Haven't looked too far into the book, but immediately two items caught my attention: Illusionist's Bracers and Mizzium Apparatus. Illusionist's Bracers is very rare, which probably makes it fine, but although the flavor text says it was created to be able to make multiple Minor Illusion spells, any spellcaster can attune to it, including a Warlock. Two Eldritch Blasts per round sounds... ouch. The Mizzium Apparatus looks more overpowered, though, being just uncommon: basically, you can cast all cantrips of your class (DC 10? +9 Arcana is easy to achieve), plus you can probably cast any other spell, too. At level 17, when you get access to level 9 spells, the DC for a level 9 spell would be 28, and your Arcana bonus should be at least +11 (that's just proficiency and intelligence bonus, assuming no items that give bonuses to skills, and assuming 20 Intelligence, not higher), so you'll manage to do it 20% of the time. The rest of the time, you're not wasting an action, just casting a different spell. And given that most of the options (including ALL of the options for spells other than level 2 and 3) are attack/offense, you're probably end up doing something good anyway, even if not as good as you intended. Level 2 and 3 spells, by the way, you manage 90% and 80% of the time, so the odds of getting a "bad" offensive choice are REALLY low. All that, for an uncommon item???
Whoever made Illusionist's Bracers did not account for Warlocks.
By the time you get Very rare your Eldritch blast will either be doing 3 beams or 4 (let's go with 3) and 7 Eldritch Invocations.
Agonizing Blast: each beam now does +CHA extra damage, whiich by this stage is most likely +5. So, if all against one target and all hit that's 3d10+15 force damage (a damage type rarely resisted).
Eldritch Spear: the range of Eldritch Blast attacks are now 300 ft.
Grasp of Hadar: Once on a turn if you hit with at least one beam you may pull them closer to you by 10 ft. (optional on hit)
Lance of Lethargy: Once on a turn if you hit with at least one beam the creature's attack speed is reduced by 10 ft. (optional on hit)
Repelling Blast: Each time you hit a creature with an Eldritch Blast beam you push them away by 10 ft.(optional on hit)
And two of choice.
You or an ally creates an ongoing AoE that affects a creature "when they enter on a turn" and "start their turn there". With a radius of 20 ft or at most 30 ft. Like Sickening Radiance which is a Warlock spell.
With the bracers you can use Eldritch Blast twice a round for free for as long as you want. So, focus on one enemy in that AoE. You can attack them with up to 6 beams, and can move them 10 ft per beam away until they're out of the area then another blast to pull them towards you back into the area triggering the AoE's effect.
So for sake of example let's say you hit on all 6, and had used Sickening Radiance and they failed their saves...
That's 6d10+30 from blast, 8d10 from Sickening Radiance, and the targets gets 2 levels of exhaustian which is... oh half speed, and less 10 ft movement that's.. 5 ft of movement on average they get. Even if they dashed you could potentially do this all over again. And again. And again... For up 100 rounds.
That's just a little bit broken in my opinion. Especially since you can pull this off about 3 times per short rest. High Con? The attacks will wittle them down. High AC? Eventually they'll fail Con enough times to be killed by that. To contend with this the creature has to have high AC, high Con and be immune to exhaustian.
JUst want to stick to blasting? Why not take Spell Sniper and enjoy sniping your 6+ attacks at 600 ft. Throw in a bt of Sorc for a naughty occasional 1200 ft sniping just to make those enemies go WTF?.
Any Sorc can do this but their distant spell metamagic comes at a cost of resource of 2 point each time: that's 10 a day at 20th level. That's reasonable. But doing this infinitely, especially with Warlock who can throw in so many extras for the E-Blasting and this is insane.
Maybe Legendary would be better.
And the Apparatus, yeah that should be Rare at least, probably Very Rare.
@Cyb3rm1nd Breath. Sorlocks have been a powerful multiclass for a long time. This doesn't change anything except now you don't need to multiclass, and if you get the bracers, you will get them 9 or more levels later than it would have taken the multiclass to come online.
TL;DR Illusionist bracers are a strong magic item, but not balance breaking. Very rare is an appropriate rarity for them.
I don't know why you're mentioning breath. Are you saying I need a mint? How could you tell, I'm supposed to be alone here...
