Are psychics op?

[MonkeySage]

I put forth the idea of playing one for our next campaign with a fellow player and he had a pretty... interesting reaction. Kinda got mad and thought I was talking about psionics. Even when I explained I was talking about the pathfinder occult class, he still said it was op.. Though it doesn't seem like he knows the class very well.

[Eldariel]

Psychics are fine, but they miss some cool spells (crucially they don't get access to most of the Conjuration BFC spells like Grease, Web, Stinking Cloud, Glitterdust, Wall of Stone, Fogs, etc.) and bloodline options compared to Sorcerers, and are a level behind Wizards. In exchange they get Psychic-style casting, some new spell options and some cool class features. A solid tier 2ish class. If they're not allowed, you can just play a Sorcerer or a Wizard and be fine, but there's little reason not to allow them at least on a power basis.

[MonkeySage]

People seem to have a knee-jerk reaction to it... "No psionics" they say before even looking at the class.

[Tuvarkz]

People seem to have a knee-jerk reaction to it... "No psionics" they say before even looking at the class.

Issue is 3.0 Psionics were quite broken. 3.5 mostly fixed the issue, but the idea stuck somehow, and DSP's psionic stuff is quite well balanced.
Regarding the Psychic, is a High Tier 2/low Tier 1 class. Which means that a sufficiently optimized one will break the game, but the Wizard is still more capable at doing so.

[Douglas]

Actually, the original big issue is that AD&D 2e Psionics were really broken. Part of their rules was every character just having a random chance to be straight up more powerful by having a psionic ability at no cost. Another was that you could use any power you had enough power points for, even if that was your entire maximum reserve. You could get Disintegrate at a much lower level than usual, for example.

In 3.x, there's the lingering memory of AD&D plus a lot of people not noticing the rule that you can't spend more PP than your manifester level at once. This leads to thinking that a psionic character can blast for one-hit-boss-killing amounts of damage, and similar powerful-above-your-level nova options.

[Kurald Galain]

People seem to have a knee-jerk reaction to it... "No psionics" they say before even looking at the class.

Yes. In addition to what Douglas said, this is also because none of the D&D psionics books makes a good case as to why psions should exist side-by-side with wizards*. Since the wizard is right in the PHB1 and the psion relatively obscure, that makes "no psionics, just play a wiz" a common conclusion.

* I'm not saying that such a case can't be made, of course, merely that the books of various editions do not do so.

[Florian]

I put forth the idea of playing one for our next campaign with a fellow player and he had a pretty... interesting reaction. Kinda got mad and thought I was talking about psionics. Even when I explained I was talking about the pathfinder occult class, he still said it was op.. Though it doesn't seem like he knows the class very well.

Occult Adventures might actually have the most well balanced full classes and archetypes that have been released for PF so far. But as been mentioned, keep in mind that psionic in D&D have always been such an overpowered mess with rules that could be misinterpreted due to bad writing and the rep still clings to the whole topic.

[Kurald Galain]

Occult Adventures might actually have the most well balanced full classes and archetypes that have been released for PF so far.

Balanced? Hardly. The occult classes run the full gamut from extremely powerful (psychic) to well-balanced (mesmerist, occultist) to needlessly complicated and fiddly (spiritualist, medium) to overly weak (kinny). We just had a long discussion on that (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?518415-What-Roles-do-the-Occult-Classes-fill) last week. I wouldn't call any of it overpowered though, psychics are about as powerful as wizards.

Overall I see no strong reason to ban them, except if you feel that the world already has too many different types of magic.

[Oneris]

People seem to have a knee-jerk reaction to it... "No psionics" they say before even looking at the class.

I suspect part of the bad reaction to the word Psionics may come from the old lack of magic/psionics transparency, where Psionics was the same as magic but better with total immunity to standard methods of identification and antimagic. Psionic monsters were also not as commonly used, which made the system into a PC-only special snowflake.

[lord_khaine]

I suspect part of the bad reaction to the word Psionics may come from the old lack of magic/psionics transparency, where Psionics was the same as magic but better with total immunity to standard methods of identification and antimagic. Psionic monsters were also not as commonly used, which made the system into a PC-only special snowflake.

Even then i would not call it directly better, just different. Psionics had some rather nice tricks in 2nd ed, but were also kinda limited by a low number of PP.