Confused about spell sources for Artificer

Question

I am going to play my first D&D campaign soon. I have played lots of Neverwinter nights (not the mmo) which I hope will give me something of a grounding.

Anyway, I have chosen to be an Artificer.

The spell list states that some of the spells are from Xanathar's Guide to Everything. I did some googling, found a link to the book's content and the spells are not listed there... Confused!

I do some more googling and find out that they actually seem to be in the Players Companion for Elemental Evil.

What confuses me more is that the same spells listed here also have comments from people saying that they are not in the normal players guide but are in fact in Xanathar's.

Could someone help me out? Where is the true source for these spells?

Answer 1

There are a couple of things going on here

1. You are looking at an outdated playtest version of the class. The final version is in Eberron: Rising from the Last War (and in Wayfinder's Guide to Eberron). See this question for more details.

2. The Artificer class is newer than Xanathar's, so the Artificer spell list isn't in Xanathar's, but the spells should be in there if listed as such.

3. A number of spells in Xanathar's are reprints or updates of spells from the Elemental Evil Player's Companion, so they'll appear in both.

4. The spell list for the final version of the class is given in the books that contain the class (see #1 above) and also listed on D&D Beyond; however, you won't be able to access the text unless you own that content on that site. If you don't want to do that, you could use filters to only show you the freely available spells.

Answer 2

The 'missing' spells are not available for individual purchase because they are already freely available

These spells can be found in both the Elemental Evil Player's Companion (EEPC) and Xanathar's Guide to Everything (XGTE).

The spells that are included in EEPC are freely available to all - that pdf is officially a free download.

On DnD Beyond you can buy access to an entire sourcebook or you can buy items of content from that sourcebook piecemeal. To this end, the page you have linked to contains a list of all the spells you can purchase from XGTE as individual purchases.

The spells in the EEPC are all reprinted in XGTE (with a few tweaks) but they are not listed as individual purchase options on DnD Beyond becuase they are already freely available to all users - like the basic rules.

The list of spells that you can see on the linked page is thus not a complete list of all spells in XGTE - it's just the list of spells that you don't already have free access to.

For comparison of this phenomena elsewhere, see the purchase page for the PHB. No Races are available to purchase and the only available Subraces to purchase separately are Dark Elf and Forest Gnome - while the actual book contains 9 different races + subraces to go with most of them.

To access all of the free content on DnD Beyond, including the 'missing' spells just create a free account - no purchase necessary, though that won't give you access to the official Artificer subclasses - which are behind a paywall.

In summary, the list of individual purchases available, from within a sourcebook, is not an accurate summary of that book's contents, and should not be treated as such.

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Note: You are not looking at the latest version of the Artificer, which has now been published offically, and has over time gone through many changes.