The artificer is decent but doest hold a candle to the focused practitioner who chooses summer magic/biomancy as there focus. or even any really specialized mage for that matter.
your objection seems to be that they can get strength 8 affects for zero to one stress?
Discipline 5, Conviction 5 Modified [7/10] if offensive casting meant to kill or alter 9/13
Lore 4
Focus items
+4 biomancy [applies to all summer magic rolls as control, as long as within the themes of summer magic.]
+2 Summer magic offensive power.
Summer magic -4
Item of Power Oaken staff -1 [Grants Refinement 3] +2 Summer magic: Power, +1 Biomancy: Control other refinement into 2 more focus item slots
Lawbreaker -2 second
Lawbreaker -1 first
depending on st whim you may or may not be able to take another level of refinement to bring it up to 11 shift effects with a control roll of 13 all at submerged power level.
The same general build works equally well with hellfire, or even simple channeling/rituals. alternatively you can grant full evocation and thaumaturgy by dropping 2 points of lawbreaker for very minimal lost in efficiency.
This of course doesn't even scratch the surface of what you can do with complexity 10 rituals at no preparation. especially when you'd have a discipline roll of 13 for any biomantic buff spells and little to no worry about them backfiring due to the expertise provided by it being summer magic.
for example you are afraid that your to much of a blaster and are afraid a sniper might kill you, no problem. Spend about an hour each morning meditating, and otherwise preparing yourself for your daily/weakly buff ritual.
+10 from self assessments should be fairly trivial. so you now have a complexity 20 ritual that you cast in 2-3 rounds with no chance of failure. this effect can give you something like a block 16/8 which just like a ward will weaken instead of disappearing when overcome for duration... oh well spend the other 4 shifts into that, since its a thaumaturgical affect we use the time chart starting at day that pushes it to a month.
Likewise five free tags on an aspect you created is easily possible. Now if your gm frowns on using assessments to boost the complexity of rituals and wont listen that the book clearly says that that is the way to do it, your still fine. you just cast a base complexity 10 spell. for armer 8/4 duration a week. sure its not as powerful but its better or equal to what the artificer is going to have and you can do the same thing with aspect stacking. or rigging up a block instead of simple action for any of your spells with a strength of 8-10 at similarly long duration. and of course since you have summer magic you can do that at evocation speeds while arguably keeping thaumaturgical duration, at 9 shifts for one stress or 2-3 for 10-11 shift evocations, and still reliably control them with your discipline.
