Introduction

Augments are the Mechanist’s signature feature, allowing you to add powerful magical effects to equipment. While you can absolutely hoard all of them to yourself, there aren’t enough exciting options that you’ll want to do that. Instead, you’ll want to share some with your party.

You’ll have a few go-to Augment options (Empowered is too good to pass up), but over time you’ll have room to learn Augment Effects that you’ll rarely use. This is normal. Since you can use your favorite effects multiple times on different items, you have room to rotate situationally useful effects into play when they’re needed, them drop them again to return to consistently useful effects.

Arguably the biggest problem with the Mechanist’s Augments is that none of the options are level gated, so you’ll have the best options early in your career, and then you’ll be forced to pick from less appealing options as you gain levels.

Remember that you can apply Augments to magic items, but you can’t put multiple Augments on the same item. Combining an Augment with a permanent magic item can produce very powerful combinations.

Table of Contents

Disclaimer

RPGBOT uses the color coding scheme which has become common among Pathfinder build handbooks, which is simple to understand and easy to read at a glance.

  • Red: Bad, useless options, or options which are extremely situational. Nearly never useful.
  • Orange: OK options, or useful options that only apply in rare circumstances. Useful sometimes.
  • Green: Good options. Useful often.
  • Blue: Fantastic options, often essential to the function of your character. Useful very frequently.

We will not include 3rd-party content, including content from DMs Guild, in handbooks for official content because we can’t assume that your game will allow 3rd-party content or homebrew. We also won’t cover Unearthed Arcana content because it’s not finalized, and we can’t guarantee that it will be available to you in your games.

The advice offered below is based on the current State of the Character Optimization Meta as of when the article was last updated. Keep in mind that the state of the meta periodically changes as new source materials are released, and the article will be updated accordingly as time allows.

Mechanist Augments

Adhesive: Only situationally useful.

Collapsible: Only situationally useful. This doesn’t specify what happens to potential contents, so I’m not sure what happens if you try to collapse a chest full of gold.

Detecting: Invisi-Vision and X-Ray Vision are very powerful, but you won’t need them constantly. The Darkvision option is similarly useful, but you really need something with a better duration than 1 minute.

Empowered: +1 to attack and damge, scaling to +2 at level 9 and +3 at level 15, and it stacks. Throw this on your party’s biggest magic weapons. As normal, you can’t put an Augment on an already Augmented item, so you can’t stack this with itself, but you really don’t need to.

Illusive: Only situationally useful.

Loading: This makes crossbows as effective with Multiattack as bows are. However, the difference between the Longbow’s 1d8 and the Heavy Crossbow’s 1d10 is easily outweighed by the +1 to attack and damage from Empowered, so there’s no reason to use this.

Phosphorescent: Making the light only visible to your allies is an exciting option. In a dark area, this would mean that your allies can seem, but your enemies can’t unless they have Darkvision. Of course, nearly everything except humans has Darkvision. This could allows allies without Darkvision to scout in the dark without giving away their position, but they should really look for Darkvision either from a spell or from a magic items.

Propulsive: A 5-foot movement speed increase is tiny, and the levitation effect isn’t great in combat since it uses your whole Action. I would consider this at high levels once the movement speed increase improves, but before then just have someone cast Longstrider.

Protean: Weapon damage type very rarely matters once the weapon is magical.

Reactive: Only situationally useful.

Reinforced: Very situational. Damage to objects is rare.

Returning: Essential for thrown weapon builds, especially once martial characters have Multiattack.

Repellant: Greant on melee characters. The movement doesn’t specify “directly away”, so you’re technically free to launch enemies into the air, dropping them for guaranteed falling damage.