Best Feats for Armorer Artificer 5e
by Prince Phantom
The Armorer wins the award for my personal favorite subclass in 5e. I apologize if I’ve said that about a different subclass, but I tend to change my opinion on this topic about as often as I change my shirt, so you’ll have to excuse me. The Armorer lets us live our armored super hero fantasy in 2 different ways, defender or infiltrator. The defender trades damage for tanking ability, support for its party, and debuffing enemies. The infiltrator focuses on ranged single target damage, stealth, and mobility.
Both are great at protecting themselves, negate the typical problems with wearing heavy armor, and allow you to focus solely on intelligence as your main stat. They both get extra attack and extra infusions to put on their armor, which is a godsend as the majority of an artificer’s life is spent wishing they had more infusions. While you can swap between the two armors every long rest, you’ll probably end up committing many aspects of your build like feats and infusions to specialize in one of the two options, meaning most players won’t be swapping between the two armors very often. For this list I will denote if a feat is only good for one of the two armors, and if no denotation is made, assume it is good for both.
Best Feats for Armorer Artificer 5e
Sharpshooter (Lv 4, Infiltrator): Using this, the infiltrator can easily compete in damage with the likes of other martials. I do recommend picking up the Archery fighting style in some way as well, as that will majorly increase your average hit chance and average damage.
Alert (Lv 4, Defender): The defender wants to get in and impose that disadvantage as soon as possible, and on every round possible. If you are behind on initiative, that’s an entire round where you aren’t helping your team. If you think you can make it to level 10 and pick up the Helm of Awareness infusion, hold off on this and pick that up instead.
War Caster (Lv 4, Defender): The infiltrator can reliably stay out of most enemies range, protecting their concentration passively. The defender needs to be up close, so just having proficiency in Con saves won’t be enough. Grabbing this also lets you smack an enemy with Booming Blade as an opportunity attack, dealing a bit of extra damage.
Poisoner (Lv 8): Neither of these armors have an easy way of getting a bonus action attack, so if you’re not interested in bending over backwards to make that work, your DM has assured you that not literally every enemy will be immune to poison damage, and your DM has agreed to work with you about crafting and obtaining better poisons, then this might be a good way to increase your damage. Yes that is a lot of qualifiers, but that’s kinda the lot you buy into when you’re talking about poison damage.
Sentinel (Lv 8, Defender): This is an easy and simple way to keep enemies close to us if they try to run away, and gives us another chance to impose our debuff if we missed with our attacks on our turn.
Telekinetic (Lv 8): If Poisoner wasn’t the fit for you, this feat is another way to have a reliable and consistent bonus action that we can use to push enemies around the battlefield. Notably, we have access to Web, which is the perfect spell to pair with this feat.
Resilient Wisdom (Lv 12): As always, protecting ourself from wisdom saves is vitally important, especially for the defender. Imagine an enemy taking control of us and forcing our allies to have disadvantage to attack anyone but us! Combine this with Flash of Genius to ensure you make those crucial saves.
Tough (Lv 16, Defender): The defender would really like to have extra HP, and Tough is the simplest way to accomplish this.
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