Reciprocal Gyre

[FocusWolf413]

Why haven't I found any love for reciprocal gyre? It does (spell levels affecting a target)d12 damage, is hard to resist, and can automatically shut down some casters. It's one of the best spells in Complete Arcane and a great way to take the optimization of a party down a notch. Why does nobody talk about it?

[Karl Aegis]

You said it yourself: It brings the optimization of the party down.

[Sith_Happens]

Because you're getting the two versions of it mixed up. The Complete Arcane version deals 1d6 per spell level, the Spell Compendium version deals 1d12 per spell. The latter is both far worse and far more likely to be the version a given person uses.

[Cruiser1]

Why haven't I found any love for reciprocal gyre? It does (spell levels affecting a target)d12 damage, is hard to resist, and can automatically shut down some casters.
Reciprocal Gyre (both versions) isn't used or talked about much because it's a simple and poor quality spell. It's just a single target nuke, which is only useful if the target has a bunch of buffs on it. You can Will save for half damage, and the targets most likely to have a bunch of buffs are casters who have good Will saves.

It's also a 5th level spell, and a caster has much better things to do with higher level spell slots than weak and unreliable nukes (e.g. if you want to take out a single caster with a 5th level slot, Baleful Polymorph it instead to target their Fort save). On the occasion that a caster does want to do direct damage, they're better spent on AoE spells, e.g. spend that 5th level spell on a classic Cone of Cold to take out a dozen mooks at once.

[Telok]

On a scroll it rocks. Expect the person to make the save for half and accept that as the damage.

It's also a die per spell level on the target, find yourself a nice easy no-save spell with a duration and have an artificer burn a wand off to put lots of spell levels on them before you cast it. Crabwalk, Faerie Fire, Stalking Brand, heightened, repeat, twinned, yadda yadda yadda. Put as many spell levels on some poor sucker as you can and slap Reciprocal Gyre on them. It's not an super optimization spell but for a cheap wand and a scroll an artificer can get pretty good bang for his buck.

[icefractal]

In practice, it's more useful for the GM than the players, because players tend to have a lot more buffs than monsters. Even for foes that could use a lot of buffs, they're only going to do that if the GM felt like spending a lot of time custom-making them. And also, the newer version is pretty weak. 3-6d12, save for half, at mid-level? Not impressive.

[Troacctid]

There are a lot of spells that are powerful in the abstract, but aren't worth the high-level spell slot they call for. Reciprocal Gyre would be quite strong if it were a 1st level spell, but it's a 5th level spell, and at the level you get it, it's just worse than other things you could be doing with that spell slot. There aren't really a lot of realistic scenarios where it does anything useful.

[StreamOfTheSky]

I love the idea of it in principle, but the actual end result leaves me disappointed. It is rather high level, it'd be nice to have lower-level options. And if you're using the SpC version, which you probably are, the damage is pretty garbage for single target even in good situations to use it. But wait, it also stuns! Yeah...and it doesn't matter if the foe has a single first level spell or two dozen spell buffs running, same DC, same stun duration. That honestly pisses me off a lot.

The ideal RG spell would be lower level or have a lesser version, and would scale up linearly if not quadratically to the number of spells / spell levels in use by the target, with those have only a low level buff or two barely affected by it and no risk of stun, and those with tons of spells active get put through the ringer.

That said...the entire high level game is built upon spell buffing, so RG in any capacity really upsets the established way. Maybe it shouldn't be that way at all, but it'd be better to change the fundamental problem then rather than just introduce spells to punish it.

I have been meaning to homebrew some lesser versions of it that are more useful/balanced...