 Howdy how's it going? My name's Davy Chappie, and it's time to bust some nuts and bolts because we're gonna be talking about the greatest inventor since the killer and among us, the Artificer. As you may have noticed, this video is a redo of my last Artificer guide, as not only have I played this class extensively between now and then, giving me a new perspective on the abilities and how they synergize with each other, but the Artificer has also been officially reprinted in Tasha's Cauldron of Everything along with a new subclass, so it's the perfect time to attune your years to the grinding gears. As always keep in mind that a lot of this is just my opinion, so if you feel like I must have gotten a few screws loose, feel free to play your games however you want. But with that out of the way, let's begin. And real quick, I'd like to give a brief shout out to my new patrons this month. Dreamfarer, Aaron Lazu, Kiwi Ninja, Karja, DM Dastardly Mimic, Mikal Wells, Michael Murphy, Brandon Parsons, Harry Perry Chicken, Eric P. Stadnick, Epos Fluffles. Thank you so much for pledging to my Patreon, may you never hit L when you're trying to hit Enter. So the Artificer is the Magitech maniac of the material realm, combining the forces of science, pseudoscience, and twiddling your fingers until that magic stick you found on the ground becomes a magic vibrating stick, with the power to slap cheeks until they're imbued with magic, having the knowledge to assemble any Ikea furniture, and possessing enough combat skills to make your party wonder, wait, is the Artificer supposed to be your frontliner? The Artificer is the perfect everyman class for players looking to try it all. The main gimmick of the Artificers are their infusions, special abilities that work like warlock invocations but are applied to objects instead, turning them into bonafide magic items that can do any number of things, from hit harder, boomerang at you, glow explode, tell you why your parents got divorced, fly, help you fly, help you through your divorce, and so much more. Most of them can only be applied to specific items, and they can only be accessed at certain levels, so you'll spend a lot of your campaign trying to find the right combination to fix your broken marriage. Also, in addition to multiple tables of pre-existing magic items that you can build, if you have access to Xanathar's God to everything, you can also build anything from the minor magical item section, or at least you couldn't the Eberron version. Meanwhile, Tasha's erased that paragraph, but that's not going to stop me, because I can't read. It's almost all useless junk anyway, just quirky useless junk, but it's weird how much more the Artificer gets from a book that isn't even about it. In fact, Xanathar's Guide gives the Artificer the biggest power boost in the game if you're using its optional tool rules. See, outside of these tools, almost every kit in 5e is completely useless when you treat them how they're normally presented in the game. But Xanathar's went out of its way to fix the uselessness of tool proficiencies by, first of all, explaining what actually goes inside of a toolkit, and also giving legitimate mechanics to each and every kit, so that there was no more guessing about what something like Cobbler's Tools could actually help you do. Did you know that a person using Cobbler's Tools can build a tiny compartment inside their boot, or that they can fix up everybody's shoes, that they can travel longer distances without resting, or that they can look at someone's shoes and tell all of the locations they've been in through a basic investigation check? That's just with Cobbler's Tools. I urge you to check out the others, it's crazy how much you can do. And the reason I bring this up is because, at 6th level, the Artificer gets a trait called Tool Expertise, which, as it sounds, gives you expertise on all the checks that have to do with tools. At first, you might say, yay, tools? But then you start looking through Xanathars, and you start to realize the scope of what the Artificer is suddenly capable of. And you start to understand that the only useless tool here is you. And speaking of tools, people will tell you that science has no place in our fantasy world, but if your DM is having a hard time explaining the Artificer into your games, one of you isn't thinking hard enough. As counterintuitive as it may seem, nothing about the Artificer actually demands that it be played as a Doctor Evil science nerd. Obviously, the class is built with that in mind, but all the Artificer forces out of you are the mechanics, which involve casting stuff, enchanting stuff, and knowing how to use some sort of tool. Hags would make great Artificers, and my personal Artificer is Twizzle Mist, the high elf enchanter that uses the Artificer's stat block, but is really just a hoity-toity wizard that specializes in using his magic on items because he likes selling shit and touching people's personal stuff in a way that you can never wash off. If you really want to be basic, just ask your DM if you can use a component pouch instead of tools, call yourself a wizard, and boom, you're done. In fact, the book specifically says that an infused magic item can be your spellcasting focus, so enchant a wand, and you don't even need the DM's permission anymore. As for subclasses, the alchemist needs no explanation. The armorer is just magic armor. Artillerist can be a very broken wand, and the Battlesmith's dog can be reflavered as a nature spirit, like a druid's woodwowed companion. Maybe the reflavering stone won't work because your campaign is set in a low magic world, but that's