Top 10 level 9 spells

[Anthrowhale]

The ultimate level of spells (See 0 (https://forums.giantitp.com/showthread.php?657743-Top-10-cantrips),1 (https://forums.giantitp.com/showthread.php?657825-Top-10-level-1-spells-at-ECL2-amp-20),2 (https://forums.giantitp.com/showthread.php?658094-Top-10-level-2-spells-at-ECL-4-amp-20),3 (https://forums.giantitp.com/showthread.php?658251-Top-10-level-3-spells-at-ECL6-amp-20),4 (https://forums.giantitp.com/showthread.php?658751-Top-10-level-4-spells-at-ECL-8-amp-20#post25846144),5 (https://forums.giantitp.com/showthread.php?659463-Top-10-level-5-spells-at-ECL-10-amp-20),6 (https://forums.giantitp.com/showthread.php?660156-Top-10-level-6-spells-at-ECL-12-amp-20),7 (https://forums.giantitp.com/showthread.php?660357-Top-10-level-7-spells-at-ECL14-and-20),8 (https://forums.giantitp.com/showthread.php?661013-Top-10-level-8-spells)). What are the top 10 level 9 spells? Choices here are quite difficult--if a spell isn't breaking the game, it's suspect. What should not be on this list?

Some clarifying questions:
What level? ECL18 and ECL20 are basically the same.
Essentials? Yes, let's include essentials like healing. There are many ways to find this in the game, but a list of 10 spells is also generous.
Combos? Yes, let's include relevant combos.
What about offbeat prestige classes giving early access? I'm happy to make a note about early access, but the general preference was to not include.
What level? For spells at different levels on different lists, it's the level on a core class or domain, and if that's not available on some other base class.


DOW Shapechange (https://www.d20srd.org/srd/spells/shapechange.htm). Transmutation. For 10 minutes/level as a free action each round assume the form of any nonunique creature up to caster level (max 25) hit die, taking their type, extraordinary, and supernatural abilities while losing your supernatural abilities. An entire handbook (https://docs.google.com/document/d/127el4KqlL2ALu1chZ9WLPGFOu1InVTJ2pmxAmYAARbE/edit#) has been written about this spell. For most adventures on most adventuring days, just casting this spell with a greater rod of extend spell is all you need.
COW Gate (https://www.d20srd.org/srd/spells/gate.htm). Conjuration(Creation or Calling). Open a gate for concentration (max round/level) to anywhere or call any unique being (which may refuse) or kind of being with hit dice less than twice caster level controlled for round/level or bargained as per planar ally for longer. The calling form costs 1K xp, but it brings absolute encounter-ender creatures, for example from the Epic monster (https://www.d20srd.org/indexes/epicMonstersAndObstacles.htm) list. The duration of control can effectively be extended indefinitely by creating a clone with Ice Assassin.
W Ice Assassin(Frostburn). Illusion(Shadow). Create a clone of a creature at full HD under your command that hates the original with telepathy, free scrying, and sharing of spells out to 1 mile. The "any creature", "under your command", and "sharing of spells" are all substantial improvements over Searing Seed, although it's still difficult to heal as per Simulacrum. The casting time could be reduced via Uncanny Forethought, and if you can do that on a Dweomerkeeper chassis you avoid the substantial XP cost. The touch range could be enhanced to a ranged attack using Reach Spell (for example) opening the possibility of using a (very expensive) greater rod of chain spell to create 21 Ice Assassins. Ice Assassin] is an obvious choice, although Ice Assassin[Searing Seed[You]] allows you to add the half-fiend template if you can handle the difficulties. The other obvious choice is Ice Assasin[Gate[Epic Creature]] to create epic creatures you command indefinitely.
CO Miracle (https://www.d20srd.org/srd/spells/miracle.htm). Evocation. Duplicate any L8- cleric spell, any L7- spell, any effect with similar power level, undo the harmful effects of spells, raise fallen allies in battle (5k xp cost), transport you and allies anywhere (5k xp), protect a city from a natural disaster, or a similar effect as long as it's consistent with a deity's nature/alignment. In many/most circumstances, this is superior to Wish (https://www.d20srd.org/srd/spells/wish.htm) which has a prohibitive XP cost associated with spell duplication although if a DM is particularly restrictive or you have levels in Dweomerkeeper Wish may be superior. You plausibly only need one of these since the spells are mostly duplicative.
OW Genesis (https://www.d20srd.org/srd/epic/spells/genesis.htm). Conjuration(Creation). After a 1 week casting time create a demiplane that grows at 1'/day up to 180' and then can be cast again to grow further. This gives you direct control over and access to planar traits (https://www.d20srd.org/indexes/planes.htm) which can then be exploited elsewhere by casting planar bubble on a native of your plane.
COS Astral Projection (https://www.d20srd.org/srd/spells/astralProjection.htm). Necromancy. After a 30 minute cast, you and touched creature/2 levels your physical bodies remain suspended on the material plane indefinitely while new astral bodies duplicating all carried items appear on the astral plane and can travel to any plane adjacent to the astral plane creating new physical bodies there. The duplication of charged items is [I]extremely powerful here. For example, two rings of three wishes (https://www.d20srd.org/srd/magicItems/rings.htm#threeWishes) provide a seed which can make every party member have an inherent+5 bonus to every stat and then provide 6 free wishes for every adventure thereafter. There are also some famous and less famous vulnerabilities to watch out for. Silver Swords are deadly, and users are subject to a calling effect via (Greater) Spirit Binding per the "what is a Spirit?" sidebar in Complete Divine. In addition, your bodies are left vulnerable on the material plane. These appear addressable. Against Silver Swords, control your proximity. Against Sprit Binding use a Contingency that dispels Astral Projection if you are called. And, of course, have serious guards for your bodies. This spell is famously available from a Nightmare (https://www.d20srd.org/srd/monsters/nightmare.htm) which can be called via Lesser Planar Binding. The value of having it here is that a Nightmare is not particularly robust and you don't want to be abandoned on some other plane.
OW Disjunction (https://www.d20srd.org/srd/spells/magesDisjunction.htm). Abjuration. All magical effects and items (will negates) are dispelled in a 40' radius burst. The potential loot destruction here can be avoided by using Disjunction inside of a Time Stop although if that's not available Sanctum Disjunction with a minimal casting stat is only DC22.
W Mindrape(BoVD). Enchantment[Mind-affecting, Evil]. At medium range learn everything a creatures knows and alter its memories, emotions, alignment, or opinions as a standard action (Will negates). This can be used in a battlefield for an effect like Charm Monster. More generally, it can turn any creature subject to mind-affecting spells into a minion in a manner not subject to neither future AMFs not Protection from Evil. The ability to directly alter alignment can also be quite telling in many ways. Throwing on Mindworms[Chain Spell] creates an encounter-ender that also creates minions you can use in the next encounter.
W Teleport Through Time (https://web.archive.org/web/20200831071938/http://archive.wizards.com/default.asp?x=dnd/pg/20030409b). Transmutation(Teleportation). After a 1 round cast involving picking a flower in a site untouched by intelligent creatures since a desired previous time teleports you+50 lbs/level other creatures or objects to the previous time with a small chance of failure and a small drift, where if you meet yourself you attack, and if you die your body returns to the present. This spell is super-broken. Even using it to go back in time one day and partitioning responsibilities with your other selves to avoid the meeting clause is amazing. Most games simply can't handle the complexity this spell may introduce.
W Hide Life(Tome and Blood). Necromancy. After a 1 day cast, ignore all damage or spell effects rendering you disabled, dying, or dead in favor of staggered until a chosen(and typically hidden) body part is destroyed. The effect is amazing, but has some limits. This is an instantaneous spell, so it is not suppressed in an AMF. The staggered condition can be removed via Favor of the Martyr. The effect pairs well with the Proof Against Transmutation armor property which eliminates form-altering attacks (like Flesh to Stone or Flesh to Ice) which don't technically kill you. In terms of limits, supernatural effects that render you dead not through damage still work. That's uncommon, but a Dweomerkeeper could pull it off and there may be other methods.


C=Cleric, D=Druid, O=dOmain, W=Wizard

Counts by:
class: 3C, 1D, 6O, 8W
school: 1 Abj, 2 Conj, 1 Ench, 1 Evoc, 1 Illus, 2 Necro, 2 Trans
modifiers: 0.5 Calling, 1.5 Creation, 1 Evil, 1 Mind-affecting, 1 Shadow, 1 Teleportation
source: 1 BoVD, 1 Epic, 1 Frostburn, 5 PHB, 1 Tome and Blood, 1Web

