Classcraft: The Artificer
For me, the Artificer, more than any other class, is about more than just wanting what the base class has to offer. Because, quite simply… it’s not enough. You can’t just want to be an Artificer, you need to be more. Potion swigging alchemist? Gun toting artillerist? Hammer swinging, pet commanding battle smith? Straight up Iron Man, or, that is to say, an Armorer? Each of these is really a class in and of itself, and worthy of today’s Classcraft.
So having just said that the Artificer is more than its base class, let’s first discuss… the base class. I know, I know, but we have to.
Base Class
The Artificer is a half caster class, which some would compare to D&D’s other half casters, the Paladin and the Ranger. But unlike those classes, the Artificer gets spells at level 1, access to cantrips, and when multiclassing with other casting classes, you get to round up when determining your spell level. This has caused many people to refer to the class as a 2/3 caster, which is fairly appropriate.
On the melee side, Artificers get medium armor and simple weapons, which is good but not great, and constitution saves, which are fantastic when it comes to maintaining concentration. Coupled with access to booming blade and green flame blade, this gives you a fairly gish (mix of melee and spellcasting) setup for your character.
Spell selection for the base class is good but not great. While strong with offensive cantrips, the rest your spell selection is heavy on utility and diversity, while lacking the heavy hitters you would want for healing and damage dealing. This will change based on your subclass, but on it’s own, it’s noticeably lacking.
Your spells, however, are augmented by a new ability, unique to the Artificer, the infusion. Artificers know four infusions at level 2, and twelve infusions by level 20. That said, for however many infusions you might know, you can only have half that number running at any one time. So at level 2 you know four, but of those four, only two can be infused into an item at a time. So if you decide your four give you a mechanical familiar, a throwing weapon that returns to your hand, a gun that never runs out of magical bullets and a bag of holding, don’t go using them all at once. As soon as you try to infuse the third item, the first infusion fades away. While this limits what you can have infused at any one moment, on the plus side, if you don’t create any more of them, the ones you do have will last forever (well… unless you die). This can be great when you give one to a party member, but they sure better hope you don’t change you mind mid-battle.
Overall, I like the concept of infusions, and I think they’re great at lower levels. Often, the abilities they provide are highly sought after or nearly impossible to get at levels 1-4. Unfortunately, the higher you get, the less effective they become. Although several infusions do scale with your level, they don’t scale enough. Worse, you can only infuse non-magical items. So infusing a dagger at level 1 so that it returns to your hand? Amazing. Getting an amazing magical dagger at level 10 and not being able to infuse it at all? Heartbreaking. This means at high levels you will either be using weak weapon infusions or magical items with no infusions at all. While not every infusion suffers from this weakness, it definitely brings down the system as a whole from great to merely good.
While I could continue detailing every remaining abilities of the Artificer, I’m going to stick to the flashier bits. As you level you will pick up several abilities that up your amount of attunable magic items, topping out at six at level 18. You will also gain the ability to place spells in items that can be activated later. While you can only have this effect on a single item at a time having a free spell every day, on an item anyone can activate (and with multiple uses), it pretty great. Lastly, there is the capstone, and I’m happy to say that the level 20 ability does not suck. Soul of artifice is an amazing ability, giving you a +1 bonus to your saves for each magic item your attuned to, and the ability to end an infusion to drop to only 1 hit point when something would take you to zero. Given that at level 20 you should have 6 attunements and six active infusions at all times, that’s +6 to all saves, and the ability to stay alive six times in a row (as long as the attack does not outright kill you). I cannot think of an ability that give you more survivability than this one. It’s a fantastic capstone (though I will admit, not flashy in any way).
Given the Artificer is relatively new (and yes, I’m aware i’s been in Eberron for forever), it has only four sub-classes. The alchemist, the artillerist, the armorer, and the battle smith. As started earlier, I consider each sub-class to be super robust, and the source of most of the class’s flavor. So with that said, on with the show.
Alchemist
The Alchemist is probably what I consider the most baseline of the sub-classes. I often feel likes it’s the best choice when you don’t directly identify with the other three choices. That said, the Alchemist does have some great selling points, especially when it comes to healing.
The first big boost you receive is in the form of spells. All of the Artificer sub-classes come with an expanded spell list, and each one is chock full of very great, and very different, selections. The Alchemist’s extra spells include healing word, flaming sphere, Melf’s acid arrow, mass healing word, and raise dead. Half of these spells allow you to be the primary healer of the party, with bonus action heals, group heals, and a quick raise dead checking off all the boxes. The flaming sphere and acid arrow spells also help plant you in the back of the group when it comes to dealing damage, and in terms of the sphere, gives you a great use of your bonus action when your not forced to heal. Clearly, by these spells alone, you have fully stepped into the roll of a back line caster/healer.