not something that should restrict just one spellcaster. Anything wizard do, I can do Artificer. In addition to all the enchanting and tooling, the second half of the Artificer's levels focus on upping the amount of magic items that you can attune to, as well as giving bonuses for making and equipping them, which makes sense when you put it into the perspective that magic items should play a more prominent role in your game after level 10 than before. That, plus its nature as a halfcaster, put the Artificer in a spot where it can fill any role in the traditional party composition. I'm putting this in error quotes because party comp does not matter, but I know you're still wondering about it. The role you fill will be decided by the spells and magic items that you select for the day, and in true everyman fashion, you can swap out those invocations and spells if you find your team lacking in an area. The only thing that really locks you down is your subclass, which will sort of staple you into a specific role unless you work to get out of it. And speaking of subclasses, the Artificer has four different specializations, as of Tasha's Cauldron, starting with the Alchemist. My personal favorite archetype, the Alchemist turns you into the potion seller of your dreams, able to apply a magical effect to anybody you want through the simple words, hey, drink this, I swear it's not poison. The power of spiking somebody else's drink manifests mainly in the experimental elixir, a brew that you cook up once a day with a menagerie of effects that you figure out once you bake the bottle, from healing to flying to transmogrification to boldness, which I can only assume is alcohol, from adding your intelligence mod to granting temporary hit points to a free cast of heal, every ability in the subclass either heals directly or has the capacity to heal. So the Alchemist is the archetype for you if you want to force your allies to take their medicine. The Armorer specialization is the choice you take if you're about to face Barney the Purple Datasaur, and it places you directly in front of the action, teaching you how to use heavy armor and how to upgrade it into either a Guardian or an Infiltrated design. The Guardian can take a lot of damage straight to the face, and then face punch right back, while the Infiltrator shoots lightning beams, moves faster, and gets the stealth cloak. But what's interesting is that it can still be heavy armor, which would instead cancel out the disadvantage that heavy armor normally imposes, so that you can sneak around in your giant can of baked beans. Further abilities include extra attacks, more mod spots in your armor for enchanting purposes, and upgrades to the armor models, making you a fantastic tank so long as you don't get hit, or else you're gonna really feel that D8 hit die. Now if you want to address all of your attacks to whom it may concern, and throw all notions of traditional fantasy out the window in favor of the big flump-off cannons, then the artillery specialization is the perfect choice for you. Your special gimmick is known as the Eldritch Cannon, a highly customizable weapon of mass destruction that can be small enough to fit in your hand, or large enough to be its own creature, with legs optional for either of them. The cannon then gets three settings, flamethrower, force field, and gun, plus more abilities to upgrade your cannon as you level up. I was being a bit hyperbolic when I said that you'd be throwing fantasy out the window, since the cannon can move around like a creature, but it doesn't have the creature type, so like the steel defender that we'll talk about later, you can reflavor this as like an elemental spirit, or a gnome that pops out of the ground and belches fire at people. There are plenty of ways to do this. Even the poster child, Artillerist V, makes her cannon look like a chicken, so yeah, go crazy. As for fighting, your game plan is going to be largely ranged as you send out your Pokemon to do all the work, so if you don't want to get blood on your fancy brass goggles, then play the Artillerist and watch out for exploded body parts. Finally, the last specialization for the Artificer is the archetypical class option, the choice that epitomizes what it means to be an Artificer, the decision to charge into battle with nary a bucket on your head, but with a giant mechanical bull stolen from Texas Roadhouse. The Battlesmith is the big bruisey type of a family, not suited for tanking per se, but good at surviving some hits and then dealing damage right back, like a fighter or a ranger. While you don't get heavy armor like the armorer, you do get proficiency in martial weapons and a bunch of abilities to strengthen both the attacks that come from you, as well as those that come from your steel defender, a mechanical monstrosity that is theoretically just as durable as you, but comes with enough self-heals to last longer, and it has a penchant for slapping attacks away from its friends, making the Battlesmith a weirdly good alternative for the Beastmaster Ranger. Given that the Artificer is a half-caster, spells were never the only thing that it brought to the party, but if you want to disregard spells almost entirely, the Battlesmith lets you pick up a big mallet and turn your brain off as you play the most dangerous thing ever, a science nerd that gets those sweet gains. But that'll about do it! I hope you enjoyed this video, be sure to leave a like, comment, subscribe, check out my social media in the description below, and maybe support me on Patreon so that I can tighten the screws that rattle around in my head. But yeah, Dabby out.