Since arcanists prepare their spells you can't make word spells on the fly. You have to prepare them, then cast the wordspells prepared spontaneously.
It looks like your party could use someone to melee or heal right now though. Fighters make pretty damn decent frontliners(even if that front line is them using a bow and Point Blank Master), and clerics can heal out of battle after they smash things with their weapons.
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seems like your party has enough blasting, dragonfire adept just dragon breath all day and from what I recall even use some warlocks powers and got some of their own.
The warlord is a decent frontline.
Artisan not familiar with it but guessing it's about crafting.
As for wordcasting and arcanist, there are no official rules for it, you will need to ask your DM about it.
Heh quite honestly, the way the party is made, you might as well, just play a battlefield controller or a divine caster to help with various problems, your party might run into like ability damage/drain, negative levels, etc... Or you could join the front/melee, with a warpriest or a melee oracle. Or if your heart is set on an arcanist, a brown fur arcanist for stronger buffs.
Transmuted Wizard or Magus focused on shapeshifting. Here's a guide just for Shapeshifting.
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In general without archetypes?
Wizard is stronger. Arcanist is easier to play and exploits make it easy to do some interesting stuffs.
With archetypes?
Arcanist can use some tools of the wizard effectively (archetype to use a full school power or even archetypes to use a full bloodline from sorcerer) etc...
Wizard has an archetype that can use exploits from arcanist and comes out ahead.
But yeah wizard is stronger, if that what you are wondering but not by much.
seems like your party has enough blasting, dragonfire adept just dragon breath all day and from what I recall even use some warlocks powers and got some of their own.
The warlord is a decent frontline.
Artisan not familiar with it but guessing it's about crafting.
Mainly. Artisan does a few things:
1. Creates magic items, more efficiently than anyone else.
2. Temporarily buffs weapons, armour, and shields with magical plusses and features - similar to the paladin's divine bond (weapon) ability, but can be done on nearby allies. Basic buffs are swift actions, while some take standard actions - so action economy isn't too bad.
3. Has selectable abilities that make UMD better (so that they can actually use the scrolls they make, as they actually need UMD for that; they're Artisans, not Artificers!)
Otherwise, d8, mid-BAB, good Will only, 8 skills, simple weapons + medium armour + shields, you know the drill. The big thing is having relatively low stat dependency (just Int for Craft and uses of the enhancement ability, and Cha for UMD.)
It has an archetype, Creationist, that trades the item creation bonus feats away, in exchange for SLAs of the Creation subschool - which isn't too bad, actually.