The second major ability you gain is experimental elixir, which is fairly sub-class defining. After every long rest you can make free potions. Yay! But their effects are random, boooo! I both love and hate this ability. On one hand, it’s all benefit. The random potions cost nothing, only give positive effects, and can sit in their bottle all day without expiring. Plus, as you level, you can produce more and more of them. But they’re soooo very random, and nothing diminishes that randomness. But, as a major plus, you can also use this ability and burn a spell slot, which lets you pick the potion. This is a fantastic tweak to the ability, as all six potion types are handy, and it includes making healing potions. So to make it official, I consider the random version of this ability a bit blah, but love the non-random version.
Sadly, after gaining the elixir ability, everything else you will pick up lacks any kind of coolness factor. That said, the rest of the abilities are super helpful in a mechanical way. Alchemical savant boosts your damage and healing when you hold an alchemy supply in your hand as a spellcasting focus. And what alchemist doesn’t want to point flasks at people? Restorative reagents gives you free castings of lesser restoration and adds a temporary hit point buff to every use of an experimental elixir. While this doesn’t solve the whole, “I’ll swig this thing and hope it saves my life” problem, it does help, greatly, that I’ll gain 2d6 + Int temporary hit points even if I don’t luck into the 2d4 + Int healing from actually rolling the healing option. Lastly, chemical mastery gives you a free use of greater restoration and heal, and resistance to poison and acid damage (as well as an immunity to being “poisoned”). This ends the sub-class on more of a whimper than a bang, but free spells and resistances are better than nothing.
Overall the Alchemist is great as long as you adapt yourself to the role it provides, as it will not adapt to you. It expects to to be flinging offensive spells made of acid, fire, and poison, and healing your party through spells and elixirs. If that works for you, it’s a great choice for your Artificer.
Artillerist
The Artillerist is both my favorite sub-class as well as being the most limited. It’s an Artificer with magic guns. The end. Also, at the same time, it’s everything I want to to be, and more. Now before I explain why I love it, one quick disclaimer. All Artificers of every sub-class can take a pistol/hand crossbow, throw a repeating shot infusion on it, and have a magic gun. So please, no letters about how the Artillerist is not the only sub-class that gets magic guns. Now on to the sub-class…
The artillerist starts, as do all the sub-classes, with an expanded spell list. There’s a lot of good stuff here, including shield, thunderwave, scorching ray, shatter, fireball, cone of cold, and several wall spells. Shield is fantastic for personal protection, and everything else is exactly what you would want to shoot out of a gun. That said, there is very little here OTHER than things you would want to shoot at people. So once again, the sub-class is really setting your role within your group.
In addition to the bonus spells you receive access to at level three, you also gain the signature ability of your class, the eldritch cannon. The canon is many, many things in one, and worth discussing in detail. The cannon comes in two size and offers you a choice of three effects. The size can be tiny or small, with tiny primarily representing a gun you hold in your hand, and small representing a turret. Regardless of size, your canon can have legs if you wish, and if it does, it can move under its own power. Once you’ve figured all this out, you can decide if you want your cannon to shoot force blasts, create cones of flame, or project a force field that provides temporary hit points. The canon can be fired as a bonus action, but the attack is considered to be made by the canon itself, so there’s no need to figure out two weapon fighting type stuff. All of this is pretty much just fantastic. The damage from the canon is quite good, and scales a bit as you level. The forcefield is a bit godly at low levels, and provides you with a bit more utility that is rare in the Artillerist sub-class. Plus, if you have been searching for a way to dual wield pistols, this is pretty much the best that D&D has to offer. With a real pistol infused with repeating shot in one hand and an eldritch cannon that fires itself in the other, you can make two gun attacks a round at level 3, should that be your thing (we shall not speak of the whole free hand for loading thing, I’ve got a whole different article for that).
Your next handy ability arrives two levels later when you get arcane firearm. This ability allows you to carve your own wooden gun, errr, I mean wand, that acts as a spellcasting focus for your artificer spells. In addition, it adds 1d8 damage to all damage rolls cast through the focus. This wooden… wand… is now, for all intents and purposes, your new firearm. As long as you have a cantrip to shoot through it you will have a weapon you can use every turn for nicely scaling damage. Plus every time you cast one of your better attack spells, you get an extra die of damage (and you don’t need a free hand for this one).
