While true about damage spells not being the prime focus of the artificer, the overly conservative buff/debuff/control spells with excessive concentration requirements is also something that hits them in an area they should shine in.
5e reduced it to a half caster from 3/4 caster. Here is the old paladin, artificer, & wizard spell progression side by side
The other half is not what I desire and the spell list doesn't match my desires.
Gotcha. I've always heard the earlier (1st-6th caster levels) playtest referred to as 2/3 not 3/4 but the point stands.
I have found Tasha's to have less impact on the game than Xanathar's Guide did. I don't see it as a major shift. A lot of it's rules are highly optional, more so than any new rules are optional. Which I think is resulting in a fair number of tables simply not using those more optional rules.
God I hope not. That's against the idea of DIY that is inherent in D&D and would be the point I quit buying new books.
Exactly. Hence why I said yet. I'm not saying they will definitely happen, just that they MAY happen should the above factors align.
Gotcha, you want Eldritch Knight and Arcane Trickster to be separate classes rather than subclasses of Fighter and Rogue. I personally don't see that as making sense since they're literally Fighters and Rogues with spellcasting, but all sorts of splat classes existed in previous editions, so I can see why someone would want such splat classes to fiddle with rather than the far more easy to balance subclasses to fiddle with. WotC seem to be EXTREMELY cautious with publishing entire new classes; they even tried to make the Artificer a Wizard subclass at first. In my view, a whole new class needs to have conceptual space that doesn't step on the toes of any other class. It stands on its own with its own narrative. That's what will stand up to both internal alpha and beta testing and external playtesting through UA. But I understand why one might not agree with that design ethos.
I'm not sure that "switch to 3rd party product" is the what's going on though. DMs Guild and En5ider, etc, build on a foundation of WotC material. In TCG terms, they're booster pack expansions to the core decks put out by WotC. They can add flavour to your game, but they're not replacements for the game. In late 3rd Edition as the transition to 4th Edition happened, some people found the 3rd-party content was sufficiently a replacement in Pathfinder, but even then they were using it in tandem with their 3.5e era books for a long time before enough revisions had happened that people just dropped 3.5e for a wholescale Pathfinder experience. WotC has reopened the floodgates to 3rd party content a like has not been seen since 3e, but the Pathfinder fork splitting the D&D community has as of yet not occured. MAYBE Morrus will achieve that with LevelUp, but I don't think that's his aim with it. Even though it CAN stand alone, it's clear that anything put out here is playing on the stage that WotC built with 5e. 5e is in no danger of being replaced by competitors.
That touches on some other systemic problems within 5e that stems from designing spells & everything else for no feats no magic items until it comes to magic werapons & advice for how much effort should be involved in obtaining them where a piddling 500gp is recommended , GMs are encouraged to be "generous" with them, and AL just awards them free to everyone who hits level 5. It resulers in spells & cantrips being massively overvalued. They did dial back infusions though, those are far less useful than they once were when they could be used for a wide variety of wands & occasional very custom gear for party members. Being a caster class those infusions no longer really follow the low bar wotc recommends & they instead tune for a no magic item whiteroom they themselves recommend against.
Tasha's didn't kill PHB+1. The Tasha character creation rules were adopted into the D&D AL Player's Document to get around that problem.
Sorry yes, they did dial back infusions, but they spoke about dialing them back much further to allow for a more caster-oriented class with occasional magic item creation. The end result was more heavy on the magitech and lighter on the spells, and that's better for the archetypal identity of the Artificer class.
