Thats a nice way to implement it, and a great way to add class flavor, but when I was talking about niches I was meaning in more broad terms, ranged dps vs mele dps, AOE vs cleave vs single target etc. what utility and buffs do they bring that might make them more attractive than another class that fills a similar role. ultimately everything else is mostly window dressing.
(this is something warlocks have tended to suffer from, while they fill a very similar niche to mages, they don’t come with a lust ability, and while they do have a b-rez, enough other classes have one that it isn’t a HUGE selling point, their gates DO give them a fairly unique role for creating skips, and most raids will want at least 1 for their closets and lock cookies, but they could def use just a LITTLE bit more love imo.)
cuz while class flavor is cool and all, what matters from a practical standpoint is what role they fill and what kind of synergy and utility they can bring to a group.
i do think tinkers could be a really cool class and could def have a place, its just figuring out exactly what that place would look like, and what sort of unique utility they would add to the group as a whole. (so if they are going to be AOE and control focused they would be sharing space with mages, and mages come with lust, so what would tinker have that might make you want to take one of them instead, without making them so unbalanced that you would only EVER want to bring one)
off the top of my head, giving them short term aoe buffs to people standing within a certain distance of them (lets say themselves and 4 other people, so a full dungeon group if close enough but not a full raid) with the buffs lasting like 30s or something, used optimally you could co-ordinate those buffs with your teamates burn phases…
although that is REALLY similar to what shaman totems where “supposed” to be, and poor shamans have had a REALLY bad time of it for like… ever… so giving a different class something that was supposed to be their signature role would suck… as I said, just throwing an idea out there (in this case turns out it was a bad one)