Trapmaking

The Device Workstation in the House Cannith Enclave

Trapmaking is a feat Auto-granted to Rogues and Artificers once they reach Level 4. A build with 1 level of Rogue or Artificer can take this feat if they also take one of these feats: Skill Focus (Disable Device), Nimble Fingers, or Least Dragonmark of Making. It gives the ability to scavenge trap parts from existing traps, which can be used as components in trap crafting.

Trapmaking Feat

• Usage: Passive
• Prerequisite: Requires Trapfinding (Auto-granted to Rogue and Artificer at level 1) and one of: Skill Focus: Disable Device, Nimble Fingers, Least Dragonmark of Making. Auto-granted to Level 4 Artificer or Rogue, and Level 3 Dark Hunter.

Description

Benefit: You have learned enough about traps to be able to scavenge parts from them, and with the help of the Free Agents, can craft your own.

The Basics, Acquiring parts

At 4th level, the Rogue and Artificer classes are granted the Trapmaking feat automatically. The Trapfinding class feat is also required to find any traps with a DC higher than 20 using the Search skill. The Trapmaking feat allows a Rogue or Artificer to harvest 'Trap Parts' from trap Control Panels that they successfully disable. Those gathered trap components can be used at the Free Agents' Device Workstations to help craft traps, e.g. Mines. The Trapmaking feat also allows a Rogue or Artificer to place and arm/activate the crafted Trap (Mine Traps or mine-like Magical Traps) within quests. Once your Rogue or Artificer has the ability to collect trap parts, you should find your pack beginning to fill with an assortment of parts as you quest. Every Control Panel you disable has a chance of bestowing trap parts, and Control Panels are the only place to get parts. Your chance of parts, and how many you receive, depend on three things:

1. Your Disable Device skill. (The higher the skill, the more parts you'll get.)
2. The base, pre-epic level of the quest. (Again, the higher, the better.)
3. The DC of the trap. (Tougher traps generally give you more parts.)

However, it is always a random amount of parts. These factors just better your chances of getting a larger amount of parts. Sometimes a Control Panel will give you 1 part; others, it will give 15. Since you gain a random amount of parts with each Control Panel, your best bet to obtaining many parts is to go to quests that have many traps to disable, especially if many are of the type of trap you wish to harvest, such as Fire or Mechanical. It's important to note that if a single Control Panel controls multiple traps of different types, that Control Panel will still only give one type of trap part.

There are 10 types of trap parts, each corresponding to their particular type of trap that the Control Panel controls:

• Mechanical (Spikes, Blades, etc.)
• Acid
• Cold
• Electrical
• Fire
• Force
• Sonic
• Unholy - not usable (no recipe) drops from Haunted Library, Siegebreaker, and Wheloon Prison (DDO Forums)
• Holy - not usable (no recipe), drops from Siegebreaker)
• Magical (Both Poison and Spell Traps)

In addition to Trap Parts, there are a few other necessary Trapmaking ingredients:

• Glass Vials: Crude, Simple and Unadorned. (Only from the Free Agent Vendor, e.g. Sorville Smythe)
• Siberys Dragonshard Fragments (From chests and collectables)
• Scrolls
• Cannith Essences

All of the parts do stack by type, but I highly recommend heading over to the Twelve and claiming the free small ingredient bag as soon as possible. If you plan to do serious crafting on your rogue, then you'll want to invest in a small ingredient bag.

Crafting

Crafting the traps is a very simple process, provided you have all the ingredients. First you have to find a Device Workstation, located on the ground level of the House Cannith Enclave. If your guild is level 30 (24 Gold Seal), a Device Workstation can also be rented on the airship as an amenity.

The process of crafting is similar to the other crafting systems in the game. You open up the interface, place in the various materials, and press the craft button. The window will show the available recipes you can make with those ingredients and what the cost for building is. Selecting a recipe will attempt to gather all the necessary ingredients from your Ingredient Bags.

Mines and Grenades

With parts, you can make traps, which come in two kinds: Mines and Grenades.

Grenades are very much like the various bombs that kobold throwers have, or like the sun flasks during the Festivult. They fly in an arch, and can be aimed to hit places a bow might miss (and risk crashing against low ceilings). They can also simply be used while targeting, and they will usually hit the monster. Grenades are splash weapons, so it's best to use them when there are many monsters gathered close together and out of reach.