Probably not:
Foresight. Immunity to surprise is an amazing effect, but it's also a consequence of Contingency triggered on Nerve Skitter. The additional "general idea of what action you might take to best protect yourself" is highly DM dependent but may be useful.
End To Strife. 20d6 damage to anyone vulnerable to [mind-affecting] within 80' that attacks anyone is great when your party is immune, but those vulnerable to mind-affecting are already punked so may ways at this level that it seems redundant.
Programmed Amnesia. Rewriting the memories of creatures is crazy-powerful, but those vulnerable to [mind-affecting] have already lost and it appears vulnerable to Protection from Evil, a level 1 spell.
W Chain Contingency(Tome&Blood). Evocation. 3 different L6- spells come into effect as per the Contingency (https://www.d20srd.org/srd/spells/contingency.htm) spell. You could have Chain Contingency[Celerity x3][Cast Nerve Skitter] and Contingency[Celerity][Cast Nerveskitter] to get 4(!) actions at the beginning of an encounter. That's pretty amazing, but you can get much of the same effect with Contingency+Time Stop.
Node Genesis. Create a node, which allows you to escalate caster level and decrease metamagic costs. It takes forever to be significant though. Maybe combos with Teleport through time?
Eye of Power. L3- spells is to low level. Project Multiple Images provides some mechanism for a more complete but shorter ranged remote casting.
Invoke Magic. It's pretty niche although obviously useful in that niche. You also run into DM questions about whether you can cast Invoke Magic while in an AMF or merely cast it outside an AMF and then have an L4- spell take effect inside an AMF.
Blinding Glory and Utterdark. Blindness is a fine debuff, but it doesn't take away actions.
Shades. Not much better than Miracle for spell emulation.
Precipitate Complete Breach. Connecting planes seems fine, but it's not clear this is game breaking in the same way as some other spells.
Undermaster. You can get much of this from Shapechange.
Implore. There are some unique creatures you can get here like Elder Evils, but Gate[epic creature] seems fairly comparable.
Co Putrefaction(Dragon #300). Necromancy(Evil). Touched living creature aging in the standard fashion ages one level/round and is stunned until it dies turning into a zombie and ghost under your control with the ghost unable to move more than 30' from you. This has no save, denies actions, provides a fairly permanent kill effect, and the ghost (https://www.d20srd.org/srd/monsters/ghost.htm) minion is more powerful than the original. Furthermore, you could leverage Mindworms[Chain] Mindworms[Ocular] Putrefaction to wipe out an entire encounter with no save. This is a great spell, but actions can be denied with no save as of level 7 via Amber Sarcophagus and there are better minions available.
True Resurrection: Bring back the dead even without a body. This is accessible via Greater Planar Binding[Planetar].
Astral Projection: You can adventure without risking your personal safety.... except that it also makes you subject to Greater Spirit Binding. Being on the wrong end of Greater Spirit Binding sounds super unpleasant.
Transcend Mortality: SR:No, DR 30/Epic, save+10(enhance), immune ability damage, energy drain, poison, disease, death & persistable, but you disintegrate at the end. These are quite nice, but most of these effects are available from lower level spells.
Unname: Just use a Thinuan blade instead.
Effulgent Epuration: block spells targeting creature. That's very potent, but Mystic Shield already blocks L6- spells and Skin of the Steel Dragon + caster level advancing spells blocks SR:Yes spells.
OW Time Stop (https://www.d20srd.org/srd/spells/timeStop.htm). Transmutation. You can act for 1d4+1 rounds of apparent time during which other creatures are invulnerable. You can make this more deterministic via Mindworms[Maximize Spell] Time Stop. Inside Time Stop you can cast buffs of course, but more potent usage are possible such as Disjunction (to wipe out all enemy defense) folllowed by Energy Trasnformation Field to deny the enemy any use of Spells, SLAs, or Supernatural abilities. This is quite powerful, but it's already possible to create an action nova via Greater Arcane Fusion[Celerity,Celerity] and longer cast spells can be cast more quickly via Miracle emulation.
W Absorption(Spell Compendium). Abjuration. Absorb 1d4+6 ranged spell or SLA levels and then cast for free spells with absorbed levels within 10 minutes/level. This is an ok spell as intended, essentially Spell Turning except you choose the spell that's returned. It's utterly broken with metamagic since it allows you to cast unbounded spells/day. The basic trick is to use metamagic cost reducers to cast Repeat Maximized Absorption, have your minions target you with at-will SLAs, cast any desired spell, and then have you minions charge up the repeat casting. Metamagic reduction by 6 may seems steep, but there are many approaches via Arcane Thesis, Incantatrix, Shapechange[Tome Dragon] etc... The cost (in feats) of doing this is high and the effect is not entirely new compared to Unfettered Heroism+Wand Surge+appropriate staffs.
C Erupt(Serpent Kingdoms). Transmutation[Fire]. After a full minute cast in a 100'/level radius every creatures takes 10/level damage (fort half), catches on fire, and those wearing metal armor are subject to heat metal (fort negates) while structures and unattended objects take full damage with no save. This spell has casting time issues which can be mitigated by casting it in advance and holding the charge (it's a touch spell, but do take care to not accidentally light it off early) or more esoterically via Uncanny Forethought on a spellcaster who prepares known cleric spells (clerics do not qualify since they don't actually know spells) and friendly fire issues which are dealt with by Energy Immunity or Purify Spell. The effect though is amazing. "Below, you see an immense fortress swarming with Pit Fiends, Paeliyrons, and lesser devils. These swarms will clearly annihilate anyone approaching." "I cast Mindworms[Purify] Erupt with a greater rod of Acid Substitution using my current caster level of 50 so if they make the fortitude save they take 250 damage and the fortress takes 500 damage to every section in line of sight." This isn't in the top-10 because high level armies of this scale are not common enough.

[loky1109]

Shadowcaster's Black Labyrinth.

[Biggus]

The potential loot destruction here can be avoided by using Disjunction inside of a Time Stop.


How does this work? Time Stop says


While the time stop is in effect, other creatures are invulnerable to your attacks and spells [...] A spell that affects an area and has a duration longer than the remaining duration of the time stop have their normal effects on other creatures once the time stop ends.

I don't see anything in the text of either spell which gets around that.

[Anthrowhale]

Shadowcaster's Black Labyrinth.
It's a powerful effect, but the friendly fire element seems to detrimental to be effective and I don't see a good way to avoid it.


How does this work? Time Stop says
Time Stop makes a creature's items invulnerable to Disjunction, so you don't destroy the loot. Disjunction also directly affects spells which Time Stop does not provide any invulnerability for. The net effect is that Disjunction-in-Time Stop is toned down a bit so that it takes out all the spells in the area but not any possessed magic items.

The overall effect is not quite as good as a vanilla Pathfinder Disjunction (https://www.d20pfsrd.com/magic/all-spells/m/mage-s-disjunction/) which suppresses (rather than destroys) magic items and of course any magic items not possessed by a creature are in severe danger. Nevertheless, it goes a long way towards removing hesitation/sacrifice associated with using the big D.

[loky1109]

It's a powerful effect, but the friendly fire element seems to detrimental to be effective and I don't see a good way to avoid it.

Don't have friends.

[RandomPeasant]

Honestly time stop doesn't make the list. You can just get a bunch of regular actions with e.g. greater arcane fusion -> celerity + Twinned celerity which you can use to attack people directly (also I don't think the disjunction interaction works as you want, it says "as a dispel magic spell does", and that doesn't work through time stop). mindrape, on the other hand, fixes the big issue with other mind control magic, which is that it can be removed via mental protections. mindrape is Instantaneous, so your minion doesn't have to worry about going into an AMF or getting hit with protection from evil. It can technically be removed, but that takes either a wish/miracle or a 1-minute casting time break enchantment.

I'm also skeptical of putrefaction. You're doing a lot of work to make it a particularly compelling spell to cast in combat, and at 20th level you have a lot of options for minions that A) are uncapped (IIRC you get at most CHA mod worth of mooks out of putrefaction) and B) can move more than 30ft from you. I think it is worse than ice assassin, gate, and mind rape, and arguably worse than dominate monster (particularly if you are comparing the spells and not the spell plus all the supporting pieces).

foresight is heavily dependent on your DM. The mechanical effect is pretty mediocre, but you are supposed to get something out of the "what action you might take to best protect yourself", and depending what your DM thinks that means it could be very good.

absorption seems like it has too many moving parts to be worthwhile. If you've got six levels of metamagic reduction and a bunch of minions with at-will SLAs, you just win everything anyway. Also effulgent epuration is better for the intended purpose because it scales indefinitely with caster level.

true resurrection deserves a spot, because it is the no-penalty no-questions-asked way of getting someone back from the dead. Yes, it's higher level than messing around with animate with the spirit or whatever else, but you're never raising the dead out of combat slots so that doesn't really matter. freedom at least merits a note for removing a condition that is otherwise completely intractable, though it's not generally-applicable enough to make the list.

I don't understand how you haven't mentioned astral projection at all, given that it's one of the best spells in the game.

transcend mortality is neat. You get some nice buffs, including +10 to all saves, a bunch of immunities, and SR that will make you de facto immune to all magic if you boost your CL. The downside is that it has a 1 round/level duration and you die when it ends, but you can make it Persistent and it allows you to be resurrected. So basically you get to be way more durable, but in exchange you have a really weird bedtime ritual where your friends all beat you to death and then someone pops revivify on you.

hide life makes you unkillable. Literally unkillable, in that you do not die of anything. You do have to hide your body part somewhere, but fortunately destroying it doesn't kill you and you can cast the spell as often as you want (though first figure out some way of negating the XP cost). So chop off all your toes and make anyone who wants to kill you do ten quests of your choice (a fun combo is to give the parts to people and cast imprisonment on those people to make them essentially unfindable and the parts invulnerable).

There's some other stuff that's cute or potentially interesting but probably not good enough. undermaster is very good with Persistent Spell, but costs XP and doesn't measure up to shapechange. node genesis is potentially interesting if you can create nodes with arbitrary spells in them (particularly with acorn of far travel), but that seems kinda unworkable for the average PC. invoke magic is a unique effect, but a 4th level spell is not going to do enough to be worthwhile. eye of power is almost there, but it doesn't make the regular arcane eye any faster, meaningfully more durable, or harder to detect, so the dream of getting to harass people with no risk to yourself is better-achieved with astral projection.

[Troacctid]

I'm not a fan of including a bunch of spells that are only worthy of the top 10 if you include multiple additional cheesy combos to enable them when there are other spells that are powerful on their own merits and don't need the help. IMO, if the biggest point in Erupt's favor is that it's an okay payoff for when you've managed to triple your caster level and ignore long casting times, that's not very impressive to me. You're CL 50 and that's seriously the best you can do?

Seriously, though, if you're going to assume that you can easily inflate your caster level arbitrarily and apply whatever metamagic you want for free, I don't know why you wouldn't also assume that you can bypass XP costs, and at that point it looks ridiculous not to have Wish in the top 10 when it's letting you wish for more wishes to gain unlimited wealth.

[Fero]

Some more to consider, as usual I will post my thoughts on the existing list once I can gather my thoughts:

1. Blinding Glory & Utterdark: Massive mobile AoE sight negation that last all day and don't allow saves or SR. True army destroyers.

2. Teleport Through Time (Perilous Portals): Freaking time travel. Even with the casting challenges and optional predesterminism this is a uniquely powerful effect. Recover long lost secrets and artifacts. Kill Vecna and take his place as the god of secrets. The options are endless.

3. Invoke Magic: Not as dramatic as other options but a unique and, at times, extremely useful effect.

4. Node Genesis: Potentially very powerful with a good stronghold.

5. Implore: Bind Elder Evils and more (see https://forums.giantitp.com/showthread.php?258840-Binding-Elder-Evils-A-miniguide )

6. Precipitate Comple Breach: Can do some absurdly powerful stuff.

7. Shades: Can sidestep component costs and long casting times for a number of powerful effects. My favorites are: (1) Trap the Soul (why is this Summoning?), (2) Capable Caravel (I like the idea of dropping a ship on my opponents), (3) Ice Castle, (4) Instant Summons (cast this on all of your gear), and (5) Fistandantilu's Portal (pour the contents of the ocean on an enemy city, send a charging foe to the other side of the world etc.)