Er, anyway...
I am fully aware there are sorlocks (and, that you can take E-Blast without multiclassing, thank you Magic Intiate) but see, the Sorcies get a limited pool for doing this and it takes 2 points to achieve this. This means even if they get to level 20 they can only do this 10 times and it takes away from all the other metamagic fun and extra spell slots they could have used. They can achieve more by sacroficing a lot of spell slots, sure, but agan this creates more limit.
But Sorlock is even more limited! To get all those E-Blast upgrades requires heavy investment into Warlock which means a lot less investment into Sorcerer so much less Sorc Points to use. That makes a decent limit.
The powerbalance for rarity comes into play because of those E-Blast upgrades and the vast amount you can abuse them for mnaipulating enemies (on hit, no save) into and out of lasting AoE for re-triggering damage basically letting you double the effects of it while potentially dealing up to 8d10+40 every single turn without limit (which, note, no Legendary item or multiclassing can grant) on top AND reducing speed for them to try and get away from this AND you could be moving away up to 300 ft or even further with a feat to stay safe from even most ranged attacks -- and this is all without any help from your adventuring party.
What this offers to Warlocks far exceeds any other Legendary item in D&D 5th Edition. And Gude to Ravnica provides it as very rare. The techniques mentioned can be achieved by a Sorlock but with considerable limitations and sacrifices to balance it. This item lets a Warlock not need to multiclass AND use it as much as they could possibly want without any limits.
You are not wrong. In the very specific case of a high level warlock with mostly eldritch blast invocations, the illusionist bracers are very powerful (probably way more powerful than the developers intended). So a DM just has to not give it to the warlock, or house rule out eldritch blast.
The one what "pulls" is once. The one that "pushes" is per hit. You could therefore very easily push them out of the AoE and pull back in and reduce their movement and if they fail the Sickening Radiance 2 or more times, bearing in mind that using this you're forcing them to save aganst it twice per round (more times if your party is also doing this) you reduce their speed to 5 for most enemies making it very easy, given you have 6-8 attacks, to pull this off, over and over.
The apparatus is not providing spell slots, as magic items tend to do. Mathematically, the wearer’s daily power output does not change. Its effect scales with level, unlike most other magic items, which provide static benefits.
A tier-3 wizard will always be able to cast a Cantrip, but warlocks and sorcerers are at risk of wasting an action if they attempt to cast a Cantrip. A lvl 5 wizard will have a 10% chance of failure.
A player using this is trying to cast a specific spell, probably for a particular purpose. If the player fails the arcana check, the player risks A) wasting an action and spell slot on a spell that had no benefit in this situation, B) losing concentration on a spell, C) creating an AoE harmful to self or allies.
A lvl 5 wizard who tries to cast a 3rd-level spell has a 40% of failure, and about 6% chance of downing himself with a fireball.
I think that the mizzium apparatus is dangerous enough to its user to balance its benefits.
I also think that this item needs to be uncommon because of Rules as Fun. You don’t want to wait until tier 3 to start using this thing.
A with any magical item, how broken or balanced it is in a campaign heavily depends on the DM. If a DM finds it is too powerful, they don't need to ever give it to their players. Or if they do and find the players are making it far more powerful than expected, first off good on the players, but second, the DM can just make more difficult encounters.
Go for more numerous enemies over singular powerful enemies, for example. One dragon turtle got caught in a loop using Eldritch Blasts? Well, maybe go for three dozen kobolds. Much lower on the challenge rating scale, even going by adjusted XP values, but sheer numbers could easily let them overpower the players, and two Eldritch Blasts can only kill two kobolds no matter how much damage is dealt in one hit. Or, for less to keep track of, four banshee. Numbers can make it harder to manage thanks to action economy. Or find enemies with resistance or immunity to whatever their players use most to exploit the power of the item like force for a warlock spamming Eldritch Blast. Or modify more intelligent enemies by giving them items to do the same, like resistance potions so you don't need to give the players more magic items to exploit. And that's just for Illusionist's Bracers.
