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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Langy" data-source="post: 8902764" data-attributes="member: 6861240">I'm about to start my first A5E campaign, and one of my players was planning to play a Machinist Artificer. After making our characters during Session 0, he began looking deeper into the Artificer mechanics and noticed that, unlike the O5E version of the Artificer, there doesn't seem to be anything that really balances that the Artificer is a half-caster. In O5E, each of the Archetypes provides some pretty powerful options to increase the combat capacity of the Artificer to make up for it being a half-caster, like the Artillerist's bonus action to fire the cannons or the Battle Smith's robot companion and Extra Attack, or the Armor Smith's armor and Extra Attack. Alchemist doesn't get as much, and is objectively the weakest of the O5E Artificer subclasses, but it at least gets +INT to Cantrip damage, which isn't nothing.In A5E, the base Artificer and the Artificer archetypes don't seem to have that. The Bombardier can throw some half-decent bombs up to Proficiency Bonus times per short rest, which is OK. The Machinist gets literally nothing to help in combat outside of the vehicle, which is much more of a utility mount than it is a combat vehicle - it never increases the Machinist's DPR and only somewhat increases their defenses, and it's not going to be available in all combats. The Stitcher at least gets the minion, but the minion explicitly can't ever attack so the DPR increase is minor at best.Am I missing something? What benefits does the A5E Artificer get that justifies it being a half-caster? Is there any way for an A5E Artificer to keep up with any other class in terms of combat output?</blockquote>

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