Sudden metamagic feats

[Mike Miller]

I haven't used the sudden metamagic line of feats, but I was looking them over recently. What do people think of them? Are any of them worth taking for a straight Beguiler? I feel like they would be useful, but not necessarily better than normal metamagic feats due to their limited daily uses.

[peacenlove]

Its not the 1/day use that makes them bad, its the insane prerequisites for the better ones.

[Mordaedil]

I think I'd take them if they gave more uses, personally, but the requirements aren't really making a good case for taking them either.

Removing the requirements and giving a few more uses per day, especially for the weaker ones would go a long way to make them more appealing.

[Mike Miller]

Its not the 1/day use that makes them bad, its the insane prerequisites for the better ones.

Sudden Quicken is absurd, I saw that one. I think it was the only offender, though. The others have no prereq or just "any other mm feat."

[Darrin]

I like taking Sudden Extend as a prereq for one of those "at least one other metamagic" feats, such as Energy Substitution or Sculpt Spell. I figure a free extend 1/day is almost always going to be useful. The other Suddens... I don't see them as being nearly as useful, although there's a certain smug satisfaction of having a Sudden Maximize in your back pocket at least once a day.

[peacenlove]

Sudden Quicken is absurd, I saw that one. I think it was the only offender, though. The others have no prereq or just "any other mm feat."

The other I had in mind was Sudden energy affinity in Miniatures handbook (not reprinted in CA), that requires the base feat, severely diminishing its usefuleness.

[AnimeTheCat]

I enjoy sudden silent and sudden still. You never know when you'll need to silently cast a spell or when you'll be bound and need to cast the spell.

[Zaq]

They can explicitly be used on SLAs and, unlike the relevant pseudometamagic feats for SLAs (Empower SLA, etc.), they don’t require a minimum CL or put a cap on the maximum effective spell level, so there’s a little bit of niche use there if you happen to rely on SLAs for some reason (Warlocks, Truenamers, dragonmark specialists, members of weird SI-ish PrCs, etc.). And unlike Empower SLA and the like, you use them on the fly rather than picking a SLA you have when you take the feat, so you can take them even if you don’t yet have the SLA you care about most. I’ve never actually seen a Pally take Sudden Extend for use on their special mount, but doing so would be legal and might technically not be useless? Probably useless, but whatever.

They’re also not awful in E6. Metamagic is really hard to use in E6 because you just don’t have many spell levels to work with (and, anecdotally, many GMs who choose to run E6 do so with the intent of keeping caster power levels from going crazy, so the GMs I’ve personally played with who run E6 tend to frown on DMM and similar things), but feats aren’t quite as costly as in the normal game. So the sudden metamagic feats can be fun there.

Otherwise, as Darrin said, Sudden Extend is a grade-A choice if you need “any other metamagic feat” as a prereq but don’t necessarily have enough slot-room to really use another metamagic feat at full cost. Beyond that, a normal full caster will usually want to spend their feats elsewhere as the sudden feats do tend to be pretty niche, but at least they are simply niche and not straight garbage overall. (Even if they were a little bit too cautious with the prereqs on Sudden Quicken. Like, okay, I get it, getting your highest-level spell as a swift action 1/day is a pretty dang sweet effect and shouldn’t be so easy to get that it becomes a no-brainer, but with that kind of feat cost it’s basically a soft ban, and I find soft bans to usually be, shall we say, somewhat dishonest game design.)