[RandomPeasant]

Seriously, though, if you're going to assume that you can easily inflate your caster level arbitrarily and apply whatever metamagic you want for free, I don't know why you wouldn't also assume that you can bypass XP costs, and at that point it looks ridiculous not to have Wish in the top 10 when it's letting you wish for more wishes to gain unlimited wealth.

The problem with wish is that if you want to do the cheese that is specific to XP-free wishes you can just cast shapechange and turn into a Zodar (or, for that matter, cast planar binding or gate for an Efreet). miracle is just pretty straightforwardly better if you are casting it to do spell emulation, and if all you're doing is generic "I have infinity GP" stuff there's even easier options. That said, whatever treatment you think is appropriate for planar binding/planar ally is certainly appropriate for miracle/wish.


Node Genesis: Potentially very powerful with a good stronghold.

What exactly is the big cheese here supposed to be? I looked at it and it seems like it's mostly minor nice stuff unless your DM is very generous with how spells linked to nodes works.


Shades: Can sidestep component costs and long casting times for a number of powerful effects.

The problem is this is mostly just worse than miracle. Emulating trap the soul is neat (and, mechanically speaking, weird -- where the hell is the soul going when you cast the spell in a way that doesn't involve material components?), but I don't really think there's enough to give this a niche at what it does over miracle (though I'd probably prepare it overwish as a Wizard).

[Anthrowhale]

Looking through suggestions, comments on what to remove are welcome, and we have as candidates:
Mindrape: instantaneous [mind-affecting] rewrites someone's history arbitrarily so it keeps working in an AMF.
True Resurrection: Bring back the dead even without a body.
Astral Projection: Mostly safe adventuring, unless someone is futzing with Greater Spirit Binding.
Transcend Mortality: SR:No, DR 30/Epic, save+10(enhance), immune ability damage, energy drain, poison, disease, death & persistable, but you disintegrate at the end.
Hide life: you don't die from hit point damage or any effect which makes you dead. My read is that technically-not-dead like a melted flesh-to-ice is ok though.
Teleport-through-time: Kill the BBEG as a baby.

(And of course any followup on the below.)


Don't have friends.
Ah, a spell that decreases your capabilities.


Honestly time stop doesn't make the list. You can just get a bunch of regular actions with e.g. greater arcane fusion -> celerity + Twinned celerity which you can use to attack people directly
It's a fair point that you can nova standard actions easily enough, but it's also interesting to note that rounds are much better than actions. They allow casting multiround spells (like ETF), and are doubled by Shapechange[Chronotyryn].

(also I don't think the disjunction interaction works as you want, it says "as a dispel magic spell does", and that doesn't work through time stop).
I'm not quite following this. Dispel magic can dispel spells inside of a Time Stop. Time Stop's invulnerability clause does nothing to protect precast spells.


mindrape, on the other hand, fixes the big issue with other mind control magic, which is that it can be removed via mental protections. mindrape is Instantaneous, so your minion doesn't have to worry about going into an AMF or getting hit with protection from evil. It can technically be removed, but that takes either a wish/miracle or a 1-minute casting time break enchantment.

Mindrape can also potentially beat Dominate Monster in terms of swapping sides mid-combat, and it's easily chainable. It bears a rethink.


I'm also skeptical of putrefaction. You're doing a lot of work to make it a particularly compelling spell to cast in combat, and at 20th level you have a lot of options for minions that A) are uncapped (IIRC you get at most CHA mod worth of mooks out of putrefaction) and B) can move more than 30ft from you. I think it is worse than ice assassin, gate, and mind rape, and arguably worse than dominate monster (particularly if you are comparing the spells and not the spell plus all the supporting pieces).

I was thinking of Putrefaction mostly as an attack spell rather than a minion spell. It's like Irresistible dance, except affecting nearly all living creatures and ending in more permanent than normal death. The Zombie and Ghost are just some bonus. On the other hand, it does seem fair to point out that you can Amber Sarcophagus creatures and that's good enough in most circumstances.


foresight is heavily dependent on your DM. The mechanical effect is pretty mediocre, but you are supposed to get something out of the "what action you might take to best protect yourself", and depending what your DM thinks that means it could be very good.
I made a note.


absorption seems like it has too many moving parts to be worthwhile. If you've got six levels of metamagic reduction and a bunch of minions with at-will SLAs, you just win everything anyway.
There is a question here about "how much is to much". Is 4 feats (Repeat, Maximize, Arcane Thesis[Absorption], Practical Metamagic[Maximize]) and a couple other spells(Shapechange[Tome Dragon], Planar Binding) you have anyways to much? It's half your feats, but "cast as many spells as you want" is also pretty amazing.


Also effulgent epuration is better for the intended purpose because it scales indefinitely with caster level.

EE is quite nice, but it doesn't seem to add much beyond a level jacked Skin of the Steel Dragon.


true resurrection deserves a spot, because it is the no-penalty no-questions-asked way of getting someone back from the dead. Yes, it's higher level than messing around with animate with the spirit or whatever else, but you're never raising the dead out of combat slots so that doesn't really matter.

Interesting point. True Resurrection has the virtue that it doesn't require a body at all.


freedom at least merits a note for removing a condition that is otherwise completely intractable, though it's not generally-applicable enough to make the list.

I'm not sure it's completely intractable otherwise? It sounds like there are alternatives to locate, so you could potentially teleport into the earth with Earth Glide active and dispel, and teleport out.


I don't understand how you haven't mentioned astral projection at all, given that it's one of the best spells in the game.

It's a little sketchy if Greater Spirit Binding is in play, but worth considering.


transcend mortality is neat. You get some nice buffs, including +10 to all saves, a bunch of immunities, and SR that will make you de facto immune to all magic if you boost your CL. The downside is that it has a 1 round/level duration and you die when it ends, but you can make it Persistent and it allows you to be resurrected. So basically you get to be way more durable, but in exchange you have a really weird bedtime ritual where your friends all beat you to death and then someone pops revivify on you.

You'd need something more potent than revivify, since that requires a body. Alternatives? It looks like Miracle[Pact of Return] is plausibly viable as it can operate off disintegrated remains, costs nothing, and has no level less. True Resurrection is to expensive for daily use.


hide life makes you unkillable. Literally unkillable, in that you do not die of anything.

Interesting--combos well with Favor of the Martyr as well to remove the staggered condition. What happens if you are subject to Disintegrate though? You are not-dead dust? And what about Flesh to Ice + melting?


There's some other stuff that's cute or potentially interesting but probably not good enough. undermaster is very good with Persistent Spell, but costs XP and doesn't measure up to shapechange. node genesis is potentially interesting if you can create nodes with arbitrary spells in them (particularly with acorn of far travel), but that seems kinda unworkable for the average PC. invoke magic is a unique effect, but a 4th level spell is not going to do enough to be worthwhile. eye of power is almost there, but it doesn't make the regular arcane eye any faster, meaningfully more durable, or harder to detect, so the dream of getting to harass people with no risk to yourself is better-achieved with astral projection.
Yeah, that was my though as well here.


I'm not a fan of including a bunch of spells that are only worthy of the top 10 if you include multiple additional cheesy combos to enable them when there are other spells that are powerful on their own merits and don't need the help. IMO, if the biggest point in Erupt's favor is that it's an okay payoff for when you've managed to triple your caster level and ignore long casting times, that's not very impressive to me. You're CL 50 and that's seriously the best you can do?

I believe the lists are more interesting if we take into account the other spells, it avoids duplications and allows for interesting combos. Caster level 45 seems like the minimum that we should consider in that case with a conservative reading of Suffer the Flesh, Consumptive Field and Greater Consumptive Field. (There are also tons of other ways to get something similar off classes or classes+feats.) Removing the 1 minute casting time seems entirely optional since you could cast the spell from far beyond normal detection range. We could of course change the criteria and not allow combos, but that would seem to create lists which are less interesting.

Seriously, though, if you're going to assume that you can easily inflate your caster level arbitrarily and apply whatever metamagic you want for free, I don't know why you wouldn't also assume that you can bypass XP costs, and at that point it looks ridiculous not to have Wish in the top 10 when it's letting you wish for more wishes to gain unlimited wealth.
I don't know a spell-based XP bypass. Do you?



1. Blinding Glory & Utterdark: Massive mobile AoE sight negation that last all day and don't allow saves or SR. True army destroyers.

These are fine spells, but "blind" is a far cry from unable to act which is the ideal I normally aim for. Erupt seems like a much more solid army destroyer.


2. Teleport Through Time (Perilous Portals): Freaking time travel. Even with the casting challenges and optional predesterminism this is a uniquely powerful effect. Recover long lost secrets and artifacts. Kill Vecna and take his place as the god of secrets. The options are endless.

Yeesh, that's an amazing one (see here (https://web.archive.org/web/20200831071938/http://archive.wizards.com/default.asp?x=dnd/pg/20030409b)).


3. Invoke Magic: Not as dramatic as other options but a unique and, at times, extremely useful effect.

Unique and handy, but feels to narrow.


4. Node Genesis: Potentially very powerful with a good stronghold.

The "wait years until it takes effect" part seems like a big turnoff. Also, fully leveraging it dips in the rather finite feat budget.


5. Implore: Bind Elder Evils and more (see https://forums.giantitp.com/showthread.php?258840-Binding-Elder-Evils-A-miniguide )

The ability to call and command specific outsider/elementals up to 22HD does have some real value beyond the ability to call and command generic creatures up to level*2 HD, but I'm not sure it's enough. Looking through the guide:
Zargon is great, but Hecatoncheires (https://www.d20srd.org/srd/epic/monsters/abomination.htm#hecatoncheires) is even more of a brute.
Sertrous and Lymic are >22HD, so you need Malconvoker + Implore. I've been trying to avoid specific classes in considering things.
Shothragot seems solid, but I'm not sure it's better than (say) a Phane or Xixecal.


6. Precipitate Comple Breach: Can do some absurdly powerful stuff.

It connects planes, but I'm not seeing what's so absurdly powerful?


