The Artificer's Future

 When the Artificer was released for 5E, it came out in Eberron: Rising from the Last War, marking the class as a part of that idiosyncratic setting. Eberron is a more technological setting than, say, the Forgotten Realms, inspired by pulp adventure novels from the 1930s (though given that Conan the Barbarian was among such pulp novels, so was D&D itself) and a bit of Film Noir from the 40s and 50s.

Tasha's Cauldron of Everything, though, brought us a more-or-less unchanged version of the class, along with several subclasses from other setting books (though it came out too early for the ones in Van Richten's) and gave them a setting-agnostic seal of approval to be part of the overall list of options for 5E characters (not that I had any interest in restricting their use as a DM).

With the 2024 PHB revising the twelve original 5E classes, but leaving out the half-as-old Artificer, I had thought maybe we would be waiting for a long time before getting an update, or really anything, for this class.

But that's not the case:

The Artificer is getting its own 2024 update with this year's Forge of the Artificer, a lighter and less comprehensive Eberron book (that also appears to be coming out at a 30-dollar price point, little over half the cost of your standard D&D book) with a revision along with a fifth subclass (and revisions to the existing four).

Still, while I was excited to see this (though I'm mixed on the revisions they're making to the class,) I had still thought that the Artificer was likely to stagnate as it had in its initial incarnation, due to a principle that, unless the full class was reprinted, they could't really add anything to it.

Now, to be fair, that's not strictly true - a single spell out of Fizban's Treasury of Dragons was designated as available for Artificers.

But I do think that the governing principle with 5E has been that every single book they release should be useable if you only have the three core rulebooks.

However, with the likely release of the Reanimator Artificer in what I assume is going to be a similarly smaller Ravenloft supplement akin to Forge of the Artificer, there's reason to believe that they're going to start treating this class as a full and welcome part of 5th Edition.

I don't know whether WotC plans to have big setting-agnostic rules expansions like Xanathar's or Tasha's for 5.5E, but my hope would be that the Artificer could continue to get supported with other expansions to its subclass and spell options (I'd also, frankly, love to see at least one Artificer-exclusive spell).

Now, there are two routes that might follow from this approach:

The more consistent embrace of the Artificer as a class in 5E, marking it as perhaps last among equals with the 12 from the PHB, might also imply that they're unlikely to add more classes to the game. Rather than building out new full classes, they'll simply keep working on the existing thirteen.

Alternatively, the opposite could be true: having found the right way to approach non-core classes, they might feel emboldened to create more of them.

I do think, though, that it's kind of an interesting question as to what other classes might even exist. The Artificer, at one point, was tested as a Wizard subclass. And actually, I've seen some arguments that the Artificer should have been a full spellcaster, rather than a half-caster (This feels particularly true for the Alchemist, and I think would also probably feel true for the Cartographer and maybe the Reanimator).

D&D's approach to classes is very broad - you go in for more specific flavor with subclasses. You could imagine a game in which a Rune Knight and an Arcane Archer are fully separate classes, and indeed, I think possibly as recently as 4th Edition, the Vengeance Paladin was actually an Avenger, a separate class from the Paladin (though don't quote me on that - I don't really know 4E rules).

Thus, the question becomes: what other broad fantasy archetypes are there to build entire classes around?

One of the first third-party classes available on D&D Beyond (I think for free?) was Matt Mercer's Blood Hunter. In some ways, the class fits that "expert monster hunter" vibe that I wish the Ranger was more like, but even though its subclasses go in pretty wildly different directions (one being a pretty transparent Witcher analogue, though to be fair, it's not like WotC hasn't made subclasses that feel tied to specific IPs - I wasn't aware when it came out, but the Way of the Astral Self is evidently based on Jojo's Bizarre Adventure) I think there's a great deal of specificity to its class flavor that makes it feel not quite as broadly-imagined as the main classes.

Anyway, I'm curious to see what the final version of the new Artificer looks like. I remember being a bit underwhelmed by the most recent UA version, but we'll see.