Spell Point Variant Abuse

[defiantdan]

In a recent thread about Sorcs vs Wizards I saw that one of the posters had mentioned how powerful an option the spell point variant was. I was curious why this is so. I get that you can blow all your points on using higher level spells (similar to going nova like a psion). Is there anything else that makes it a more powerful option?

I also saw that there are some "hard" counters to celerity, but no one mentioned what that is exactly.

[Callin]

Using the Vitality option is the most broken. All you have to do is get rid of Fatigue which is very easy to do and you get back a bunch of Spell Points. You can go all day for the most part and not have to really worry about Resource Management. Its banned at my tables now because of me lol

[sleepyphoenixx]

Even without the Vitality option (which is just broken because Lesser Restoration = unlimited spells) you can get around one of the problems wizards sometimes have, that of needing one spell several times on the same day.

Essentially it turns your wizard into a sorcerer that chooses his spells known every time he prepares spells, with a free Versatile Spellcaster thrown in because f*** you, mundanes.
Another valid comparison is a less limited, less expensive StP Erudite (only without psionics), which is essentially what you become except that you pre-choose your spells at the start of the day (unless you go to the trouble of getting Uncanny Forethought).

In short you gain a lot of versatility on a set of classes that are already all-powerful and only marginally held back by the eccentricies of the vancian casting system, making them even more powerful.

[Brova]

It's also worth noting that spell points is broken because it lets you trade nonequivalent resources. There is no number of castings of magic missile you could give someone to make up for losing a casting of cloudkill.

[StreamOfTheSky]

You abuse Spell Points by using them at all.

/thread

[lsfreak]

There's also the issue that damaging spells need to spend extra points to increase their damage up to your CL, but other spells auto-scale. It's not abusive per say, but imbalanced; you shouldn't be punishing the least-powerful options (things like magic missile and fireball) and encouraging casting things like silent image, glitterdust, or haste instead. Psionics doesn't have this problem (or at least, not anywhere near as bad) since a lot of non-damaging spells have augments too, and a lot fewer autoscaling ones.