When you ignore the single subclass the provides nearly no meaningful power, Artificers can bring a lot to the table. Their magic item creation and infusion system lets them supply themselves and teammates with splashy items that provide unique effects, and each subclass has a ton of flavor baked in with its own core play pattern.

Battle Smith artificers are closest to rangers and paladins in presentation. You’re getting excellent bonus proficiencies, Extra Attack, solid bonus spells, and a summon-like ally that will feel similar to Beast Master ranger.
If you want a big robot pet to beat up monsters alongside you, Battle Smith is the specialty for you. 

Do you enjoy making stuff explode? Do you want a free magical gun to blast away with? Want to get as close to the Gunslinger as possible without using Critical Role materials? If so, Artillerist has your back.

This subclass is packed full of juice and builds off the base artificer fantasy in a way basically none of its other subclasses do, making it the best expression of what an artificer subclass should look like.

Alchemist commits many sins. As far as giving a character tools to craft and use potions, the best option you get is the freaking tool proficiency. Experimental Elixir fails spectacularly at being a reasonable method to make and use potions. This subclass doesn’t even give you ways to improve in using acid and alchemist’s fire

This essentially gives them a 4th spell of 3rd level each day, which could be massively impactful if used wisely and if you’re having enough combats per day to warrant it. Most of the time however, you don’t need this.

This does fix a lot of the problems of thrown weapons in this game, but it doesn’t fix the biggest one: damage. There’s just no real reason to use this over a hand crossbow or any other ranged weapon for that matter.

This infusion is not one you’ll use every day of your adventure,  but on the days you need it, you’ll wonder how you would have survived without it. If you can spare a known infusion on this and your DM throws non-physical damage at you ever at all, put this in your back pocket and pull it out when you need it.

Most Artificers will be wielding a shield, meaning this is a very good pickup once we reach level 6. Options for infusing a shield are limited to just this and Enhanced Defense, so thanks to a lack of competition, this will be the go to pick for many players from levels 6-9.

Replicate Magic Item is a special infusion. Keep in mind that you can take an infusion more than once, you just can’t infuse a single item with multiple infusions. You’ll find that this infusion ends up taking up a lot of your known infusion slots, even if they aren’t one of your active infusions all the time.

This gives a weapon +1 and removes every aspect of the ammunition and loading properties, even letting the weapon produce magical ammunition of its own when you go to fire it.

Most Artificers are wielding some sort of weapon, and if that’s the case, you’ve probably been using Enhanced Weapon up to this point. A quick read will show that Radiant Weapon is strict upgrade once we reach level 6, with one small caveat; it requires attunement where Enhanced Weapon does not.

Holding concentration is important in 5e, and perhaps no feature holds concentration quite as well as this infusion. No muss, no fuss, if you fail, you succeed instead 4 times per day. I’d hazard a guess that thanks to the Artificer’s innate Constitution saving throw proficiency, this one infusion might be all some Artificer players need to secure their concentration for an entire campaign.

This is the Artificer’s answer to the Wizard’s familiar, and just like a class that specializes in intelligence should do, they got the answer correct. First, let’s break down exactly what the Homunculus is just from its stat block, then we’ll talk about how we can get creative.

This infusion is most easily compared to the Alert feat. Personally, I’m a big fan of Alert, especially on casters, and while Artificers aren’t full casters, they still have plenty of benefits to going early in initiative order.

This is a fairly simple infusion with a lot of complexity behind it. First off, if we plan to keep this weapon for ourselves, we really should be consistently making multiple attacks per round, meaning neither the Alchemist or Artillerist are very interested in this.

For an infusion as simple as +1 AC to a suit of armor or shield is, there sure is a whole lot to talk about with this one. Obviously this is a way to stack your AC to the stratosphere, a very common strategy among Artificers and Armorers specifically.

An often underused aspect of Artificer Infusions is the ability to hand them off to another party member. I admit, I am also an offender, as it really feels like you as the Artificer need these infusions to stay relevant and powerful. If there was ever an infusion that I would almost always give to a friend however,  it would be this one.

This is a teleportation effect wholly unique to this infusion, meaning we have no reference points by which to judge it, so let’s break it down as best we can. First, this requires a bonus action, so both the Artillerist and Battlesmith have immediately lost all interest. They both have bonus actions provided by their subclass that are much better than this.