7. Shades: Can sidestep component costs and long casting times for a number of powerful effects. My favorites are: (1) Trap the Soul (why is this Summoning?), (2) Capable Caravel (I like the idea of dropping a ship on my opponents), (3) Ice Castle, (4) Instant Summons (cast this on all of your gear), and (5) Fistandantilu's Portal (pour the contents of the ocean on an enemy city, send a charging foe to the other side of the world etc.)
Ice Castle and Instant Summons are available off Miracle. It's not clear to me that dropping a ship on someone is that impressive an effect. That leaves:
Trap the Soul. This is a decent effect but it offers a save compared to (say) Amber Sarcophagus.
Fistandantilu's Portal. A nice spell, but you could Miracle[Flash Flood] for example.
Overall, I'm no quite seeing the value compared to other L9 spells.

[RandomPeasant]

It's a fair point that you can nova standard actions easily enough, but it's also interesting to note that rounds are much better than actions. They allow casting multiround spells (like ETF), and are doubled by Shapechange[Chronotyryn].

Yeah, but getting to target your enemies directly is way better than not getting to do that.


Dispel magic can dispel spells inside of a Time Stop.

Not spells on creatures, which are the ones you care about. They are invulnerable to it in the same way they are invulnerable to a fireball or scorching ray.


I was thinking of Putrefaction mostly as an attack spell rather than a minion spell. It's like Irresistible dance, except affecting nearly all living creatures and ending in more permanent than normal death.

You can make stuff as dead as you want to once it's regular dead, because Bhargests have 6 HD and can be gotten with lesser planar binding. Also, what is the specific phrasing on the age-up kill? Because it seems like that wouldn't work on anything immortal.


There is a question here about "how much is to much". Is 4 feats (Repeat, Maximize, Arcane Thesis[Absorption], Practical Metamagic[Maximize]) and a couple other spells(Shapechange[Tome Dragon], Planar Binding) you have anyways to much? It's half your feats, but "cast as many spells as you want" is also pretty amazing.

If I have shapechange I can already cast as many spells as I want. If I have planar binding I can have as many allies as I want and they can cast as many spells as I want. If I have either of those things I can get an XP-free wish that gives me as much everything as I can describe in terms of a magic item.


EE is quite nice, but it doesn't seem to add much beyond a level jacked Skin of the Steel Dragon.

It beats SR: No.


I'm not sure it's completely intractable otherwise? It sounds like there are alternatives to locate, so you could potentially teleport into the earth with Earth Glide active and dispel, and teleport out.

I suppose you might be able to physically find someone who got hit with imprisonment, but they "remain there", subject to the stasis effect, until someone casts freedom at the appropriate location.


True Resurrection is to expensive for daily use.

In what world are you going to be allowed to do absorption shenanigans to cast an infinite number of spells, but not any of the vast range of shenanigans that allow you to break WBL like a twig?


Interesting--combos well with Favor of the Martyr as well to remove the staggered condition. What happens if you are subject to Disintegrate though? You are not-dead dust? And what about Flesh to Ice + melting?

hide life says that "If damage or a spell effect would normally render you disabled, dying, or dead, you ignore the usual effects", so presumably you ignore the effect where disintegrate turns you to dust, as that's an effect that renders you dead. Melting you after hitting you with flesh to ice would probably work, but it seems to me that you could take any of the resulting water, re-freeze it, hit it with ice to flesh, and then use regeneration to get back to a full body.


Removing the 1 minute casting time seems entirely optional since you could cast the spell from far beyond normal detection range.

Could you? I seem to recall from the 3rd level thread that we were assuming a theory of Spot where you saw things at arbitrary distances, and erupt is a burst, which are defined as not going around corners.


I don't know a spell-based XP bypass. Do you?

If it has to be spell-based, then you can go ahead and remove body outside body at 7th, because if we're limiting ourselves to spells it's trash.


Trap the Soul. This is a decent effect but it offers a save compared to (say) Amber Sarcophagus.

One version of it does. But there is a case where it's no-save. Can the material component that doesn't exist because you're emulating the spell be something a creature has just accepted? Like I said, shades + trap the soul raises some real questions about what the hell happens, mechanically speaking.

[Rebel7284]

<snip> but you can get much of the same effect with Contingency+Time Stop.


The spell to be brought into effect by the contingency must be one that affects your person and be of a spell level no higher than one-third your caster level (rounded down, maximum 6th level).

Craft Contingent spell can give you a contingent Time Stop, but regular Contingency is ALSO limited to 6th level max.

Invoke Magic seems like it would be REAL important for Epic level play for when your other 3 ways of getting out of an AMF fail, but I admittedly have no actual experience playing at 20 or epic.

[Gorthawar]

W Absorption(Spell Compendium). Abjuration. Absorb 1d4+6 ranged spell or SLA levels and then cast for free spells with absorbed levels within 10 minutes/level. This is an ok spell as intended, essentially Spell Turning except you choose the spell that's returned. It's utterly broken with metamagic since it allows you to cast unbounded spells/day. The basic trick is to use metamagic cost reducers to cast Repeat Maximized Absorption, have your minions target you with at-will SLAs, cast any desired spell, and then have you minions charge up the repeat casting. Metamagic reduction by 6 may seems steep, but there are many approaches via Arcane Thesis, Incantatrix, Shapechange[Tome Dragon] etc...

Wouldn't empower be both better and cheaper? (1d4+6)x1.5 is the same or greater than a flat 10 and it's only a +2 modifier instead of +4.

[Chronos]

I think that Unname deserves consideration. At this level, any enemy of any significance is almost guaranteed to have allies capable of casting Raise Dead, and is likely to have allies capable of Resurrection or True Resurrection. Which means that for most of them, death is a mere inconvenience. Unname addresses the niche of when you want an enemy really, truly gone.

As mentioned in the 8th level thread, there are ways to make the True Speech check. They require multiple other spells to set up, so you're probably not casting this in the middle of battle. But if you can incapacitate your enemy some other (temporary) way, then you can take the time to buff up your skills and finish them off.

[RandomPeasant]

Invoke Magic seems like it would be REAL important for Epic level play for when your other 3 ways of getting out of an AMF fail, but I admittedly have no actual experience playing at 20 or epic.

If you're playing an Epic-level game, I doubt one 4th level spell is doing much for you.


I think that Unname deserves consideration. At this level, any enemy of any significance is almost guaranteed to have allies capable of casting Raise Dead, and is likely to have allies capable of Resurrection or True Resurrection. Which means that for most of them, death is a mere inconvenience. Unname addresses the niche of when you want an enemy really, truly gone.

unname seems less reliable for making people really dead than just having a Bharghest Feed on their corpse. AFAICT, the ritual to bring them back is reliable, it just requires that they have additional resources. With a Bharghest, there's a 50/50 shot it doesn't work at all.

[Zancloufer]

Looking through the spells and posts on them;

Not sure if Wish and Miracle should be considered different spells. Yes Miracle doesn't need EXP for all of it's effects, but Wish IMHO does have a slightly more powerful spell list to draw upon. Either way they are technically variants of each other but from different spell lists and as mentioned Dwemonkeeper removes the one downside from either.

Time Stop is definitely more powerful that chaining immediate actions if only because you can't interrupt it once cast. Sure you can try spell chaining to cast a bunch of spells at once but you risk enemy Celerity, Contingency or even attacks of opportunity potentially disrupting you.

Can't actually find the description for Putrefaction, is there more details on that?

Erupt looks okay, though again it seems more of a mass army/siege/city ending spell with it's okay damage, long casting and large area of effect. Would argue that summon tornado, err control weather, is probably a better mass destruction spell.

True Resurrection is really niche but by god do you need it when that niche comes up.

Astral Projection is only really cracked in combination with Genesis.

Transcend Mortality is okay as a buff but hilarious as an attack spell. Sure it's fairly difficult to cast on others but it pull it off do it's essentially a [swift] "**** you now your nothing but dust".

Teleport-through-time probably requires too much DM fiat to actually be good. Either the quest to find the flower is going to be as/more arduous than fighting the BBEG, will **** up the timeline and possibly makes things worse or both. If that's not the case your probably playing a pretty chill game and/or the DM gave up trying to actually stop the PCs in any meaningful way.

Foresight; Definitely too DM dependent to be worth a 9th spell slot. Not bad just inconstant.

Shades; forget comparing it to miracle (I mean are there any 7th level conjuration summoning/creation spells worth casting?) there really aren't that many level 7-8 spells that take more than 1 action for you speed up with it. Maybe a Master Illusionist that banned conjuration, but where getting pretty niche.



unname seems less reliable for making people really dead than just having a Bharghest Feed on their corpse. AFAICT, the ritual to bring them back is reliable, it just requires that they have additional resources. With a Bharghest, there's a 50/50 shot it doesn't work at all.

Bharghest feast explicitly only works on Humanoid type enemies. Also I would argue that [a] Truenaming is probably not a common thing (at least compared to Wish/Miracle/True Resurrection) [b] having/planner binding a Bharghest would be something of a pain [c] IIRC the ritual doesn't bring the person back, it just lets them be a valid target of Wish/Miracle/True Resurrection.

Finally Unname also deletes ALL items/gear the person has with NO SAVE ALLOWED. Well the creature gets Fort negate but not its gear. . .
ALL gear, no save deleted. Have a evil Macguffin you need removed from existence? Whip out a sacrificial rabbit from your hat of tricks, tie the artifact of doom(TM) to the hapless sacrifice, make a Truename DC check of 15 and pow it's gone. Getting 14-Int mod to Truname (as you need at least 1 rank to use it) is a joke at level 17+.

[Fero]

Note that RaW unname is the "most powerful of spells" meaning it probably gets a spot on this list by default.

[Silva Stormrage]

What exactly are Mind Worms? I have seen them referenced multiple times in these threads. I can tell they apply metamagic in some way but I have never heard of them and google didn't turn up anything.

[Chronos]

The thing with Teleport Through Time is, it's just not really possible to make time travel work properly in a game. This isn't a criticism of the writers of that particular spell; it's just not possible for any game. It can, with difficulty, be made to work for a story, where the author can figure out all of the parts of the story together, but with a game, it's not possible to plan that out.

[Anthrowhale]

I dropped Putrefaction in favor of Mind Rape.

Looking at our current list:
True Resurrection can be accessed via Greater Planar Binding[Planetar].
Astral Projection: I really don't like the idea of being subject to Greater Spirit Binding.
Transcend Mortality: The bonuses available here are mostly available from other sources.
Effulgent Epuration: it's not clear to me this is a big enough gain over Mystic Shield + Skin of the Steel Dragon.