From this point on, everything else in the sub-class is all about improving this core set of abilities, with nothing entirely new arriving in later levels. At level 9, all your offensive cannons gain an extra d8 worth of damage and can be self-destructed for 3d8 damage. At level 15 everyone within 10 feet of the cannon gets half cover (yay forcefields) and more importantly, you get to run two cannons at once, with each configured exactly as you like it. So do you want to hold a force ballista in your off hand while a protector canon walks at your side? That, and every other combination will work just fine. Just remember though, you can’t activate your cannons separately. So if you fire your force ballista at a long range target and there’s no one in range of your flamethrower, well.. that’s just the way it is.
Overall the artillerist is, in my opinion, a great sub-class. It excels at it’s role of a long distance damage dealer, while offering a single excellent healing feature in the form of the protector canon, which is amazingly powerful at lower levels. When combined with the base features of the class, it’s one of my favorites in the game.
Armorer
A recent addition to the class, released as part of Tasha’s Cauldron of Everything, the armorer is straight up medieval Iron Man. It accomplishes this right off the start with the addition of a heavy armor proficiency and an expanded spell list.
These spells are designed, in my opinion, to really give the flavor of the afore mentioned Marvel hero. Do you like his heat seeking missiles? Enjoy these magic missiles. Do you like his shoulder mounted laser canon? How about lightning bolt? Holographic decoy projector? Mirror Image. The spells are a nice variety of options, mixing quite a bit of offense with a fair amount of defense and utility.
Along with these spells comes the bread and butter of the armorer sub-class, the ability to turn your mundane armor into “Arcane Armor.” Arcane Armor has the same base stats as the mundane armor it once was, along with a sea of new features. The first batch of these features include removing the armor’s strength requirement, acting as a spell casting focus, preventing the armor from being removed by force, and allowing you put it on or take it off as a single action. All of these abilities are quite handy, but pale in comparison with what’s to come.
Once you have made your armor “arcane”, you must now customize it into a guardian or infiltrator set. Guardian customization gives you a defensive field that gives you temporary hit points, usable multiple times a day, and thunder gauntlets, which allow you to make melee attacks with your armored fists. The gauntlets count as simple weapons, use strength or intelligence for attacks and damage, do 1d8 damage, and more importantly, give the creature struck “disadvantage on attack rolls against targets other than you until the start of your next turn.” This is an incredibly powerful ability when it comes to protecting your party, especially when your fighting a single target.
Your second option is to configure your armor set as “infiltrator.” Infiltrator armor gives you access to the lightning launcher, powered step, and dampening field abilities. The lighting launcher is a simple ranged weapon with a range of 90/300. You can attack with them using dexterity or intelligence, and they do 1d6 damage, plus an additional 1d6 once per turn. Powered steps add an extra 5 feet to your walking speed, and the dampening field gives you advantage on Dexterity(Stealth) checks. This last bit is important, as without it, choosing to add infiltrator customization to an armor that gives disadvantage to stealth would be pretty counter productive. By gaining this ability the player is presented with a choice. You can make a medium armor an infiltrator set, which gives you a lower AC but gives you advantage on stealth, or make heavy armor an infiltrator set and let the advantage it provides cancel out the disadvantage inherent to the armor.
These abilities are the core of the subclass, though there are a few more you will pick up as you level. At level 5 you gain extra attack, which works well with either customization’s armor-based attack. Armor modifications at level 9 give you the agility to place four infusions on your armor (chest, weapon, boots, and helmet) and ups your number of active infusions by two, as long as they go on one of your armor pieces. Lastly, at level 15 you can perfect your armor.
For the guardian customization this perfection gives you the equivalent of a tractor beam, allowing you pull enemies towards you, as long as they are huge or smaller. For infiltrator customization, it gets a bit more complicated. With this customization perfected, your lighting launcher now inflicts an electrical charge on those it hits. Those that are struck shed “dim light in a 5-foot radius, and they have disadvantage on attack rolls against you, as the light jolts them if they attacks you. In addition, the next attack roll against them has advantage, and if that attack hits, the target takes an extra 1d6 lightning damage.
While the perfected guardian ability is ok, acting like a high power lighting lash, the infiltrator ability is fantastic, giving you a defensive boost should the target attack you, and an offensive boost in terms of both the attack and damage rolls.
Overall, the armorer has a great mix of features and flavor. It will 100% make you Iron Man, giving you a high armor class, coupled with strong offensive and defensive spells and built in armor attacks. It also allows you to focus on just two ability scores, Intelligence and Constitution, as you can attack purely with Intelligence, and your armor no longer has a strength requirement. A good choice for players wanting to play Tony Stark, or just play a class that is super optimized for it’s role.
