a problem that you're facing fighting me nice i really like that combination um for me i'm also going to take two feats i'm not going to worry about ability score increases yet either i have a higher intelligence at the gate so i'm okay with staying at 18 intelligence to get my feets i'm going to take um as my first feet sharpshooter because the if i'm using a musket that's got a really low range 40 feet or 120 feet so i really want to get that range but i also want to get that minus five to hit plus 10 to damage the other feat that i'm going to take though to offset this is fighting initiate so that i can get the archery fighting style for a plus two bonus to my attack rolls now i might be tempted to do a plus just bump my intelligence up to 18 here um i think you could make the argument either way um if either or i think i want both of those things i'm gonna bump my intelligence up in the next bracket though i think so next now we come to the infusions that we took at level 10. now for me i'm still going to be relying on having the magic gun which at level 10 um having the enhanced uh weapon it goes up to a plus two bonus so this is a big deal because you want to keep that keep that magical weapon going but i'm gonna be able to have a couple more in here and this is where i'm probably gonna trade out the replicate magic item for the goggles of night and get me some new boots oh we get boots so now you are flying with your musket blasting people yes oh that's good well my dog eats them yeah yeah um beyond this i think i'm also going to go with the helm of awareness so i have advantage on initiative checks obviously and then finally i'm also going to pick up the spell refueling ring because i really want that extra third level spell slot for myself we'll talk about that in a moment when we get the spells why so with my infusions i'm also going to replicate a magic item and i'm gonna take the cloak of protection keep in mind that i am using a shield as well so i have my shield my warhammer i'm now wearing full plate and i have the cloak of protection i have enhanced my armor with another infusion and i'm also going to take the repulsion shield okay so you got full plate so that's ac18 yeah it's now plus two-fold plate because of your infusion so that's ac20 you're using a shield that is a plus one shield because it's a repulsion shield so that's ac23 you're a warforged so that's 80 24 and you're wearing a cloak of protection so that's ac25 that's ac25 and i still have shield in my back pocket we're not even getting in there's there's more here but so again with that with my companion next to me and it having to either attack me with disadvantage or me get an extra attack on it with my weapon that has a plus nine to hit i i'm i'm going to be dealing damage a lot maybe not as much as your character but i'm way harder to hit yeah because your steel defender can impose disadvantage on attacks yes so disadvantage on attacks against me ac 25 and i'm hitting relatively hard i'm not the greatest damage dealer out there but i'm hitting hard enough and uh with my multi-attack and my steel defender i'm doing fine on the front lines all right so with all that in mind what are you going to pack for second and third level spells what are what are the kind of key tools in the toolkit i took some classics like web and heat metal but i also took enlarge reduce which i just think is going to be fun to play with as a character um you can be larger than charge yeah yeah for third level spells though this this is a key element of my build i took haste so did i i'm going to haste myself so now i'm smacking an extra time in in combat but i'm also getting a bonus to my ac what is your ac now so 25 if i haste myself 27 and i can cast shield on top of that so you can have a 32 ac yeah and we're not done yet we're not done yet so uh sorry sorry dms out there i'm i'm breaking the battlesmith for your players so so we looked this up you're level 10. yeah so um one of the highest attack bonuses i could find going going through the monster manuals is a challenge rating 10 cloud giant for a of level appropriate a challenge rating 10 cloud giant has a plus 12 attack bonus so this means it can only hit you if it crits you and since you have your steel defender to impose this advantage on its first attack between the steel defender and shield it can't like it's very unlikely to actually hit you and here's the last piece of this the repulsion shield seems like yeah i get a plus one shield but why the repulsion how is that useful if any creature tries to hit me with multi-attack and they do hit me with their first attack i reaction repulse them away and now if they use their movement to get up to me that turn they can't use that second attack and if they do decide to go for the for for your little clone you're just gonna smack them an extra time exactly exactly that's so tasty um i don't know if i can do quite as well as that on that kind of combo but i will say at this level i have a musket that hits for d12 plus seven damage with a plus 14 to hit i'm gonna haste myself and i'm going to take the sharpshooter penalty so now i'm gonna make three shots at a plus nine to hit that's still which is i think you said that your character's has a plus yeah so my accuracy even with the sharpshooter penalty is just as high as yours yeah but except i'm doing d12 plus 17 damage yeah so so you're so these are the this is the beauty of the two builds that we're creating you're up in the air well your steel defender is blocking yeah and you're blasting from the sky my character is up front and center and nearly impossible to hit they're great yeah these are great and then in most cases i'm going to be using my regular bonus action to just command the steel defender to attack um so get a little bit of extra damage from that as well um for other spells beyond haste i'm probably gonna bring revivify and dispel magic and for second level spells i'm gonna bring invisibility because i think that that could be really clutch yeah um especially because i could