Quote Originally Posted by Zanos View Post
The tier list isn't about floors. You can pretty easily just set your spellbook on fire at level 1. Or prepare animate rope in 90% of your slots. The later of which a real person in a real game I ran actually did, because "I'm a transmuter."
There's a difference between not measuring floors and ignoring optimization effort altogether. The amount of work and game knowledge it takes to get the Artificer working at all is more than it takes to get a Beguiler or Dread Necromancer to Tier One.