Battle Smith
Last, but not least, is the Battle Smith. The Battle Smith, prior to the creation of the armorer sub-class, was designed to be the melee focused sub-class. Now that it shares this designation with the armorer, its even more important to understand the features of the sub-class that set it apart from the armorer.
As with all the Artificer sub-classes, this one starts with an expanded spell list. The spells are a mix of party buffs, melee attacks, and defensive abilities. While it’s a good list, it’s spread across several different types of spells. This is great if your Battle Smith is going to fill all these roles in your party, but that assumes these roles remain unfilled. With a bad party configuration the battle smith will just be doing what everyone else can already do, without offering something unique.
Beyond the expanded spells, the first of the abilities that the battle smith acquires is “battle ready.” Battle ready gives you proficiency with martial weapons, and the ability to use your intelligence modifier for the attack and damage rolls when using a magic weapon. This seems like a small ability compared to the other sub-classes, but it is also the only way to make a melee oriented Artificer that can use a weapon of their choice. So if you want to make the core of your character the swinging of a long sword… this is it.
In addition to Battle Ready, you also gain a second sub-class defining feature, the Steel Defender. The steel defender is the mechanical equivalent of the Beastmaster Ranger’s animal companion. This generally means it scales up as the battle smith levels, and can only attack when the Battle Smith uses their bonus action. While this might not make it the strongest of companions, it does have an excellent ability called “Deflect Attack” which allows the Steel Defender to “imposes disadvantage on the attack roll of one creature it can see that is within 5 feet of it, provided the attack roll is against a creature other than the defender.” While this is a reaction, it does use the battle smiths bonus action, but it’s still something that most Battle Smiths will want to use as much as possible.
The rest of the Battle Smith’s abilities are a bit of a mixed bag. At level 5 they gain extra attack, which is good, but this merely keeps the battle smith on par with other melee-focused classes, and they never gain a third attack. At level 9, you gain Arcane Jolt. This ability causes the target of you or your defender’s attack to take an extra 2d6 force damage. In addition, you can choose a creature or object you can see within 30 feet of the target of your attack to be healed for 2d6 hit points. This is a great ability that is tempered by the fact that you can only use it an amount of time equal to your intelligence modifier, and never more than once per turn. This makes the ability a fair bit weaker than other classes that can consume spell slots to continue using the effect.
Lastly, at level 15, you gain “Improved Defender.” This ability increases the damage and healing of Arcane Jolt to 4d6, your steel defender gains a +2 bonus to its AC, and when it uses Deflect Attack, the attacker “takes force damage equal to 1d4 + your Intelligence modifier.” Once again, these are all good things, but nothing stands out as amazing.
Of all the sub-classes, the Battle Smith is the least focused, and suffers as a result. It clearly wants to be a melee attacker, and it totally makes that happen. It also wants a constant mechanical companion, much like the Beastmaster Ranger, which it definitely gets. For many people that might be all they need, and more importantly, this is the only Artificer sub-class where they can get these abilities. But if you want neither of these things, then this is probably not the class for you.
Multiclassing
There are two ways one can look at the multiclassing potential of the Artificer. The first way is, “do I want to stop leveling in Artificer and start adding in a second class?” For most people, the answer to this question is… No. The Artificer continually adds quality features as you level, cannot grow stronger without additional Artificer levels, and has an excellent capstone. While you can multi into something else, what you gain will be counteracted by what you lose.
Your second option is taking Artificer as a dip for another class. Most of the sub-classes work as a good dip for full spell casters. While you would gain little from a single level dip, taking 3 levels earns you a sub-class, which has many benefits. The Battle Smith’s Intelligence based attacks are quite attractive, and often couple well with a melee class that uses intelligence as a secondary stat. Eldritch Knights in particular, fit well with this ability, and continue to gain spells at the same rate. Overall, you might want to consider the Artificer for a dip, or a class you abandon at level 3 for whatever becomes your primary class.
In Summary
The Artificer is a good class, with some great sub-classes. Most offer a clearly defined role with a ton of flavor to match. In fact, it’s one of the few classes I’ve seen that tells you (it’s actually written in the book) to retheme your spells so they all have cool mechanical flavor to match the class. In many ways I feel this is a class where you picture your character idea in your head, and that picture is either clearly an Artificer or it’s entirely not. If it’s not, look somewhere else, as the Artificer can’t really be adapted into something outside it’s role. If it is? Then have fun! It’s a great class when it offers you the ability to do exactly what you want to do.