The Mizzium Apparatus is the same, as although many of the potential spells of a failed use can still be useful, they aren't always. Again, resistance and immunity can easily make the spell do nothing. Plus, at higher levels, it adds even more risk, since any spell above 5 fails into a level 5 spell. As an optional thing, since the lore is that the spellcasting fails and becomes something else and how this happens isn't specified, the DM could rule that the player doesn't get to adapt the range, thus running the risk of accidentally hitting allies or not having the right range anymore. As an example, say the player, a second level wizard, tries to cast Magic Missile on a kobold 20 ft away using the apparatus, fails the check, and ends up casting Thunderwave, hitting the team's barbarian instead since its now a 15 ft cube originating from the caster instead of a magic range attack with a 120 ft range. Or a drow spellcaster instead of a kobold, in the far back to avoid combat and thus 100 ft away, and the Magic Missile becomes Burning Hands, not reaching the spellcaster and firing straight in front of the player, just missing the drow scout a little more to the left that had been ignored because the paladin that is in range was dealing with it. Just because many of the options are still attacks, doesn't mean there's no risk when they miss. And if you disregard that risk because the Arcana check is easily passed by the player, then it just becomes that they didn't need to worry about ensuring they have the right spells prepared, and if that was an issue then it shouldn't have been given in the first place since that's the main effect, though that still isn't a broken effect since it just saves time and lets the DM have less to worry about to avoid a TPK since damage resistance and immunity isn't as big of a problem.
Vedalken are not the optimal. Mark of Making Human with Prodigy. Artificer 1/Graviturgist X. At level 2, the character's arcana bonus will be 1d4 + 5. At level 5, 1d4 + 9 (auto-success for cantrips). At level 9, 1d4 + 12 (auto-success for 2nd-level spells). At level 13, 1d4 + 15 (auto-success for 3rd level spells). At level 17, 1d4 + 17 (auto-success for 4th level spells). Also would be able to cast Guidance on itself. The mizzium apparatus would give the character access to both the artificer and wizard spell lists.
Haven't looked too far into the book, but immediately two items caught my attention: Illusionist's Bracers and Mizzium Apparatus. Illusionist's Bracers is very rare, which probably makes it fine, but although the flavor text says it was created to be able to make multiple Minor Illusion spells, any spellcaster can attune to it, including a Warlock. Two Eldritch Blasts per round sounds... ouch. The Mizzium Apparatus looks more overpowered, though, being just uncommon: basically, you can cast all cantrips of your class (DC 10? +9 Arcana is easy to achieve), plus you can probably cast any other spell, too. At level 17, when you get access to level 9 spells, the DC for a level 9 spell would be 28, and your Arcana bonus should be at least +11 (that's just proficiency and intelligence bonus, assuming no items that give bonuses to skills, and assuming 20 Intelligence, not higher), so you'll manage to do it 20% of the time. The rest of the time, you're not wasting an action, just casting a different spell. And given that most of the options (including ALL of the options for spells other than level 2 and 3) are attack/offense, you're probably end up doing something good anyway, even if not as good as you intended. Level 2 and 3 spells, by the way, you manage 90% and 80% of the time, so the odds of getting a "bad" offensive choice are REALLY low. All that, for an uncommon item???
Whoever made Illusionist's Bracers did not account for Warlocks.
By the time you get Very rare your Eldritch blast will either be doing 3 beams or 4 (let's go with 3) and 7 Eldritch Invocations.
Agonizing Blast: each beam now does +CHA extra damage, whiich by this stage is most likely +5. So, if all against one target and all hit that's 3d10+15 force damage (a damage type rarely resisted).
Eldritch Spear: the range of Eldritch Blast attacks are now 300 ft.
Grasp of Hadar: Once on a turn if you hit with at least one beam you may pull them closer to you by 10 ft. (optional on hit)
Lance of Lethargy: Once on a turn if you hit with at least one beam the creature's attack speed is reduced by 10 ft. (optional on hit)
Repelling Blast: Each time you hit a creature with an Eldritch Blast beam you push them away by 10 ft.(optional on hit)
And two of choice.
You or an ally creates an ongoing AoE that affects a creature "when they enter on a turn" and "start their turn there". With a radius of 20 ft or at most 30 ft. Like Sickening Radiance which is a Warlock spell.
