In the Character Origins UA, the new concept of spell categories took shape - magic was divided into Arcane, Divine, and Primal spell lists. The concept had already existed to a certain extent in the lore of the game - it was clear that the kind of magic a Wizard casts is quite different from the kind of magic that a Paladin casts. The spell lists contain overlaps, of course, with Mending, for example, in both the Arcane and Divine lists.
While we still don't have the Expert Classes UA available to peruse just yet, we can now see a similar concept being introduced: Class Categories along with Spell Categories.
Like the Spell Categories, this is a new tag that does not seem to be overwriting any previous tags or categories. What it does is creates hooks on which to hang new modular game concepts in an elegant way.
In the 8 years of D&D 5th Edition, only one full class has been added to the game in officially published material. The Artificer, first published in Eberron: Rising from the Last War, and then reprinted with a few revisions and a new subclass (which happens to be my favorite sublcass) in Tasha's Cauldron of Everything, is in a bit of an odd position. Because 5E has been designed under the assumption that you should never need more than the 3 core rulebooks to use any other book they've published (counting Spelljammer: Adventures in Space as a single book that happens to be in three volumes in this case,) the Artificer had to be wholly complete in both printings. While books like Fizban's Treasury of Dragons bent some of these rules (providing a new spell or two that Artificers can use,) adding a new class presents the following two problems:
First is that you cannot expand upon that class, at least not in ways exclusive to that class. We'll have to see if that remains the case when we get things like The Book of Many Things, which I assume will be the next Xanathar's/Tasha's-style rules expansion book. The class and spell categories here don't really change this fact, which is why I'm frankly disappointed that the Artificer is not seeing print in the new PHB.
However, the second problem is one that this can potentially solve: We've explicitly heard that the Artificer does count as an Expert class (note that "Expert" here is a group role - it's not meant to imply a higher difficulty or that it comes online at higher levels like old prestige classes). As such, new features that are added to the game in the 2024 PHB and beyond that serve Expert classes will also work for the Artificer.
Now, in a sense, this is philosophically similar to the very concept of classes versus subclasses. In older editions of D&D, what we'd now call subclasses were either Prestige classes or just wholly separate classes. The Avenger, in 4th Edition (I believe) is more or less what the Oath of Vengeance Paladin is today, including features like Vow of Enmity.
In a certain way, the base classes of 5th Edition have served as broad categories for the subclasses that would be published throughout the edition. They're an existing framework that allowed for the introduction of, say, new Eldritch Invocations, which anyone in the "Warlock" category could use.
Indeed, I think that the Class/Subclass system in 5E has worked out extremely well - we all know at a basic level what a Rogue can do, and each time they want to make a new flavor of Rogue, they don't have to fully go back to the drawing board.
But, as we've seen with the Artificer, even if the twelve original classes do a really good job covering the bases of the various fantasy archetypes that one could want to embody, sometimes none of them are quite the right fit, and it's useful to have some working space to allow for the creation of new classes.
What will be interesting to see is how much WotC makes use of these new capabilities. I think it possible that we might see new classes added to the game more frequently than we did in the past. I don't think that this will prevent new subclasses, but if there are places where a new class makes sense, it'll be easier to do so.
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