Crafting Your Class
All Prices given below are BEFORE cost reductions.
Here be shenanigans, but you already expected that, didn't you?Cost to make a Continuous item with a Round/Level duration at minimum CL:
Spell Level | | CL | | Cost |
| 1 | | 1 | | 8,000gp |
| 2 | | 3 | | 48,000gp |
| 3 | | 5 | | 120,000gp |
| 4 | | 7 | | 224,000gp |
| 5 | | 9 | | 360,000gp |
| 6 | | 11 | | 528,000gp |
| 7 | | 13 | | 728,000gp |
| 8 | | 15 | | 960,000gp |
| 9 | | 17 | | 1,224,000gp |
Even if you drop a digit using our cost reductions, anything above level 3 is an Epic item because the base cost is over 200,000gp.
Cost to make a Continuous item with a Round/Level duration at CL 1:
Spell Level | CL | | Cost |
| 1 | | 1 | | 8,000gp |
| 2 | | 1 | | 16,000gp |
| 3 | | 1 | | 24,000gp |
| 4 | | 1 | | 32,000gp |
| 5 | | 1 | | 40,000gp |
| 6 | | 1 | | 48,000gp |
| 7 | | 1 | | 56,000gp |
| 8 | | 1 | | 64,000gp |
| 9 | | 1 | | 72,000gp |
CL 1 items have a unique weakness however: They autofail against dispel checks, since the dispel check is vs the CL of the item. An item to protect you against this is pretty much required, or you are going to feel the hurt.
: Divine Power. Persist it or craft a continuous item of it. Yeah, it costs a ridiculous amount. That's what the crafting cost reductions were for.
Special Attacks: How many different spells can you think of that grant a special attack? That's right, a hell of a lot. Many of them are even free actions (Cloud of Knives!)
Class Archetypes: What's that? You wanted to be a skillmonkey? Ring of Evasion and Skill boosters. Wanted to be a sharpshooter? Get a crossbow and add every bell and whistle you can think of. Tank? Go full Iron Man with clockwork armor.
Feats and Skills: Certain feats can explicitly be granted by magic items. A&EG says items that grant feats have a set cost+a cost per prerequisite feat.
Plenty of spells grant feats or skill bonuses.
Sneak Attack A continous item of Hunter's Eye costs 48,000/1d6 Sneak Attack.
Find Traps costs 8000 for the base ability. Increasing the CL of the spell is pricey, so grabbing an insight bonus to search from somewhere else is preferable.
Rage This can be achieved in a variety of ways, but my favorite is the Gutworm symbiont from Fiend Folio. For the price of a lesser planar binding scroll (1125gp) you get unlimited Rage, a +2 inherent bonus to CON, and a 1/day neutralize poison.
Spells up to 6th: For the Warforged, Wand Bonding lets you cast spells from wands using your infusion slots instead of charges. (City of Stormreach, page 119)
Minimizing caster level: why would anyone want to do such a thing? The idea is that an artificer's item-creation abilities are caster-level based. As such, an artificer who goes by the minimum caster level of a cleric can't scribe a scroll of miracle until level 15 -- but going by other classes, they might get it sooner. Here's what I've come up with so far.
Cleric spells -- accessible to an ur-priest. Caster level = spell level, if the ur-priest has no spellcasting before entering the prestige class, or cleric spellcasting. (5th level spells have minimum caster level 5, etc).
Domain spells -- accessible to a divine crusader. One again, Caster level = spell level.
Sorcerer/Wizard spells -- here, things get a bit more confusing. There are two ways of getting high spell-level/low caster-level spells here.
A bard/sublime chord gets accelerated casting. Since this is a silly theoretical optimization exercise, we might as well push it as far as we can: let's take an illumian bard 1/rogue 9 with precocious apprentice and improved sigil (krau). She becomes a bard 1/rogue 9/sublime chord 1, able to cast 4th and 5th level bard and sorcerer spells with a caster level of two. From then on, progression is a bit more normal: 6th level spells require a caster level of 4, 7th require 6, 8th require 8, and 9th require 10.
Level 2 sorcerer/wizard spells also are accessible with a CL of 1, via precocious apprentice.
Level 3 sor/wiz spells still require a caster level of 5, as far as I can tell. It's a bit odd: you can cast level 0, 1, and 2 arcane spells at CL 1, then you need CL 5 to cast level 3 arcane spells, then you go back down to CL 2 to cast 4th and 5th level arcane spells.
Bard spells -- well, I think this is mostly covered by the bard/sublime chord combination for bard spells of level 4 or higher. Bard has another weird "hump" in CL: level 0 spells have minimum CL 1, level 1 spells have minimum CL 2, then level 2 spells go back to minimum CL 1 thanks to precocious apprentice. Spell level 3 -- well, the best I can come up with is CL 6, which is barely better than the default of CL 7. That's the caster level at which a chameleon can cast level 3 arcane spells.
Depending on whether aptitude focuses are usable for item creation, the chameleon provides a bit of help for both arcane and divine spellcasting CL minimization for level 2 spells: they can cast them at chameleon level 1 with a CL of 2. From then on, chameleon spellcasting quickly becomes a worse and worse deal for CL minimization: level 3 spells at CL 6, level 4 spells at CL 10, level 5 spells at CL 14, and level 6 spells at CL 18.
The blighter could be addressed, but in truth, I don't feel like bothering. Its spell list is so thoroughly mediocre that the divine crusader, ur-priest, bard/sublime chord, and such probably make it completely obsolete.
So... for an artificer, this means that 9th level cleric and domain spells can be scribed onto scrolls at level 7, since artificers can meet item creation prerequisites two caster levels higher than they are, and can scribe 9th level sorcerer/wizard spells at level 8. Furthermore, polymorph is available at level 1 for an artificer.