That leaves:
Hide Life. This is a pretty unique effect making a spellcaster extremely difficult to kill. Hide Life + armor proof against transmutation looks pretty amazing.
Teleport through Time. This spell is just crazy.



Not spells on creatures, which are the ones you care about. They are invulnerable to it in the same way they are invulnerable to a fireball or scorching ray.

I'm unaware of any rules support for invulnerability of a creature implying invulnerability of spells affecting such a creature. In fact, Planar Bubble is plausibly the only way to effectively interact with creature native to a static plane.


You can make stuff as dead as you want to once it's regular dead, because Bhargests have 6 HD and can be gotten with lesser planar binding.

Really, a Thinaun blade seems like a fine solution to semi-perma-death.


If I have shapechange I can already cast as many spells as I want. If I have planar binding I can have as many allies as I want and they can cast as many spells as I want.

There's a qualitative difference between being able to cast an unlimited number of spells and being able to cast an unlimited number of top-10 spells.


It beats SR: No.

That's good, but I'm drawing a blank on relevant SR:No L7,L8,L9 spells.


I suppose you might be able to physically find someone who got hit with imprisonment, but they "remain there", subject to the stasis effect, until someone casts freedom at the appropriate location.

Ah, because it's instantaneous. That does make Freedom pretty nice.


In what world are you going to be allowed to do absorption shenanigans to cast an infinite number of spells, but not any of the vast range of shenanigans that allow you to break WBL like a twig?

I don't have an answer to this---it seems like there are lots of ways to break the game at this level.


Could you? I seem to recall from the 3rd level thread that we were assuming a theory of Spot where you saw things at arbitrary distances, and erupt is a burst, which are defined as not going around corners.

Erupt indeed does not go around corners, but you only need concealment to hide.


If it has to be spell-based, then you can go ahead and remove body outside body at 7th, because if we're limiting ourselves to spells it's trash.

How about Magic Jar[BOB]? That gives you a pool of remotes that can take turns casting spells remotely.


Craft Contingent spell can give you a contingent Time Stop, but regular Contingency is ALSO limited to 6th level max.
The standard trick is to use a Contingency[Celerity] which allows you to cast any spell you want, possibly including Time Stop.

Invoke Magic seems like it would be REAL important for Epic level play for when your other 3 ways of getting out of an AMF fail, but I admittedly have no actual experience playing at 20 or epic.
By RAW, I don't think you can actually cast Invoke Magic while inside an AMF. Instead, it merely allows you to cast a L4- spells into a nearby AMF. That seems to niche.


Wouldn't empower be both better and cheaper? (1d4+6)x1.5 is the same or greater than a flat 10 and it's only a +2 modifier instead of +4.
If you have two Absorptions up, which one absorbs the spell? Using Maximize spell, you can avoid that headache. If you have some other resolution for this, Empower may indeed be better.


I think that Unname deserves consideration. At this level, any enemy of any significance is almost guaranteed to have allies capable of casting Raise Dead, and is likely to have allies capable of Resurrection or True Resurrection. Which means that for most of them, death is a mere inconvenience. Unname addresses the niche of when you want an enemy really, truly gone.
As much as "gone" is nice, for practical effects just stab them with a Thinuan blade that you dump into a personal dead magic demiplane.



Time Stop is definitely more powerful that chaining immediate actions if only because you can't interrupt it once cast. Sure you can try spell chaining to cast a bunch of spells at once but you risk enemy Celerity, Contingency or even attacks of opportunity potentially disrupting you.

Good point.



Can't actually find the description for Putrefaction, is there more details on that?

It's Dragon Magazine #300. I'm not sure what fair use is, but the condensed description I gave summarizes most of it.


Erupt looks okay, though again it seems more of a mass army/siege/city ending spell with it's okay damage, long casting and large area of effect. Would argue that summon tornado, err control weather, is probably a better mass destruction spell.

I don't think Control Weather/Control Wind matters, for example, against opponent who can Greater Teleport at will. Erupt has the property that it does all of it's damage at once and hence is much more potent if you are invading the abyss/hell. (The damage can also be amped substantially further if you try.)


True Resurrection is really niche but by god do you need it when that niche comes up.

It looks like you can get it from Greater Planar Binding[Planetar].


Astral Projection is only really cracked in combination with Genesis.

This isn't going to be popular, but I'm hesitant about Astral Projection because you could easily end up on the wrong end of Greater Spirit Binding.


Teleport-through-time probably requires too much DM fiat to actually be good. Either the quest to find the flower is going to be as/more arduous than fighting the BBEG, will **** up the timeline and possibly makes things worse or both. If that's not the case your probably playing a pretty chill game and/or the DM gave up trying to actually stop the PCs in any meaningful way.

It is game altering through, even if you are just going back in time for a few days/weeks.


Finally Unname also deletes ALL items/gear the person has with NO SAVE ALLOWED.
It's potent, but maybe just make a dead magic demiplane and dump stuff there?


Note that RaW unname is the "most powerful of spells" meaning it probably gets a spot on this list by default.
We'll be using our judgement :-)


What exactly are Mind Worms?
It's in Dragon #343 and on the level 4 list. Roughly speaking, you can shoot yourself up with Mindworms to lose 3 level 1 spells (replaced by 3 pearls of power I guess) and then apply a metamagic for free in the next hour. It also does 1d6 Wis damage, but that can be dealt with. It does require a feat to access.


The thing with Teleport Through Time is, it's just not really possible to make time travel work properly in a game. This isn't a criticism of the writers of that particular spell; it's just not possible for any game. It can, with difficulty, be made to work for a story, where the author can figure out all of the parts of the story together, but with a game, it's not possible to plan that out.
Maybe. It's the sort of thing which might be fun to try. "To powerful for the game" seems like something which should be on list.

[RandomPeasant]

Time Stop is definitely more powerful that chaining immediate actions if only because you can't interrupt it once cast. Sure you can try spell chaining to cast a bunch of spells at once but you risk enemy Celerity, Contingency or even attacks of opportunity potentially disrupting you.

Sure, your enemies can't disrupt you while you're in a time stop. But also you can't target them, so you're not really in a position to make best use of the advantage. Plus, they can respond to you casting time stop the same way they can anything else, and (depending on how exactly you plan to make use of time stop) they can probably respond to whatever effects fire off when it ends.


Bharghest feast explicitly only works on Humanoid type enemies.

So drop a polymorph any object on the corpse first.


Truenaming is probably not a common thing (at least compared to Wish/Miracle/True Resurrection)

If you're running around doing Truename magic, you can only assume the rest of the setting is too. Security through obscuring is not real security.


having/planner binding a Bharghest would be something of a pain

I mean, at 20th level you can just shapechange into one. Even before that, planar binding is not particularly hard to use, so the primary risk is your Bhargest getting popped in a high level fight it's not equipped for. You can resolve that by sticking it in a portable hole with a bottle of air or something.


The thing with Teleport Through Time is, it's just not really possible to make time travel work properly in a game. This isn't a criticism of the writers of that particular spell; it's just not possible for any game. It can, with difficulty, be made to work for a story, where the author can figure out all of the parts of the story together, but with a game, it's not possible to plan that out.

You can make very limited forms of time travel (that are almost completely on rails) work. You just can't have time travel as a PC ability. "The PCs travel back in time to see the big historical event" or "the BBEG does a deus ex machina time travel that the PCs have to undo" basically work, but if you ever give the PCs free reign on the timeline it becomes impossible to have a coherent story.


True Resurrection can be accessed via Greater Planar Binding[Planetar].

This argument implies that the lists of 6th, 7th, and 8th level spells can contain at most planar binding and greater planar binding.


Astral Projection: I really don't like the idea of being subject to Greater Spirit Binding.

You're going to have to explain your concern here, because it does not look to me like "dudes casting astral projection" are a type of spirit (plus, even if they are, it's not like it's hard to pick up some extra HD).


Effulgent Epuration: it's not clear to me this is a big enough gain over Mystic Shield + Skin of the Steel Dragon.

mystic shield doesn't work against the spells high level enemies are going to cast, and skin of the steel dragon is only reliable if you are boosting your CL more than anyone else.


I'm unaware of any rules support for invulnerability of a creature implying invulnerability of spells affecting such a creature.

If an effect can remove your buffs, you are not "invulnerable" to it. Can you also take off their gear?


There's a qualitative difference between being able to cast an unlimited number of spells and being able to cast an unlimited number of top-10 spells.

Both shapechange (Zodar) and planar binding (Efreet) get you access to XP-free wish, which allows you to emulate almost every spell on any of these lists and also to ask for scrolls or other items with the ones it can't emulate directly. Again, once you have a power loop that goes to infinity, finding a more complicated loop that goes to eleven doesn't mean anything.


How about Magic Jar[BOB]? That gives you a pool of remotes that can take turns casting spells remotely.

magic jar lets you remote into anyone. Why would you chose to remote into creatures that are recognizably you, don't get any of your spell-based defenses, and have one-quarter HP?

[Anthrowhale]

Plus, they can respond to you casting time stop the same way they can anything else,
I'm not quite following this. What do you have in mind?


and (depending on how exactly you plan to make use of time stop) they can probably respond to whatever effects fire off when it ends.

I'm skeptical if you are using Time Stop effectively. Something like Shapechange[Chronotyryn] in a Mindworms[Maximize] Time Stop can start with Disjunction, then followup with Energy Transformation Field and Miracle[Forcecage]. Disjunction provides a magic wipe, ETF blocks all spells, SLAs, and Supernatural abilities. Forcecage keeps a creature from wandering off. You can take a creature from buffed to imprisoned inside Time Stop.


This argument implies that the lists of 6th, 7th, and 8th level spells can contain at most planar binding and greater planar binding.

I hear that repeating "Wish solves everything" three times makes your dream come true.

More seriously, True Resurrection is the sort of spell which (a) doesn't typically need caster level escalation (b) doesn't need caster stat escalation (c) doesn't need specific feats to max out (d) is typically used rarely and (e) isn't used in combat. That's pretty much ideal for a Planetar.


...it does not look to me like "dudes casting astral projection" are a type of spirit ...

They are---see Complete Divine page 17.

...Creatures in astral form or with astral bodies...
Astral Projection is severely exploitable by an intelligent enemy.

