 Howdy how's it going? My name's Davy Chappie, and little known fact about me, but when I'm not acting out a life of debauchery and romance as the saucy is barred to ever live, my favorite archetypical style of role-playing is as the inventor, the alchemist, the artificer. And on the very last day of February, Wizards has descended upon us with what is now the third iteration of the artificer to pass through the gates of the unearthed Arkana. So it's time for me to take this solution to the Davy Laby to see if, for the third time, their new concoction blows up in their face. As always, keep in mind that the majority of this is just my opinion, so if you feel like you know how to beaker and booker better than I do, then feel free to play with your little full-middle alchemy however you want. Also real quick, I want to give a shout-out to my new Patreon supporters this month. Tom Sutton, Jadalyn Naroy, Theo Geigler, Shmigel Shmaggle the Fuse, Omni-Catty, Cameron Sojak, Patrick S. Dempsey, Jaka! Thank you so much for your continued patronage. With any luck, your support will get a subversion of the artificer that doesn't suck. But with that out of the way, let's begin. So, this month's UA brought us the newest rendition of the artificer with its first appearance being as the wizard soap class in the very first unearthed Arkana, and the second coming later to mixed results. But now the artificer is back again once more, and as a half-caster that uses intelligence as its casting stat. The whole thing puts a much larger emphasis on crafting magical items, which is a huge plus for me, and your spellcasting focus takes the form of your tools, usually being artisans or alchemical tools, with the suggestion that you flavor your spells to explain how your power over artifice weaves into them. It's a little gimmicky, but now would be a good time to remind you that Xanathar's Guide gives a MUCH needed expansion to toolkits, so using those rules will really help you gain that extra mileage in both roleplay and gameplay mechanics. But enough rambling on about the general nature of Artificer V3. Let's jump right into the me of things. So, the artificer starts out with spellcasting, which is notable because all the other half-casters don't, and they also get the magical tinkering feature, which lets them take mundane objects and do little experiments on them to give them magical properties, such as emitting light, recording messages, or making sounds. After the first level, the artificer gets what seems to be their main bread and butter feature, known as infusions, which we have very similarly to Warlock invocations in that you get access to a certain amount of infusions per level, and these infusions can be applied to various objects, turning once mundane items into MAGICAL items. Yes, you heard me right. By second level, you can start slapping pouches at the end of a long rest and turn them into bags of holding right then and there. Now, there is a limit to how many items can be infused with magic, but that limitation is widened as you go up with levels, just like your infusions, and you can always just swap out your magical items every long rest. So, after you get over the initial shock of being able to start out with a bag of holding as early as level 2, your next features include an extra attack, as long as you're using a magical weapon, the ability to swap cantrips after every short rest, the late game power to infuse either a weapon or an arcane focus with a spell slot of first or second level, and your capstone raises the amount of magical items that you're allowed to attune to to 6 as opposed to the normal 3, and every attunement gives you a plus 1 to all saving throws. So far, the overall feel of the Artificer is pretty nice, and the idea of infusions behaving like invocations and being the centerpiece of the class is pretty great, and I think that it's probably one of the only ways that wizards could have made you get your own magical items without it being either broken or too restrictive to be useful. But we're still not done with the class yet, as this version gives us two other special Artificer archetypes, here called Artificer Specialists, and they come in the form of the Alchemist and the Artillerist. The Alchemist starts out by giving you proficiency in Alchemist and healer's kits, and letting crafting potions take only a quarter of the time, and gold that they usually do. After that, you get your own little alchemical homunculus, which floats around and can do a whole bunch of stuff, like spit acid, give your allies a limited fly speed, give out temp HP, and other fun stuff. After that, you can add your Intelligence modifier to spells that either heal or do acid slash poison damage, so long as you're using your Alchemist supplies as your spellcasting focus, and you can cast lesser restoration a few times without spending a spell slot. Finally, Alchemists get resistance to poison and acid damage, immunity to the poison condition, and can cast greater restoration once per long rest. Overall, the Alchemist feels pretty good for a potion maker, especially with the first ability massively reducing potion costs and time, and also acknowledging that the Crafting Magic Items rule exists, which as a DM, I can safely say that the majority of my players did not previously know about that. But given that it is an optional rule, you should make sure that you talk to your DM right away to make sure that you don't get screwed out of your most flavorful feature. I also think that the addition of the Homunculus is really tacked on since it doesn't scream alchemy in any way, and it just feels like a vestigial feature from when controlling your own construct was a main feature in the last version of The Artificer. I personally suggested the game makers that if they happen to be watching some random dudes' YouTube channel for reasons unknown, if making a construct is something that you would like The Artificer to do, you should turn it into one of the archetypes instead of leaving it as an alchemical afterthought. Now, on the flip side of the subclass section, the Artillerist is a word that I did not know existed before today, and it represents those artificers that do not want to play Dungeons and Dragons, they want to play Borderlands 2. I say that because the main gimmick of The Artillerist is that they can pull an entire medium-sized turret out of their back pocket and place it on the field to be either a flamethrower, shoot out magical ballistic missiles, or create a shield dome within 10 feet of it. If that's not weird enough though, the turret comes equipped with spider legs or something because you can use your bonus action to move it around the map a little bit, and if the bad guys for some reason decide that getting anywhere near this mechanical monstrosity is in any way a good idea, you can set the thing to run up and detonate like a landmine. And don't worry, even though you can only create one turret for free per long rest, you can still create as many new ones as you want, so long as you only create one at a time and you sacrifice the spell slot each time. Honestly, I don't really know what I'm looking at here. People ask for a gunslinger, and this... I mean, this is something. I don't know what it is or where it came from, but it's something. Now, aside from the strange, strange turret-making ability, the rest of your abilities allow you to create magical wands that you can store a cantrip inside of, and that cantrip gains a bonus to damage rolls, and you can also give your allies half cover while nearby your turrets, as well as summon a second turret for complete turret fighting action. I'm not gonna lie, this artillerist thing is cool and all, but if it's planning on replacing the gunslinger, which I feel like it's trying to do, it's gonna have to try a little harder. The wand ability was cool, but it also fell out of place compared to the other two turret-focused features, and the turrets are just weird. It's not like they can't exist in D&D, but I imagine that there's only gonna be one shot at publishing a real artificer for 5e, and if that ends up being true, I'd much rather have a gunsmith than turrets. Overall, I think that this artificer is a much bigger step in the right direction than the other versions have been, and even though it isn't perfect, I see a glimmer of what I was hoping for in the artificer, especially in the infusions feature. Yeah, I still think it needs work, maybe replace some of the weird or out-of-place features that are just floating around with nowhere else to go, but I can see this edition of the artificer resembling the one that we eventually see in an official published book. And if the flavor text at the beginning of the article is anything to go off of, that book is looking to be my favorite setting. But that'll about do it. I hope you enjoy this video. Don't drink the fruit punch, don't eat the yellow snow, and have a nice day. But yeah, Davi out.