With the bracers you can use Eldritch Blast twice a round for free for as long as you want. So, focus on one enemy in that AoE. You can attack them with up to 6 beams, and can move them 10 ft per beam away until they're out of the area then another blast to pull them towards you back into the area triggering the AoE's effect.
So for sake of example let's say you hit on all 6, and had used Sickening Radiance and they failed their saves...
That's 6d10+30 from blast, 8d10 from Sickening Radiance, and the targets gets 2 levels of exhaustian which is... oh half speed, and less 10 ft movement that's.. 5 ft of movement on average they get. Even if they dashed you could potentially do this all over again. And again. And again... For up 100 rounds.
That's just a little bit broken in my opinion. Especially since you can pull this off about 3 times per short rest. High Con? The attacks will wittle them down. High AC? Eventually they'll fail Con enough times to be killed by that. To contend with this the creature has to have high AC, high Con and be immune to exhaustian.
JUst want to stick to blasting? Why not take Spell Sniper and enjoy sniping your 6+ attacks at 600 ft. Throw in a bt of Sorc for a naughty occasional 1200 ft sniping just to make those enemies go WTF?.
Any Sorc can do this but their distant spell metamagic comes at a cost of resource of 2 point each time: that's 10 a day at 20th level. That's reasonable. But doing this infinitely, especially with Warlock who can throw in so many extras for the E-Blasting and this is insane.
Maybe Legendary would be better.
And the Apparatus, yeah that should be Rare at least, probably Very Rare.
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@Cyb3rm1nd Breath. Sorlocks have been a powerful multiclass for a long time. This doesn't change anything except now you don't need to multiclass, and if you get the bracers, you will get them 9 or more levels later than it would have taken the multiclass to come online.
TL;DR Illusionist bracers are a strong magic item, but not balance breaking. Very rare is an appropriate rarity for them.
I don't know why you're mentioning breath. Are you saying I need a mint? How could you tell, I'm supposed to be alone here...
Er, anyway...
I am fully aware there are sorlocks (and, that you can take E-Blast without multiclassing, thank you Magic Intiate) but see, the Sorcies get a limited pool for doing this and it takes 2 points to achieve this. This means even if they get to level 20 they can only do this 10 times and it takes away from all the other metamagic fun and extra spell slots they could have used. They can achieve more by sacroficing a lot of spell slots, sure, but agan this creates more limit.
But Sorlock is even more limited! To get all those E-Blast upgrades requires heavy investment into Warlock which means a lot less investment into Sorcerer so much less Sorc Points to use. That makes a decent limit.
The powerbalance for rarity comes into play because of those E-Blast upgrades and the vast amount you can abuse them for mnaipulating enemies (on hit, no save) into and out of lasting AoE for re-triggering damage basically letting you double the effects of it while potentially dealing up to 8d10+40 every single turn without limit (which, note, no Legendary item or multiclassing can grant) on top AND reducing speed for them to try and get away from this AND you could be moving away up to 300 ft or even further with a feat to stay safe from even most ranged attacks -- and this is all without any help from your adventuring party.
What this offers to Warlocks far exceeds any other Legendary item in D&D 5th Edition. And Gude to Ravnica provides it as very rare. The techniques mentioned can be achieved by a Sorlock but with considerable limitations and sacrifices to balance it. This item lets a Warlock not need to multiclass AND use it as much as they could possibly want without any limits.
So, I stand by what I said.
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I meant breathe not breath. Stupid e.
You are not wrong. In the very specific case of a high level warlock with mostly eldritch blast invocations, the illusionist bracers are very powerful (probably way more powerful than the developers intended). So a DM just has to not give it to the warlock, or house rule out eldritch blast.
Aren't the 10' move invocations once per turn, tho? So, at best, you could move them out and back in, with two EB casts, which is still very strong.
The one what "pulls" is once. The one that "pushes" is per hit. You could therefore very easily push them out of the AoE and pull back in and reduce their movement and if they fail the Sickening Radiance 2 or more times, bearing in mind that using this you're forcing them to save aganst it twice per round (more times if your party is also doing this) you reduce their speed to 5 for most enemies making it very easy, given you have 6-8 attacks, to pull this off, over and over.
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Yikes.