What method did you have in mind for adding 5-7 hit dice?


mystic shield doesn't work against the spells high level enemies are going to cast, and skin of the steel dragon is only reliable if you are boosting your CL more than anyone else.

I agree with both. Usually mild caster level escalation pushes you off the scale of typical adventures. Do you think that Effulgent Epuration is better or worse than Hide Life or Teleport Through Time? And which 3 spells should be dropped?


If an effect can remove your buffs, you are not "invulnerable" to it. Can you also take off their gear?

Buffs are not "you"----they are just spells affecting you. Gear of creatures is explicitly invulnerable in Time Stop, so no it can't be removed.


Both shapechange (Zodar) and planar binding (Efreet) get you access to XP-free wish, which allows you to emulate almost every spell on any of these lists and also to ask for scrolls or other items with the ones it can't emulate directly. Again, once you have a power loop that goes to infinity, finding a more complicated loop that goes to eleven doesn't mean anything.

I acknowledge this, and the lists do as well by placing these spells in the top-10. At the same time, I believe we should just assume that a DM nixes this as a houserule because the game just shatters otherwise. Can you do that?


magic jar lets you remote into anyone. Why would you chose to remote into creatures that are recognizably you, don't get any of your spell-based defenses, and have one-quarter HP?
The obvious reason is because they are recognizably "you", which is an asset in many circumstances. Also, they can benefit from spell-based defenses erected post-BOB cast.

[RandomPeasant]

I'm not quite following this. What do you have in mind?

You: cast time stop.
Them: cast celerity, cast their own time stop.

The fact that your opponent can't respond "during" is not really all that important when they can respond both "before" and "after".


I'm skeptical if you are using Time Stop effectively. Something like Shapechange[Chronotyryn] in a Mindworms[Maximize] Time Stop can start with Disjunction, then followup with Energy Transformation Field and Miracle[Forcecage].

Your plan is to start off with something that doesn't work. It is not a good plan. Beyond that, your plan to make use of time stop involves first making use of shapechange and then following up with miracle. You're even using shapechange to turn into something from the same book as the Zodar!


More seriously, True Resurrection is the sort of spell which (a) doesn't typically need caster level escalation (b) doesn't need caster stat escalation (c) doesn't need specific feats to max out (d) is typically used rarely and (e) isn't used in combat. That's pretty much ideal for a Planetar.

You can escalate caster levels and DCs as much as you want when abusing wish, and there are plenty of spells that are on these lists despite being used rarely and outside combat.


Astral Projection is severely exploitable by an intelligent enemy.

Not really. planar binding is save-negates and SR: Yes. Plus you can always set up a contingency that ends your astral projection if someone tries it. Or just slap some extra HD on yourself so you're immune to begin with. Fundamentally, it's a worse version of the Free Vacation: No Save trick you can do to people with gate regardless of what spells they've cast.


What method did you have in mind for adding 5-7 hit dice?

awaken is the easiest, and you want to do it anyway because it boosts your stats. If you're allowed to use the Complete Divine version of curse of lycanthropy that also works (and is nuts in general). Or shapechange yourself into a Barghest and Feed until you have as many HD as you feel you need. Now, sure, those things are going to stop you from advancing any more (mostly) but if you were going to advance more you'd become immune in short order anyway.


I agree with both. Usually mild caster level escalation pushes you off the scale of typical adventures. Do you think that Effulgent Epuration is better or worse than Hide Life or Teleport Through Time? And which 3 spells should be dropped?

Worse than both of those, but also worse than astral projection. Of the stuff on the list, time stop, erupt, and absorption are all not good enough.


Buffs are not "you"----they are just spells affecting you.

This is splitting hairs. Dispelling someone is an attack on them. If they are invulnerable, they are not subject to attacks. Absent some clear rules definition of "invulnerable" that agrees with you, I see no reason to accept this interpretation. Insofar as time stop discusses area spells, it explicitly states they must last until after it ends to have an effect. disjunction, being instantaneous, doesn't.


I acknowledge this, and the lists do as well by placing these spells in the top-10. At the same time, I believe we should just assume that a DM nixes this as a houserule because the game just shatters otherwise. Can you do that?

The problem is you want to have your cake and eat it to. If shapechange is broken, shapechange is broken. How do we know a DM will definitely ban Zodar form, but not Chronotyryn form or Tome Dragon form? What if they decide that 1/round SU wish is fine if you ban wishing for XP-free items? What if they do let everyone go absolutely crazy? You want to allow "fair" shapechange but not "unfair" shapechange, but there's no possible way of making that distinction.


The obvious reason is because they are recognizably "you", which is an asset in many circumstances. Also, they can benefit from spell-based defenses erected post-BOB cast.

And a detriment in many more! You can prove identity without sending someone who looks like you, but any time someone who looks like you knows up, that's a pretty good signal to anyone who happens to be wherever they've shown up that you are involved in some capacity (even if that capacity is just "someone who doesn't like you is using form-changing to false flag you"). And, yes, they can benefit from having spells cast on them, but the point is there's no inherent synergy there. You get a really, really gimpy minion that you buff up at the same rate as other minions that can start life as, like, Pit Fiends.

[Chronos]

Quoth RandomPeasant:

Or shapechange yourself into a Barghest and Feed until you have as many HD as you feel you need.
Do note that Barghests only advance by eating humanoids of at least as many HD as themselves. At three meals per HD gained, it's going to be difficult just to find enough high-level humanoids to make that happen, and then you need to kill all of them, which they might object to.

[remetagross]

Something neat with Teleport through Time: Eschew Material removes the need for the flower. Bye-bye, annoying side-quest.

And about Mindrape: it's a well-known trick to use it on a 1st-level Commoner to have them fall in love with the BBEG. Then, you spam Love's Pain on the peasant and the BBEG dies.

[Beni-Kujaku]

Something neat with Teleport through Time: Eschew Material removes the need for the flower. Bye-bye, annoying side-quest.

And about Mindrape: it's a well-known trick to use it on a 1st-level Commoner to have them fall in love with the BBEG. Then, you spam Love's Pain on the peasant and the BBEG dies.

A BBEG worthy of level 20 PCs should be able to heal themselves for 35 HP per round until the PC runs out of level 3 spells, or dies of the Corruption cost. Love's Pain is really not a good strategy unless you add several layers of metamagic, and at that point you should just throw an Orb of Acid mailman-style.

TtT (best acronym, btw) is the same as Simulacrum in that something that is rare to the point that a level 20 wizard has difficulty acquiring it should have an inherent value that prevents it from being used with Eschew Material and from appearing in a material pouch.

About the spells already there: I don't think either Erupt or Absorption should be there, as they rely on several feats, several other spells and basically a whole build to be good.
I don't think Genesis should be there either, or at least with an asterisk. The spell does not say that you can choose time or magic effects in the plane, and the psionic version actually explicitates it as being impossible to affect time or psionic effects in it. Now, you can say that since that clause isn't in the spell, then you can do whatever, but the intent is pretty clear. And a demiplane with no interesting trait is not top 10 material.

I'd nominate Astral Projection (completely broken in all ways, giving access to immortality and item duplication, and I doubt there are many high-level Wu Jen spamming GSBinding in the hope of catching the PCs in most campaign worlds), prismatic sphere (in combat, there's no better single attack spell than four SoL in a row and at least 70 HP and 1d6 Con damage if all saves are made), and if you want a blasting spell, then Iceberg at least allows no save, is useable in combat and buries people.

[Herbert_W]

Buffs are not "you"----they are just spells affecting you.

This is splitting hairs. Dispelling someone is an attack on them. If they are invulnerable, they are not subject to attacks. Absent some clear rules definition of "invulnerable" that agrees with you, I see no reason to accept this interpretation.


Oh wow, 3.5e really does have a lot of ways to tie people up in rules disputes, doesn't it? This is a new one to me.

I question the assumption that "invulnerable" means negating everything that falls under the umbrella of "attack." To be invulnerable is to be not-vulnerable, meaning not susceptible to harm. Although attacks normally cause harm, the scope of what attacks can do is much broader than that. Trying to touch someone in a friendly game of tag would be resolved as a touch attack but does not cause harm. Trying to hit someone with an urn of flammable oil to soak them with it would be resolved by an attack roll, but the oil by itself does not cause harm. Casting cure wounds on a living creature who is for some reason trying to avoid the spell requires a touch attack, but does not cause harm.

This relies on some very fine distinctions to work, but I think this does work: a disjunction in a time stop can target spells on creatures, but only on a very careful and literal reading.


"Other creatures are invulnerable to your attacks" and using dispel on someone is an attack, but a creatures' invulnerability to an attack only prevents harm dealt by that attack to that creature, not other effects of that attack.
"Other creatures are invulnerable to your [...] spells" but the same reasoning applies: a creature being invulnerable to a spell does not prevent a spell from affecting other things.
"You cannot target such creatures with any attack or spell" but disjunction doesn't need to target a creature in order to target a spell on it.


On the other hand, a disjunction in a time stop cannot affect items "held, carried, or worn" by creatures due to a clause in time stop specifically prohibiting such items being "move[d] or harm[ed]."

It's weird and counterintuitive that disjunction and time stop should interact in a different way as they apply to magic items compared to as they apply to spells on creatures, but 3.5e contains a lot of weird and counterintuitive interactions when given a careful and literal reading.

[Anthrowhale]

You: cast time stop.
Them: cast celerity, cast their own time stop.

Did you switch positions to supporting Time Stop? Do you have a counter that isn't Time Stop? The other thing to note is that you can't cast celerity while flat-footed.


Your plan is to start off with something that doesn't work....This is splitting hairs.

I believe you should either reconsider or come up with a better argument. "Invulnerable to your attacks" is not the same as "unaffected by anything disfavorable". It just means that you can't directly affect them. Indirect effects like disintegrating the ground underneath them or burying them with limited wish[move earth] seem entirely legit. Wiping a buff stack with Disjunction is just another example of an indirect effect.


Dispelling someone is an attack on them.

Only if they are a spell. Most creatures are not.


Insofar as time stop discusses area spells, it explicitly states they must last until after it ends to have an effect.
To have an effect on the creature, yes an area spell must have a duration. Disjunction doesn't affect a creature though----it affects spells.


Beyond that, your plan to make use of time stop involves first making use of shapechange and then following up with miracle. You're even using shapechange to turn into something from the same book as the Zodar!

Yes? Using available tools is something that you do when you give yourself extra actions.


