Best Feats for Battle Smith Artificer 5e
by Prince Phantom
The Battle Smith is the commonly agreed upon “best” Artificer subclass, and it’s easy to see why. We get good weapon use, the ability to focus solely on intelligence, a very effective pet, and the Shield spell. In many ways this is a fixed Beast Master before that subclass itself was fixed.
I find the higher level features slightly lacking, but they’re still not bad. In terms of feat selection, the pet does want to occupy our bonus action every turn which limits us slightly, but there are still a fair number of feats that we can work with.
Best Feats for Battle Smith Artificer 5e
Sharpshooter/Great Weapon Master (ASAP): Since we can effectively use weapons, why not REALLY effectively use weapons? I’d definitely recommend Sharpshooter as staying at range is a much safer and better strategy, but I can’t deny that there is fun to be had in fighting side-by-side with your pet.
Mounted Combatant (Lv 4): A sharp player might have already caught on to the fact that as a medium construct, we can mount our pet if we play a small race. There’s a ton of advantages to this. For one, this feat allows us to more easily spread damage between ourselves and our pet, and since our pet is so easy to heal, that’s a big boon. If we treat it as a controlled mount, we can use its movement without needing to take a bonus action to command it, and it will always be near us to use its deflection reaction to keep us safe. If we stay at range, this does mean our pet won’t be attacking very often, but we can offset this downside by picking up Crossbow Expert and just attacking with our bonus action ourselves. I highly recommend trying this playstyle out, it’s very different and very fun. You could also play a kobold with pack tactics and instead pick up Gunner, intending to get in melee and shoot our targets point blank with advantage thanks to pack tactics and our mount being right next to our target as well. Doing this, our pet can also make an attack as they are in melee range. Both strategies are good, but as always the ranged option is safer and therefore better.
Fighting Initiate (Lv 8): I’d probably recommend just taking a level in Fighter rather than this, but if you refuse to multiclass and are playing a ranged build, Archery is worth this feat. +2 to hit on every attack just adds so much damage, especially when combined with Sharpshooter that I believe it’s a must have on every ranged build.
Piercer (Lv 12): If you just want another way to improve your damage, this will do. Make sure you’ve exhausted every other feat that does this before you pick this one though, as the actual DPR gain is very small.
Resilient Wisdom (Lv 12): An enemy taking control of you is even worse than a normal character, because they get your pet too. This feat plus Flash of Genius will make sure that never happens, along with all the debilitating effects of other wisdom saves.
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