The apparatus is not providing spell slots, as magic items tend to do. Mathematically, the wearer’s daily power output does not change. Its effect scales with level, unlike most other magic items, which provide static benefits.
A tier-3 wizard will always be able to cast a Cantrip, but warlocks and sorcerers are at risk of wasting an action if they attempt to cast a Cantrip. A lvl 5 wizard will have a 10% chance of failure.
A player using this is trying to cast a specific spell, probably for a particular purpose. If the player fails the arcana check, the player risks A) wasting an action and spell slot on a spell that had no benefit in this situation, B) losing concentration on a spell, C) creating an AoE harmful to self or allies.
A lvl 5 wizard who tries to cast a 3rd-level spell has a 40% of failure, and about 6% chance of downing himself with a fireball.
I think that the mizzium apparatus is dangerous enough to its user to balance its benefits.
I also think that this item needs to be uncommon because of Rules as Fun. You don’t want to wait until tier 3 to start using this thing.
A with any magical item, how broken or balanced it is in a campaign heavily depends on the DM. If a DM finds it is too powerful, they don't need to ever give it to their players. Or if they do and find the players are making it far more powerful than expected, first off good on the players, but second, the DM can just make more difficult encounters.
Go for more numerous enemies over singular powerful enemies, for example. One dragon turtle got caught in a loop using Eldritch Blasts? Well, maybe go for three dozen kobolds. Much lower on the challenge rating scale, even going by adjusted XP values, but sheer numbers could easily let them overpower the players, and two Eldritch Blasts can only kill two kobolds no matter how much damage is dealt in one hit. Or, for less to keep track of, four banshee. Numbers can make it harder to manage thanks to action economy. Or find enemies with resistance or immunity to whatever their players use most to exploit the power of the item like force for a warlock spamming Eldritch Blast. Or modify more intelligent enemies by giving them items to do the same, like resistance potions so you don't need to give the players more magic items to exploit. And that's just for Illusionist's Bracers.
The Mizzium Apparatus is the same, as although many of the potential spells of a failed use can still be useful, they aren't always. Again, resistance and immunity can easily make the spell do nothing. Plus, at higher levels, it adds even more risk, since any spell above 5 fails into a level 5 spell. As an optional thing, since the lore is that the spellcasting fails and becomes something else and how this happens isn't specified, the DM could rule that the player doesn't get to adapt the range, thus running the risk of accidentally hitting allies or not having the right range anymore. As an example, say the player, a second level wizard, tries to cast Magic Missile on a kobold 20 ft away using the apparatus, fails the check, and ends up casting Thunderwave, hitting the team's barbarian instead since its now a 15 ft cube originating from the caster instead of a magic range attack with a 120 ft range. Or a drow spellcaster instead of a kobold, in the far back to avoid combat and thus 100 ft away, and the Magic Missile becomes Burning Hands, not reaching the spellcaster and firing straight in front of the player, just missing the drow scout a little more to the left that had been ignored because the paladin that is in range was dealing with it. Just because many of the options are still attacks, doesn't mean there's no risk when they miss. And if you disregard that risk because the Arcana check is easily passed by the player, then it just becomes that they didn't need to worry about ensuring they have the right spells prepared, and if that was an issue then it shouldn't have been given in the first place since that's the main effect, though that still isn't a broken effect since it just saves time and lets the DM have less to worry about to avoid a TPK since damage resistance and immunity isn't as big of a problem.
It is far worse than that, with the Vedalkin you would always have advantage to the role for the Mizzium Apparatus.
Vedalken are not the optimal. Mark of Making Human with Prodigy. Artificer 1/Graviturgist X. At level 2, the character's arcana bonus will be 1d4 + 5. At level 5, 1d4 + 9 (auto-success for cantrips). At level 9, 1d4 + 12 (auto-success for 2nd-level spells). At level 13, 1d4 + 15 (auto-success for 3rd level spells). At level 17, 1d4 + 17 (auto-success for 4th level spells). Also would be able to cast Guidance on itself. The mizzium apparatus would give the character access to both the artificer and wizard spell lists.
Do they not just have advantage on saving throws? Its a skill check. At best they'd add 1D4 from Tireless Precision.