You can escalate caster levels and DCs as much as you want when abusing wish...

I'm not following--You can't generally escalate caster levels and DCs on wishes cast by minions or the Su ability of a Zodar.


planar binding is save-negates and SR: Yes.
This is misleading. It's SR:No for the calling effect and SR:Yes for escaping the trap. The save negates is real, but there is no reason why a BBEG can't create a very difficult save with cooperation of minions in a lair.

Plus you can always set up a contingency that ends your astral projection if someone tries it.
This seems plausibly viable, but it means your adventure is subject to subtraction at any moment and you lose other uses of a prime tool.


Or just slap some extra HD on yourself so you're immune to begin with. ...

awaken is the easiest, and you want to do it anyway because it boosts your stats. If you're allowed to use the Complete Divine version of curse of lycanthropy that also works (and is nuts in general). Or shapechange yourself into a Barghest and Feed until you have as many HD as you feel you need.
XP decays exponentially in ECL, so this wipes out your caster advancement, a cost so high that the value of the spell is negative.

Now, sure, those things are going to stop you from advancing any more (mostly) but if you were going to advance more you'd become immune in short order anyway.
The idea that you were going to quickly advance by 7 levels seems like a misconception in most games.

Fundamentally, it's a worse version of the Free Vacation: No Save trick you can do to people with gate regardless of what spells they've cast.
No---all unique creatures can choose to not interact with a gate that appears.

...unique beings are under no compulsion to come through the gate,


Worse than both of those, but also worse than astral projection. Of the stuff on the list, time stop, erupt, and absorption are all not good enough.

That's clear as opinions go. The 'to many moving parts' aspect of absorption has some sympathy from me. If you can figure out some way to do something instead of Time Stop, that would be helpful. You haven't spoken of Erupt though. Is this generalized dislike of causing damage? Or a different argument?


The problem is you want to have your cake and eat it to. If shapechange is broken, shapechange is broken. How do we know a DM will definitely ban Zodar form, but not Chronotyryn form or Tome Dragon form? What if they decide that 1/round SU wish is fine if you ban wishing for XP-free items? What if they do let everyone go absolutely crazy? You want to allow "fair" shapechange but not "unfair" shapechange, but there's no possible way of making that distinction.

I agree that what a DM bans is unclear when you get to gamebreaking effects. Shapechange[Chronotyryn] is however unnecessary to have very significant effects from Time Stop.


And a detriment in many more! You can prove identity without sending someone who looks like you, but any time someone who looks like you knows up, that's a pretty good signal to anyone who happens to be wherever they've shown up that you are involved in some capacity (even if that capacity is just "someone who doesn't like you is using form-changing to false flag you"). And, yes, they can benefit from having spells cast on them, but the point is there's no inherent synergy there. You get a really, really gimpy minion that you buff up at the same rate as other minions that can start life as, like, Pit Fiends.
Your previous argument (that you can't rely on how a DM will rule in the presence of gamebreaking effects) applies here.


Something neat with Teleport through Time: Eschew Material removes the need for the flower.
I don't think it works because oil of timelessness costs 150gp.

And about Mindrape: it's a well-known trick to use it on a 1st-level Commoner to have them fall in love with the BBEG. Then, you spam Love's Pain on the peasant and the BBEG dies.
Hopefully you make that a rod[maximized] Vile Love's Pain :-) But the spell is [mind-affecting] and hence defenses exist at this level. Still, is Love's Pain worth considering on the ECL20 list for spell level 3?


A BBEG worthy of level 20 PCs should be able to heal themselves for 35 HP per round until the PC runs out of level 3 spells, or dies of the Corruption cost. Love's Pain is really not a good strategy unless you add several layers of metamagic, and at that point you should just throw an Orb of Acid mailman-style.
Love's Pain has a pretty notable range advantage over orbs.

and from appearing in a material pouch.
Also, this particular material component cannot appear in a pouch, because it specifies that you must pick the flower during the process of casting.


About the spells already there: I don't think either Erupt or Absorption should be there, as they rely on several feats, several other spells and basically a whole build to be good.

Which feats do you believe are required for Erupt? You are thinking of Persistent Spell for the caster level escalation?


I don't think Genesis should be there either, or at least with an asterisk. The spell does not say that you can choose time or magic effects in the plane, and the psionic version actually explicitates it as being impossible to affect time or psionic effects in it. Now, you can say that since that clause isn't in the spell, then you can do whatever, but the intent is pretty clear. And a demiplane with no interesting trait is not top 10 material.

What do you think the intent is? "any desire you can visualize" seems pretty general. I do concur that demiplane without controllable traits is uninteresting.


I'd nominate Astral Projection (completely broken in all ways, giving access to immortality and item duplication, and I doubt there are many high-level Wu Jen spamming GSBinding in the hope of catching the PCs in most campaign worlds),
I'm still a bit skeptical due to GSB. The BBEG can disrupt the astral projection for 1360gp as a spellcasting service or 3825gp off a scroll. I realize this vulnerability isn't that widely known, but it's pretty hideous.


prismatic sphere (in combat, there's no better single attack spell than four SoL in a row and at least 70 HP and 1d6 Con damage if all saves are made),

That's a fun one to drop inside a Time Stop. However, I'm skeptical about other uses---outside of Time Stop, Amber Sarcophagus beats Prismatic Sphere by having no save and a nontrivial range.


and if you want a blasting spell, then Iceberg at least allows no save, is useable in combat and buries people.
It's not clear to me this is giving much on top of Frostfell which has a larger area and does 20d6 on a failed save.


...
Yeah, that was my reasoning as well.

[Chronos]

Genesis belongs on the list. A plane must have traits, and nowhere do the rules specify what the default traits for a plane are, so absent any houserules or errata to the spell, the only sensible conclusion is that the traits are determined by the plane's creator. Sure, the DM is likely to houserule that away, but "the DM is likely to houserule this to make it less overpowered" applies to most of the spells on these lists.

[Chronos]

Actually, I need to correct myself: The rules do give defaults for the categories of planar traits. But on the other hand, the Genesis spell says that the caster has full control over the environment, other than a few specific limits (and the limits do not include planar traits).

[Fero]

Actually, I need to correct myself: The rules do give defaults for the categories of planar traits. But on the other hand, the Genesis spell says that the caster has full control over the environment, other than a few specific limits (and the limits do not include planar traits).

I am not sure I follow. Does this mean Genesis lets you determine planar traits?

[AvatarVecna]

I agree with a previous poster about being uncomfortable with combos. This is less because I think they're necessarily invalid, but I don't think it's showing off spells that are good, as much as showing off combos that are good (and happen to dovetail with a 9th lvl spell pretty well). Metamagic reduction 6 on a 9th lvl spell isn't impossible, but it's a far cry from being trivial either. And if the spell isn't very good without that much metamagic reductions forced down its throat...well it's probably not actually a very good spell. Anyway my thoughts on a few spells:

Idk if Erupt belongs on the list but it's still pretty good. The casting time and the base range isn't great, but the AoE is so big that you can get around that as long as you're immune to your own attack. Even if CL 50 is too rich for ones blood, the base CL 17 is still 170 damage (equivalent of ~28d6 maximized) over an area 3400 ft in diameter. The fact that both the damage and the area scale with CL without a cap makes it ripe for abuse via any number of CL-boosting methods, but even the base spell is still capable of clearing a whole dungeon (not just the creatures inside it, but the dungeon itself) without setting foot in sight of the entrance. It's somewhat vaguely close to what a blasting spell should look like at this level.

If Teleport Through Time is a viable option for this list, it basically has to be on it. Most spells on lists like these are generally there because they can be used to shortcut obstacles, simplify whole plotlines, or even break the game. With TTT, it's very difficult to avoid doing anything of those things, even by accident. Time Stop is on the list for giving you a maximum of a 30 second headstart on a fight, while TTT is in the consideration list for giving you (at bare minimum) 85920 second headstart. Even if you never use it to go back more than a single day at a time, you can very effectively double the number of spells slots you get to work with each day, tackling a plot from two different directions confident that you won't cross yourself because you already know what you did. And that's the bare minimum. Adventurers can notoriously go from lvl 1 to 20 in just a month without pushing any harder than the game recommends. Even slowing that down to a year...well, a year is still a pretty small amount of time to jump back with this spell. Why not go back, dump a pile of lvl 20 magic items in a place you know the group will search, and then leave? There's precious few spells that can even theoretically require you to replay the whole campaign to see what happens; Wish and Miracle have their "anything goes lmao" options, but you can bet they'll come with downsides to match; Shapechange and Gate can maybe get you access to Time Dragon stuff if you put in the work. But TTT just does it, easy-peasy.

Vile Death lets you apply the fiendish template to a corporeal undead (normally an illegal target). Any spell that openly breaks the rules is definitionally gamebreaking. :smalltongue:

[RandomPeasant]

And about Mindrape: it's a well-known trick to use it on a 1st-level Commoner to have them fall in love with the BBEG. Then, you spam Love's Pain on the peasant and the BBEG dies.

love's pain is SR: Yes. It does totally own people if they are not prepared to deal with it, but if you're playing at the level of optimization where it's a concern it's not impossible to deal with.


Did you switch positions to supporting Time Stop? Do you have a counter that isn't Time Stop?

I was hoping that a simple example would not be distracting. The alternative counter is that you just kill them, and the broader point is that pretty much any reaction that is effective as you are firing off spells is effective before you start doing so, meaning that time stop is not providing a particularly meaningful tactical advantage.


Wiping a buff stack with Disjunction is just another example of an indirect effect.

No, that's very much a direct effect. I agree you could use disjunction to remove, say, a bunch of walls of fire they had set up because that was tactically advantageous to them, but they are immune to having their own personal buffs dispelled in the same way that they are immune to e.g. a non-spell damaging aura you might happen to have.


Yes? Using available tools is something that you do when you give yourself extra actions.

Again, my point is that if you are using a tool that could go to a thousand to go to eleven, you are not making a persuasive argument for whatever other stuff you are using to get to eleven.


I'm not following--You can't generally escalate caster levels and DCs on wishes cast by minions or the Su ability of a Zodar.

No, you can't. But you can wish for a scroll with whatever caster level, or a staff that also provides a big bonus to your casting stat. XP-free wish is the most broken thing in the game, and in some sense the most broken thing it is possible for there to be. You describe the magic item you want, and then you get that magic item without paying any costs.