Mines function in a unique way. When used, you will enter a short animation, placing a small device on the ground. Placing a mine will not break stealth. After a second, the mine will set, indicated by a small light switching on. After that, any monster that steps on the mine will trigger the explosion. Mines deactivate and despawn after 150 seconds. They stack in groups of 100.

Since mines can be set up in the midst of combat, they are very useful when surrounded.

The weaker mines only have a blast radius similar to a fireball. The average and large mines, however, have an area of effect of twice that size. Deadly mines are even larger, with an area of effect that will hit an entire room.

If you plan to use mines regularly, it is important to make sure that DC is as high as feasibly possible. Since the DC is based on the total Disable Device skill, equipping an item to boost the skill is a good practice before setting up traps. Mine DCs are determined in the following way.

Elemental Traps

• Normal Rogue: 50% of your Disable Device skill.
• Ranks of the Improved Traps enhancement can increase the DC to 65%/80%/100% of your Disable Device skill.

Magical Traps

• Normal Rogue: 10 + Spell Level + Intelligence Modifier
• Ranks in Improved Traps can increase the DC by +1/+2/+3.

  Note: While there's currently no way to directly measure the DC of magic traps, testing seems to indicate that it's based on the Disable Device DC in the same way as elemental traps. (DDO Forums)

Magical Traps are a very unique type of trap. You can only use a select list of spells from 1st to 3rd level with magical traps, and all of them are focused towards crowd control. Examples include: Grease, Glitterdust, Hold Person, etc. These traps function similarly to mines, except that when they activate, the spell is cast. Since these spells are derived from their basic scroll forms, the durations are very short in general.

All recipes follow the same basic pattern.

Mines

• Noisemakers
  • Recipe: 25 Mechanical Trap Parts
  • Result: 15 Noisemakers (Creates a small noise after several seconds, which lures creatures to it)
    • Level 2 to use item
• Weak <Elemental> Trap
  • Recipe: 10 <Elemental> Trap Parts, 10 Mechanical Trap Parts
  • Result: 15 Weak <Elemental> Traps (10d6 Damage)
    • Level 3 to use item
• Small <Elemental> Trap (minimum level 5)
  • Recipe: 25 <Elemental> Trap Parts, 10 Mechanical Trap Parts, 10 Siberys Dragonshard Fragments
  • Result: 15 Small <Elemental> Traps (20d6 Damage)
  • Level 5 to use item
• Average <Elemental> Trap
  • Recipe: 50 <Elemental> Trap Parts, 25 Mechanical Trap Parts, 50 Siberys Dragonshard Fragments, 1 Cannith Essence
  • Result: 15 Average <Elemental> Traps (30d6 Damage, Large Area of Effect)
  • Level 7 to use item
• Strong <Elemental> Trap
  • Recipe: 75 <Elemental> Trap Parts, 25 Mechanical Trap Parts, 100 Siberys Dragonshard Fragments, 3 Cannith Essences
  • Result: 15 Large <Elemental> Traps (40d6 Damage, Large Area of Effect)
  • Level 9 to use item
• Deadly <Elemental> Trap
  • Recipe: 100 <Elemental> Trap Parts, 25 Mechanical Trap Parts, 250 Siberys Dragonshard Fragments, 5 Cannith Essences
  • Result: 15 Deadly <Elemental> Traps (50d6 Damage, Huge Area of Effect)
  • Level 11 to use item

From levels 13-27 the format changes, with each step of 2 levels (13, 15, 17, ... 27) following this template:

• Construct <Elemental> Traps (ML:ML)
  • Recipe: 100 <Elemental> Trap Parts, 25 Mechanical Trap Parts, 250 Siberys Dragonshard Fragments, 5 Cannith Essences
  • Result: 15 <Elemental> Traps ML ((ML-1)x5 D6 Damage, Huge Area of Effect)
  • (note: U36 currently these mines deal roughly 2/3 damage. ML 13 mine deal around 40d6 instead of 60d6, ML 23 mine deal around 72d6 instead of 110d6)

Grenades

(Note: The UMD check is for characters without Rogue or Artificer levels.)

