4 out of 5 stars

Everyone should have seen the Artificer preview when it came out last year as it was part of the free trial period for Dragon shortly after WotC took it over.  It contained several novel ideas that were designed to preserve the flavor of a master magical tinkerer in the new edition.  Those ideas sparked much discussion and revision within WotC, some of which was apparently visible on their boards (not being a regular over there, I can’t vouch for that claim).

With the release of the Eberron Players Guide last week (10 days ago, to be precise), the final version of the artificer made its debut.  As I don’t play in or run an Eberron Campaign, I didn’t buy that book and don’t have plans to.  As a result, I won’t get to see the final version of the artificer until the Compendium and Character Builder are updated in July.  Today, however, we get the Design & Development article that discusses the transformation of the artificer from its 3.5 version, to its playtest version, and finally to its published form.  Said article is, as ususal, lacking in exact mechanical details, but still provides some interesting perspectives on the artificer, at least from my uninformed position.  I’d be particularly interested if someone who bought the EPG could comment on the changes, however.  Some of those mentioned in the article are:

  • Healing powers that allow for the “transfer” of healing surges from one party member to another
  • Disposable magic “items” are now represented by powers that create conjurations or zones
  • Constructs are summoned elementals bound to power a physical device
  • Buffing powers have ongoing effects to represent the idea of handing out the “right tool” or enchanting items on the fly
  • Atrificers are master crafters, getting all the item creation rituals for free and being able to use Disenchant Magic Item without paying the component cost.  They can also pick up feats that allow them to make magic items higher than their level, but they can’t get discounts on the creation process.  As a result, they don’t “mess” with the magic item economy as much as they used to.
  • Arcane Replenishment has been modified to work on more than just magic items with daily powers.

Unlike most Design & Development articles, this one was written by just one person (Stephen) who was involved in both the design and development processes.  As a result, it reads as a single unit in a way that few other Design & Development articles have been able to accomplish.  Given that those few others were the two most recent ones (on the Monk and on Dragonmarks), it’s my hope that this will continue.  However, like this one, one of those articles (the on on Dragonmarks) had a single author, so this hope hasn’t really been tested yet.  We’ll see what happens the next time a two-author Design & Development article comes out.

Overall the article is fairly good.  Indeed, it’s probably excellent if you have the Artificer class in the EPG to reference as you read it.  Since I didn’t, however, I find it slightly less useful.