Analysing the Cartographer: A New Artificer Subclass Playtest

Mapping out the artificer’s brand new subclass playtest for the upcoming Eberron book.

If you want to check out the full playtest material, you can find it all here. You can also watch the full reveal video below:

What is the cartographer?

Historically, they’re mapmakers and explorers. But this is the artificer version of a cartographer and while those functions hold up, these are more than just map makers.

These cartographers are adept at navigating through treacherous terrain and hostile environments. They’re very much team players, capable of teleporting beyond danger and safeguarding their crew.

Cartographer features

Tool proficiencies (lv3)

How it works

You gain proficiency with calligrapher’s supplies and cartographer’s tools. It also only takes half the time to scribe a spell scroll.

Cartographer’s spells (lv3)

How it works

You get a bunch of spells prepared that kick in at various levels as shown in the table below;

Artificer level	Spells
3	Faerie fire, guiding bolt, healing word
5	Locate object, mind spike
9	Clairvoyance, haste
13	Freedom of movement, locate creature
17	Scrying, teleportation circle

Tactics

• These spells are mostly about travel and information gathering and they’re a bit of a mixed bag.
• Your options at levels 5 and 13 are disappointingly poor (even if they’re thematically appropriate).
• However, faerie fire is a great buff/debuff for a level 1 spell.
• Healing word is super useful to have on another character in your party for recovering allies.
• Haste is a really strong buff.
• The likes of scrying and clairvoyance are pretty strong tools for information gathering.
• As you’ll see later in the class, the cartographer is a little bereft of damage dealing and buff/debuff options. As such, it would have been nice to see more of this in their spell list.
• I feel like spells like invisibility, greater invisibility, see invisibility, mislead, slow, spike growth, plant growth, entangle, ensnaring strike and fly could all have made better options than some of these. They’d have given the subclass better utility and usefulness in combat while fitting the cartographer thematically.

Adventurer’s atlas (lv3)

How it works

The cartographer creates several magical maps that it can give to themself and others. These grant an extra 1d4 to initiative rolls and means the cartographer always knows where the map holder is. This also means map holders can be affected by spells that require line of sight even when there isn’t line of sight, so long as they are within the spell’s range.

Tactics

• Higher initiative rolls for the party is really handy, especially with monsters often being better at initiative now.
• The really interesting part of this is no longer needing line of sight on spells for map holders.
• I’ve racked my brain a bit to try and understand how and where this can be exploited. Really we’re looking at spells we want to affect our allies.
• The obvious use is for allies that are invisible, hiding or around corners, you can now cast spells on them. This feels a little situational though.
• Perhaps a little easier to manufacture is being able to cast spells on allies while you remain behind cover. You don’t even need to leave safety to cast certain spells. Sadly, it’s easy enough in most cases, to pop your head out of cover and back in again on a turn to cast a spell. So while this solves some interesting problems, I don’t think they’re frequently problematic enough or useful enough to get excited over. Though I may be missing a handy exploit here.

Scouting gadgets (lv3)

How it works

You can use half your movement to teleport 10ft and you can cast faerie fire a few times without expending a spell slot.

Tactics

• The teleport is a nifty way to escape a creature’s reach without incurring opportunity attacks. There’s no limit to uses which is handy. It also makes it hard for you to be caged. But if you’re grappled, restrained or otherwise have your move speed reduced to 0, it won’t help you.
• Faerie fire is universally useful, granting advantage on attacks and tackling invisibility. To have several free uses of this makes this a main buff for the cartographer and it’s pretty solid for this.

Portal jump (lv5)

How it works

Gain several uses of a 60ft teleport using your bonus action. If you teleport within 5ft of an ally with an adventurer’s atlas map, you can destroy the map and teleport without expending a use.

Tactics

• 60ft is twice as far as misty step will take you which is substantial. It means much greater safety and the utility of scaling much higher environments too.
• You can also escape grapples and restraints making you very difficult to pin down.
• I’d even consider getting close to enemies, cause some damage, then escape. As it doesn’t require spell slots, you can use whatever spells you like in doing this (maybe something like dragon’s breath or thunderclap) then teleport away.

Ingenious movement (lv9)

How it works

When you use flash of genius, you can also teleport yourself or an ally 30ft as part of the reaction

Tactics

• An add on to flash of genius is nice and means you’re not competing for uses of your reaction.
• You can easily move yourself or an ally out of danger with this.
• The one issue I have here is it’s yet another teleportation feature!

Superior atlas (Lv15)

How it works

Your adventurer’s atlas now let’s allies destroy their atlas when they hit 0HP to teleport to you and become stable. It also lets you cast find the path for free once per long rest and will prevent you losing concentration on an artificer spell when taking damage.

Tactics

• Really, you just want to make sure you’ve always got your adventurer’s atlas switched on. This grants a lot of safety from death and easily maintained concentration.
• This actually makes the cartographer excellent as a spell concentration specialist. Sadly, as a 2/3 caster, cartographers aren’t blessed with a ton of great concentration spells that can really cripple enemies. There are some nice options like wall of stone, haste and Bigby’s hand, but nothing that’s going to severely debilitate multiple enemies at once like hypnotic pattern or slow which feels like a shame with what should be a very handy feature.

How good is the cartographer?

The good stuff surrounds the cartographer’s teleportation features. There’s loads of great options here and any party should enjoy having a cartographer teleport them around the battlefield.

However, there’s so much teleportation that there’s not much room for anything else. Ideally, you’d have features or spells that let you deal nasty touch or emanation effects while you teleport out of danger. As it stands, your teleportation is purely a safety and an accessibility feature leaving you zipping around the battlefield making very little impact.

Kind of like a fly. It won’t leave you alone, and it’s annoying, but there’s no sting! There’s no gun turrets like the artillerist or extra melee damage like the battle smith or something of this ilk tailored to the cartographer.

This would be fine if the artificer had spells that could compete in combat, but it doesn’t. And the cartographer doesn’t gain extra spells that are going to add much here either. Basically, you’re teleporting without a huge amount of purpose.

This leads onto superior atlas with it’s concentration feature. This is excellent in theory, but there aren’t many nasty effects to concentrate on for the cartographer. Largely, what this means is enemies will see you as a low priority target and focus attacks on scarier party members meaning your advanced concentration doesn’t matter that much anyway.

As such, I’d like to see some better spells provided to the cartographer, specifically some more that can be of use in combat. These don’t need to be big damage dealers, but something that’s going to make the cartographer a handful in combat. I felt like the cartographer shouldn’t just be a guide, but should be able to mislead and trap. That makes it great for spells like entangle, spike growth and ensnaring strike.

I also feel like they need a feature that lets them do more in combat and that works nicely in conjunction with their teleportation. Have them lay traps or alter the terrain in ways that creates problems for enemies.

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I think there’s a promising start here for the cartographer. But I do think it will feel weak in combat and needs to become more of a disruptor to be a solid subclass.

What do you think of the new cartographer subclass? Let me know in the comments below.

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