The 12 Days of Critmas: The Artificer
Welcome back, it’s Christmas and that means I can make a pun about crits and some blogs about dealing vast amounts of damage at level 8.
Merry Critmas
There are 13 classes in 5e, and over the next 12 days, I’ll put up some quick posts about doing as much damage as possible for each class, at a level you might actually get to play at. I’ll just do single class builds, so it doesn’t get too complicated, and will include most of the optional rules from Tasha’s which you’d expect to be allowed (the spell lists, better beast master, etc.). Despite the title, I’ll look at maximum damage for non-crits first, and once a build has been settled on, work out the total amount possible then. I chose level 8 so that feat combinations can be used, while still making builds that could appear in a typical lower levels campaign. You can find most of the rules involved online, but I’ll include summaries for a few important ones so you don’t need to look those up.
For this series, the goal will be doing the most damage to a single target in one turn as possible. We’ll assume the PC has a +3 in their main stat at level 1 and a +2 in any secondary stat. They can then follow any path in a single class to level 8.
The Artificer
First up, the artificer. By level 8, our main decision points here are race, feats, and subclass (there’s only a couple of offensive infusions available at this level and you know 6 in total). The best way to deal damage will vary mostly with subclass, so let’s narrow that down first. Alchemist is more support focused, and compared to battle smith, armorer will deal less damage on a turn- the benefits of the suit are more varied than just a large damage die. We’re left with artillerist and battle smith.
Artillerist can deal 2d8 force damage to a single target, or 2d8 fire AOE with a save, both as a bonus action using their cannon. We’ll go for the force option because it can crit, and the focus here is single-target damage. This leaves an action to cast a spell, their best option being shatter, with 3d8 thunder damage +1d8 bonus damage from arcane firearm. That’s a total of 48 max damage on a turn with the force option, without crits, and 64 with a crit. There are no obvious feats to improve the sheer damage here. We could take magic initiate or shadow touched to pick up hex and have it running before this attack, boosting the damage to 54 without crits, but that relies on interpreting the ‘you’ in the spell description to include the eldritch cannon.
This is quite a lot for an artificer, but pales against the Battle Smith. This next build basically relies on being a half-orc, so that you have access to the Orcish Fury feat, which lets you roll one die an additional time when you hit with a weapon. There’s an added bonus for crits, in that Savage Attacks gives you another additional damage die on melee attacks. The other main feat here is Great Weapon Master, which allows you to take a -5 penalty to hit, and then deal an additional 10 damage if you do. As we’re not worried about hitting here, it’s basically a massive free damage boost.
A half-orc with the Great Weapon Master and Orcish Fury feats, using a greatsword with the radiant weapon infusion, can attack once using booming blade to deal a maximum of 46 (1d12 +1d12 +4 + 10 +1d8) damage, increasing to 62 if the bonus 2d8 damage from booming blade is activated. If the battle smith first casts enlarge on themselves, we go up to 66, still with a free bonus action. Using the bonus action to trigger the steel defender’s attack (1d8 +3), we reach a maximum damage of 77. Alternatively, they can take two greatsword attacks while enlarged, and continue to use the steel defender bonus action. This totals to 79 damage (1d12 +1d12 +4 +10 +1d4 +1d12 +4 +10 +1d8 +3). Branding smite competes with steel defender for the bonus action, and with enlarge for concentration, however branding smite’s 2d6 totals to 12 damage, compared to the 1d4 +1d8 +int which adds to 15. Considering all the attacks critting, for a half-orc, the max damage gets crazy: 139 (2d12 + 1d12 +1d12 +4 +10 +2d4 + 2d12 +1d12 +4 +10 +2d8 +3) in a single turn.
I don’t think you could get much better than that with a level 8 artificer, but there are a whole load of potential builds so let me know if there’s something you could improve on here. If you wanted to play the battle smith build, I’d pick up some defensive infusions so you can survive a bit better in melee. Also, this post doesn’t consider how to actually hit the enemy, and you’ve got no bonus to hit when taking the penalty from Great Weapon Master, so it might be more useful to take the ASI first and pick that feat up later on. If you roll for stats though, and get lucky, this is a fun way to obliterate enemies while being what is supposedly a support class.