cast invisibility on myself instead of haste giving myself advantage on attack role on on an attack role or just hiding around like being flying invisible it's not improved invisibility though so i'm not going to have that permanent advantage happening that's where i would still default down to just fairy fire if i needed it i'm also going to take web too so i can restrain targets i mean it's great that way the the thing is that like even outside of the crazy builds we're talking about having some great utility spells in the package invisibility is great if you're doing an infiltration mission and web is just great for battlefield control and you still want those in your package um beyond that i think the only other um sort of spell that i am going to bring with me for utility is going to be enhanceability um just because it's such a useful spell to just be able to say yep you have advantage on all your ability checks related to that ability score so it does help me be a little bit more of a team player in that respect yeah so now we're going to move up to level 16. another big jump we're going to gain some extra features and her characters are going to become more ridiculous let's take a look at what we get so moving up to level 16 we're both good we're going to be able to take feats at level 12 uh and level 16. for me um at level 12 i'm just going to max out my intelligence score and at level 16 it really doesn't matter too much i feel artificers have proficiency in constitution saving throws so i could take warcaster here i could take lucky here i could take any other sort of i consider taking piercer this really feels for me like a wild card like it's where i'm gonna leave that feed open and decide what it is based on how the campaign goes i'm not too worried about that um and also i have to say the same thing about my infusions uh past level 16 you do get one more infusion slot open um so i'm probably just gonna work on either on fusions that are gonna increase my armor class or increase my defenses in some way just because i am a bit of a target flying up there in the sky so if i do get shot i want to be able to defend myself a little bit totally yeah on our way to level 16 we're also going to get improved defender at level 15 which is going to add some really important abilities to our defender especially for my build this is going to be pretty key the extra healing or damage of the of the jolt that the defender has goes up to 4d6 it also gets plus 2 to its own ac and most importantly for my build when it uses its deflect attack the attacker takes 1d4 plus my int mod in force damage nice yes so so now we have that sentinel deflect attack option going so you're going gonna damage either way yeah yeah nice so for my feets on the way here i'm not done yet we're still we still got some building to do i need to max out some stats so the first one i'm just going to take a plus one to con and a plus one to end okay and on my last one plus two to end so we both end up with characters that have an eighteen con and a twenty intelligence yeah which means those are real good it feels really tough yeah yeah i'm smacking people with plus 12 now yeah so even that like yeah it's it's off the chain yeah it's a it's a really nice ketchup as well because i feel like you know one of the nice things about the artificer is because you do get those magic items that augment your mag you're guaranteed to get a magic item that boosts your attack rules yeah so you can kind of afford to lower your uh your intelligence and not max it out right away because you get that to kind of compensate for it um i also think what's really key with both of our builds is that we do have some attunement slots open still yeah because you never know what nice treats your dungeon master is going to give you along the way and so if if you do manage to find like a better suit of armor or a cloak of displacement or maybe you know you managed to get that staff of power if i go to staff of power it doesn't seem like it belongs on this character but that's also going to give me another plus two ac and for my infusions i also am going to build myself a ring of protection to add to my cloak of protection keep in mind that this means not only is my ac now resting at 26 that's before haste and before shield but that also means i get a plus two to all my saving throws that's actually really worth considering because i think that one of the things that you can often see happen with a character with a very high ac is that their saving throws become the target and so it's nice to get the cloak of protection and the ring of protection um and also eventually the artificer does get a bonus to their saving throws equal to the number of items they've attuned to so you will end up with a very tough character that is the idea this steel defender who's really the defender here is it me or is it my companion yeah but that's that's the the key thing this character just builds on itself so well yeah i think for my character you end up with something that actually feels like a mechanical ranger yeah um which i really like um it is kind of this like weird halfway like not a ranger not not a ranger it's i would say with this character it's everything you wish the beast master was yeah no i i get that vibe you're you're flying around with a musket you're blasting people you're hasting yourself you have the steel defender eating people out there on the battlefield it's it's iconic we actually have two very different builds but very iconic these are these are almost the two different amazing ways that you can go and um when it comes to spells at this point i actually am not really relying on my spell casting all that much yeah the artificer fourth level spells leave a little bit to be desired but i do think that summon construct is a good spell to pack here um because in both in both of our cases the construct that you summon puts another body on the board and it does pretty good damage there is the argument to be made that that extra damage is more valuable than the ac