fighter/artificer combo

[Dman1970]

Have a low level (3Ftr/2Art) first life fighter/artificer using bastard swords. Should I go THF or SWF? I'm thinking THF for the strikethrough, but wanted to ask. So much has changed in the decade that we stopped playing to now, I feel kind of noobish with all the questions I've asked. What trees should I use? My base stats are at level 5 without gear are
Str 15
Dex 15
Con16
Int 15
Wis 8
Cha 8

I think I meant to do 16 Int, but missed and did Con due to craziness in the house with 2 kids and 2 dogs.... The con just makes me a bit more tanky I guess.

 

[tolanj]

You CAN strikethrough with a bastard sword and SWF, it just starts at 20% and you can really only improve that by 20% more in heroics (via Battle Engineer) with your class split (plus 20% more in racial tree if you are Warforged/Half-Orcs/Human).

It really depends were you're going with the character. In heroics, for bswords, you can get to 1.6x stat damage with THF (though you'll need Str up to 17 to do that), SWF will give you 1.5x + 30% attack speed (so better single target), and just needs some balance.

Your basic choice is to go SWF and grab Kinetic Discharge and/or Cleave/Great Cleave/Whirlwind attack feats for AOE, along with an AOE runearm OR go THF. (Runearm damage will depend heavily on the number of Arti levels you take).

'Typically' SWF builds would be int based (ie hit and damage via Arti spell + Harper Agent), take Know the Angles and start with a lower Strength and higher Int (and thus have better trap skills)
'Typically' THF build would start with a higher strength so they can hit Str 17 by the time they have BAB 6 to take Improved THF.

 

[Zvdegor]

If you wanna do a melee arti have a look at my build. It is a self sufficient fun build.

https://forums.ddo.com/index.php?threads/improved-vistani-robot-renegade-offensive-budget-off-tank-a-melee-artificer-for-r8-questing.373/

 

[Kodewraith]

To underscore what tolanj said above...

For heroics, the most effective AoE with a bastard sword is not the strikethrough, it's a cleave. IFF you have cleaves you're best off using those with a SWF weapon with a lot of damage instead of the "passive" cleave of the BSword (although a bsword is perfectly fine too). You just won't have enough strikethrough (20-60%) to make a huge difference in heroics. I hit a similar dynamic on my CHA SWF pally build and found the cleaves in KotC were vastly more important than the strikethrough. I leveled with Bsword more because I had nice bswords rather than that it was more effective than a longsword.

Assuming you just live with cleaves and take SWF, it changes at 31 when you pick up the whole THF line from your L 31 feat. Then the Strikethrough goes up to more like 240% and you actually are hitting enough to make a difference.

For the "I just want to hit things with a BSword" Arti build, you can target 18 arti/2 fighter OR 12Arti / 8 Fighter.

I'd recommend front loading fighter levels and going with with option #2. So take the next 5 levels as fighter than all the rest arti. Take 41 AP and Tier5 of Kensai, enough AP into Stalwart defender to get the first tier of the PRR Aura, then INT to hit/dmg from Harper tree as well as Know the Angles, then everything else into BE and RM. Don't worry overly much about stats, just put everythign into INT and take Harper tree. up to about 13 points.

You'll wind up with 38 odd points in Kensai, 13 points in Harper and then.... You can decide to basically ignore most of Battle Engineer beyond the first couple abilites since the Kensai tree is a way better tree for actually hitting things. In that case your points go into Defender and RM to make yourself more durable or Take everything in BE up to Tier4 and be very heavily optimized for offense. Or split the difference.

I'll try to post that build over in the arti forums since I'm about to go run it myself.

 

[Kodewraith]

Some updates from heroic play testing:

I'm sitting at level 18 right now on my main headed towards a 1x / 8fighter / 11 Arti level split. In my case, I wanted more Razerclaw lives, so Barbarian at 1. As predicted, the Cleave from RMM is most of my AoE melee DPS with a lot of short range rune arm blasting. I basically never cast any spells that aren't buffs or heals.

With an iconic level you're looking at either 12 arti / 6 Fighter / 1x or 11 Arti / 8 Fighter / 1x (which is what I recommend). I'd recommend 8 fighter just because you can't get the +25% hitpoints from Kensai T5 any other way.

Note that the optimal level split seems to be 8 fighter / 12 Arti if you're not going pure Arti. This also allows Improved Construct Essence, which you can take with your Arti bonus feat, then Construct Exemplar in epics, so if you're planning on staying at cap any length of time as an iconic, you likely really want to +1 heart into 12 Arti / 8 fighter out of your iconic level. Unless you're Bladeforged, in which case just live with 1 Pally / 11 Arti / 8 fighter.

I'll try to post my build over in the Arti forum since it's performing surprisingly well and works with any iconic.