• Weak <Elemental> Grenades
  • Recipe: 10 <Elemental> Trap Parts, 25 Crude Vials
  • Result: 25 Weak <Elemental> Grenades (2d6 Damage, Reflex Save - 12)
  • Level 1 to use item (UMD: 12)
• Small <Elemental> Grenades
  • Recipe: 25 <Elemental> Trap Parts, 25 Crude Vials, 10 Siberys Dragonshard Fragments
  • Result: 25 Small <Elemental> Grenades (6d6 Damage, Reflex Save - 16)
  • Level 2 to use item (UMD: 16)
• Average <Elemental> Grenades
  • Recipe: 50 <Elemental> Trap Parts, 25 Simple Vials, 50 Siberys Dragonshard Fragments, 1 Cannith Essence
  • Result: 25 Average <Elemental> Grenades (12d6 Damage, Reflex Save - 20)
  • Level 4 to use item (UMD: 22)
• Strong <Elemental> Grenades
  • Recipe: 75 <Elemental> Trap Parts, 25 Simple Vials, 100 Siberys Dragonshard Fragments, 3 Cannith Essences
  • Result: 25 Strong <Elemental> Grenades (20d6 Damage, Reflex Save - 24)
  • Level 8 to use item (UMD: 30)
• Deadly <Elemental> Grenades
  • Recipe: 100 <Elemental> Trap Parts, 25 Unadorned Vials, 250 Siberys Dragonshard Fragments, 5 Cannith Essences
  • Result: 25 Deadly <Elemental> Grenades (30d6 Damage, Reflex Save - 28)
  • Level 16 to use item (UMD: 40)

Magical Traps

Magical (Both Poison and Spell Traps)

• Recipe: 10 Magical Trap Parts, 10 Mechanical Trap Parts, 1 Scroll of Cause Fear, Grease, Hypnotism, or Sleep (The Marketplace Bazaar sells level 1 scrolls.)
  • Result: 15 Magical Traps
• Recipe: 25 Magical Trap Parts, 10 Mechanical Trap Parts, 1 Scroll of Blindness, Daze Monster, Glitterdust, Hypnotic Pattern, Otto's Resistible Dance, Scare, Touch of Idiocy, or Web (The Marketplace Bazaar sells level 2 scrolls.)
  • Result: 15 Magical Traps (ML:5)
• Recipe: 50 Magical Trap Parts, 10 Mechanical Trap Parts, 1 Scroll of Deep Slumber, Dispel Magic, Halt Undead, Hold Person, or Slow (Object Desire in House Phiarlan sells level 3 scrolls.)
  • Result: 15 Magical Traps (ML:7)

Some Examples of low level traps and their recipes

Grenades

• Weak Alchemist's Spark
  • 10x Electrical Trap Parts + 25x Crude Vials yields 25 grenades
  • 2-12 damage
• Weak Alchemist's Cacophony
  • 10x Sonic Trap Parts + 25x Crude Vials yields 25 grenades
  • 2-12 damage
• Weak Alchemist's Frost Grenade
  • 10x Cold Trap Parts + 25x Crude Vials yields 25 grenades
  • 2-12 damage
• Weak Alchemist's Fire Grenade
  • 10x Fire Trap Parts + 25x Crude Vials yields 25 grenades
  • 2-12 damage

Mines

• Weak Fire Trap
  • 10x Mechanical Trap Parts + 10x Fire Trap Parts yields 15 mines
  • 10-60 fire damage
• Weak Cold Trap
  • 10x Mechanical Trap Parts + 10x Cold Trap Parts yields 15 mines
  • 10-60 cold damage
• Weak Acid Trap
  • 10x Mechanical Trap Parts + 10x Acid Trap Parts yields 15 mines
  • 10-60 acid damage
• Weak Lightning Trap
  • 10x Mechanical Trap Parts + 10x Electrical Trap Parts yields 15 mines
  • 10-60 electrical damage
• Weak Sonic Trap
  • 10x Mechanical Trap Parts + 10x Sonic Trap Parts yields 15 mines
  • 10-60 sonic damage
• Weak Force Trap
  • 10x Mechanical Trap Parts + 10x Force Trap Parts yields 15 mines
  • 10-60 force damage
• Small Cold Trap
  • 10x Mechanical Trap Parts + 25x Cold Trap Parts + 10x Siberys Dragonshard Fragments yields 15 mines
  • 20-120 cold damage

External links

• Coldin's Trapmaking Guide