bonus and the way that it stacks up against even the personal output of my character it is kind of worth it yeah so it it's it's a bit of a toss-up um evaluate the situation sometimes it is worth having that extra body on the board because haste can be a little bit punishing when it goes down if your concentration on haste gets broken you do lose a turn yeah so it can suck with my spells i didn't take anything phenomenal here but i took i i leaned into the utility of my character i went with arcane eye and fabricate yeah i would take both of those and those are really just like and i imagine me sending like a little mechanical drone of my eyeball to go spy or fabricate just felt on brand and i love the idea of my artificer being able to whip up some sort of item so i was going more for flavor and theme with those choices but i do think if i have my steel defender in the middle the construct and me on either side um that's a wall we're creating a wall yep if i'm in a party with like you know some squishies in the back don't worry guys i got you now if you're setting out to build a battlesmith keep in mind that these are not the only two options we looked at a kind of cool rangery musket build and a leaning into defense build but i think that we could give an honorable mention to playing something like a gnome who rides their steel defender yes this would be a case where you might even want to consider taking mountain combatant the only reason why this doesn't work as well as you would hope it was is that mounted combatant only gives you advantage on targets that are smaller than your mount and the steel defender is a medium-sized creature so the vast majority of the time you're not going to be able to benefit from that but you could still be a gnome on a big mechanical hor on a mechanical pony uh riding around with a lance and that could be pretty cool yeah i think that there's a lot of options here and also a lot of different ways that you can go with your infusions and your spell choices and that's really what i think we like about the battlesmith is you and i just made the same subclass but ended up with two completely different characters yes they're gonna feel very different in play despite having pretty similar infusions pretty similar spell selection and really all that you do is you just vary which ability score was important what equipment was important it's it's it's a fun concept i really like the artificer for what it adds for flavor and themes for the world of dungeons and dragons yeah i think i think this is really cool and i i i'm really tempted to make this one of the next charac it's between this and a blade singer for the next character i play i mean i was absolutely a hundred percent fixed on playing a bard for my next long-term character yeah but the more i've looked into the artificer the more i think it just keeps creeping higher and higher on my list i still have some misgivings with the artificer overall um but definitely looking at the battlesmith i've warmed up to it i think there's a lot of first of all it's unequivocal that you have the damage the tankiness if you want it to build a character that is much closer really to something that feels more like a ranger or a paladin than something that is a wizard and i think that that was the thing that colored my initial impression of the artificer is that you actually get something that is more of a melee combat character that is using arcane magic to support them they're much closer in that respect uh to their more martially oriented counterparts than they are to something like a sorcerer or a wizard which i think was a little bit of a mindset change for me to look at coming into this i think you and i uh approach this at different levels i know that you you went in saying i don't know about the artificer it feels half baked yeah and i went in kind of already loving it but everything that i've seen from it and all the builds that i've played around with have just made me love it more it's it's got to be in my opinion it's it's probably in my top it's definitely in my top five classes that i would play in dungeons and dragons fifth edition i think that when a class inspires you with a lot of great options and you can see within even characters that take the same subclass different ways to make that character that is a big strength of the design because i think that for a lot of other subclasses out there there's many that don't have this kind of flexibility behind them in in the different directions you can go so you know that's that's but that's kind of the thing the the artificer is very much uh the self-made uh hero they get to build themselves up and they are as individual as the creations that they make because if nobody else is going to build you up then you've got to build yourself up and what better way to do that than being an artificer so this has been a look at how to play a battlesmith in dungeons and dragons 5th edition tell us about the battlesmiths that you've created in the comments below the videos that we create on our channel are made possible thanks to the incredible generosity of our patreon supporters if you enjoy the work that we do here on youtube and elsewhere please consider supporting our channel by following the links in the description below and don't forget to check out our live play shadows of drakenheim which is tuesday nights at 6pm eastern on twitch you can find all the previous episodes right up over here and we have plenty more build guides for the other character classes in dnd right up over here please subscribe to our channel so that you never miss an episode thanks so much for watching we'll see you next time in the dungeon

Channel: Dungeon Dudes

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Keywords: dungeons, dragons, tabletop, gaming, roleplaying, games, accessories, rules, rule, gameplay, play, game, rpg, d20, player, character, D&D, 5e, DM, PC, tips, advice, guide, guides, review, dice, books, book

Id: Ynaa0Xv7J6o

Length: 33min 19sec (1999 seconds)

Published: Thu Aug 05 2021