This is misleading. It's SR:No for the calling effect and SR:Yes for escaping the trap.

planar binding is. spirit binding just says SR: Yes, so I think you can reasonably argue that SR applies to the whole thing in that case. Regardless, if we do assume you don't get the SR until called, the effect is that they call your astral duplicate (as that's the thing that counts as a spirit), so they have just summoned a fully-functional but completely disposable copy of you into their immediate presence. Seems not great for them.


The idea that you were going to quickly advance by 7 levels seems like a misconception in most games.

It seems to me that we can either assume we're stopping at 20 (in which case there's no more advancement to lose) or we mean a general-purpose list of 9ths (in which case you will have a great many levels at which you are simply immune).


No---all unique creatures can choose to not interact with a gate that appears.

Sure, gods and demon lords are immune to Free Vacation: No Save. You aren't, though. You're just a member of a PC race with levels in a PC class. A particular being, sure, but not a unique one.


If you can figure out some way to do something instead of Time Stop, that would be helpful.

If you mean in terms of extra actions, as I said greater arcane fusion -> celerity + Twinned celerity, or Metamagic Spell Trigger on wands of celerity. If you mean on the list, teleport through time is probably the first thing I'd add.


You haven't spoken of Erupt though. Is this generalized dislike of causing damage? Or a different argument?

It's a spell that doesn't break the game when there are spells that break the game that aren't on the list. I'm honestly not sure I'd put an AoE no-save-just-die on the list at 9th, there's just so much stuff that is straight-up game destroying. Between shapechange, gate, ice assassin, mindrape/programmed amnesia, hide life, teleport through time, genesis, and astral projection, you're down to two slots before you even get to arguable inclusions. And for the arguable inclusions disjunction, miracle/wish, true resurrection, chain contingency, putrefaction, and time stop all seem better, particularly because most of them don't require any particular effort to make work.


Your previous argument (that you can't rely on how a DM will rule in the presence of gamebreaking effects) applies here.

I would raise two points here. First, I think animate dead + awaken undead still gets you better minions and isn't broken. Second, I think it is reasonable to argue that minionmancy as a category is broken, and that the restrictions on comparing to broken material should be relaxed in that context. This, I think, is the argument by which draconic polymorph is not on the 5th level list.


I agree with a previous poster about being uncomfortable with combos. This is less because I think they're necessarily invalid, but I don't think it's showing off spells that are good, as much as showing off combos that are good (and happen to dovetail with a 9th lvl spell pretty well).

Another problem with the combo stuff is that it has tended to focus the lists on spells that are synergistic with particular builds, rather than spells that are good on their own, which just makes the lists less useful. That said, it's a thorny issue, because ignoring a spell like enhance wild shape because not everyone has wild shape is sort of silly when it's on the class list for the class that has wild shape.

[remetagross]

Ah, well, I wasn't aware the Eschew Material trick did not work with Teleport through Time.

About Love's Pain: you guys saying "it's [mind-affecting]" or "it' SR: yes" are missing something very important. The target of the spell is not the BBEG, it's the Mindraped peasant. Which is not immune to [mind-affecting] effects, and does not have any SR to boot (or pick another peasant). The spell text even specifies "the loved one gets no saving throw or spell resistance."

So, there you go. Spam it at your heart's content, there is no range limit. The BBEG could be on a different plane that it would still work. The one defense against that is putting oneself into an AMF.

For added fun: Mindrape the peasant into thinking that the dreaded scroll of Apocalypse from the Sky the villain is storing to blackmail the king is in fact a sentient item and that they're in love with it. Or the BBEG's annoying Ring of Freedom of Movement/Headband of True Seeing/Third Eye Conceal. Problem solved.

[RandomPeasant]

About Love's Pain: you guys saying "it's [mind-affecting]" or "it' SR: yes" are missing something very important. The target of the spell is not the BBEG, it's the Mindraped peasant. Which is not immune to [mind-affecting] effects, and does not have any SR to boot (or pick another peasant). The spell text even specifies "the loved one gets no saving throw or spell resistance."

Good catch on the SR, but I think the loved one would still benefit from immunity to [Mind-Affecting]. The damage is still a part of the spell's effect, and the spell is still [Mind-Affecting].

[Troacctid]

But you can wish for a scroll with whatever caster level, or a staff that also provides a big bonus to your casting stat. XP-free wish is the most broken thing in the game, and in some sense the most broken thing it is possible for there to be. You describe the magic item you want, and then you get that magic item without paying any costs.
And jumping off of this, I want to point out that this is notably a function that miracle does not have. As good as it is to duplicate spells, the truly broken functionality of wish is on an entirely different vector of infinite loops and broken combos. At high optimization levels, the two are actually very different spells, IMO.


About Love's Pain: you guys saying "it's [mind-affecting]" or "it' SR: yes" are missing something very important. The target of the spell is not the BBEG, it's the Mindraped peasant. Which is not immune to [mind-affecting] effects, and does not have any SR to boot (or pick another peasant). The spell text even specifies "the loved one gets no saving throw or spell resistance."

So, there you go. Spam it at your heart's content, there is no range limit. The BBEG could be on a different plane that it would still work. The one defense against that is putting oneself into an AMF.

For added fun: Mindrape the peasant into thinking that the dreaded scroll of Apocalypse from the Sky the villain is storing to blackmail the king is in fact a sentient item and that they're in love with it. Or the BBEG's annoying Ring of Freedom of Movement/Headband of True Seeing/Third Eye Conceal. Problem solved.
This presupposes a very cynical view of true love vs. infatuation.

[Gruftzwerg]

And jumping off of this, I want to point out that this is notably a function that miracle does not have. As good as it is to duplicate spells, the truly broken functionality of wish is on an entirely different vector of infinite loops and broken combos. At high optimization levels, the two are actually very different spells, IMO.


I agree that only the first part: "spell emulation" is comparable.

Miracle can also be used for a "very powerful request" while Wish can create magic items.

The problem is that these effect's value ain't comparable in any way.

Because Miracle's "very powerful request" relies heavily on DM fiat, but on the other hand has no real RAW limit to the effect requested. The problem here is quite simple. Just think of forum contests. A judge can't set/predict how friendly a DM may or may not be towards the players very powerful requests. This makes the true scale of Miracle hard to predicts/measure.

Wish's second option on the other hand is much more predictable and bound by the rules. This makes it easier to work with in a theoretical optimization setting.

Wishing for an magic item has clear rules while making a very powerful request is very vaguely defined.


But the main difference here is that Miracle's spell emulation doesn't cost any XP at all, while Wish always cost at least the 5000 xp (and more if you wish for expensive items). And this is the reason why I would always prefer Miracle over Wish.
Sure having both is great if your build can manage that. But if I had to chose, it would be always Miracle over Wish.

The remaining question is: "Is Wish still justified a spot on the top 10 when Miracle is already there"?
While possible Wish exploits would be a good reason to include it, I still dunno if that is sufficient/justified here.

edit: I have to correct myself here a lil bit. There is one scenario when I try to get Wish over Miracle and that is "Sharing inherit bonuses with a familiar/special mount/animal companion/wild cohort/..."
From a WBL perspective, the possibly saved gold is easily 1/7th of your WBL at lvl 20 (assuming only a single stat boost with +5)! And if you wanna share multiple stats the saved gold just increases. This is a major point for Wish being on the top 10 list too.
The question is just, what should be dropped for it?

[Chronos]

Huh, I thought for sure that there was a rule somewhere that Miracle could be used the same way as Wish, for granting inherent bonuses... maybe in general rules for inherent bonuses? Certainly, you can use either to craft the tomes. But I'm not seeing it now.

And getting powerful magic items isn't really limited by whether you're using Wish vs. Miracle. It's limited by how much cheese your DM is willing to tolerate. If you have a DM that's going to let you use tricks to remove the XP cost from Wish, that DM is probably also going to let you use Miracle to planar bind an efreet and get your Wish for a magic item that way.

[RandomPeasant]

And jumping off of this, I want to point out that this is notably a function that miracle does not have. As good as it is to duplicate spells, the truly broken functionality of wish is on an entirely different vector of infinite loops and broken combos. At high optimization levels, the two are actually very different spells, IMO.

It's true that wish has broken functionality miracle doesn't, but if you want to use that functionality casting wish out of your own personal spell slots is pretty much the worst way to go about it. planar binding is a 6th level spell and gives you an Efreet that can use wish three times. shapechange lets you turn into a Zodar and make a wish, then turn into something else, then turn back into a Zodar and make another wish. wish is caught between miracle being better for uses that any DM could possibly allow and shapechange being better for breaking the game. I think having a single entry for miracle/wish is a more than adequate solution.


This presupposes a very cynical view of true love vs. infatuation.

mindrape gives you write access to someone's entire mind. You can absolutely set them up for true love if you want.

[Fero]

mindrape gives you write access to someone's entire mind. You can absolutely set them up for true love if you want.

Perhaps love is a function of the soul and not the mind?

[Chronos]

Oh, and with Miracle, it's also worth mentioning that its upper limit (admittedly with an XP cost) is pretty much "anything a deity can do". And it's also possible to get Miracle without the intervention of the actual deity, through Shadowcraft Mage. What, precisely, this means is ill-defined, but it's safe to say that it's way up there in power.

And to answer a previous poster, I do hold that, RAW, Genesis lets you set planar traits (and also hold that, in any 17th-level game, the DM ought to houserule that away). And being able to set planar traits is abso-frickin-lutely bonkers, if you can find some way to make yourself or your familiar count as native to the plane. Sure, everyone talks about the time trait (even though nobody's sure how that would actually work), but there are a ton of things you can do with the magic trait. Make the plane timeless with respect to magic, and you've got better-than-persist on everything, even things that can't be persisted. Make it enhanced magic, for whatever kind of magic you cast (which can include "spells with the [good] tag", and you make that count for all of your spells via Mark of the Enlightened Soul that never expires), and you can set it to make every metamagic you want free (you don't even need the feats). Then make it blocked magic, for everything other than the magic you use. With just Genesis, Planar Bubble, and whatever you're using to make your familiar a native (which depending on interpretation, might be as simple as summoning it for the first time while you're on your plane), you get all metamagics, infinite-duration everything, and immunity to almost all other spells.

[Bavarian itP]

Perhaps love is a function of the soul and not the mind?

In a fantasy setting, it might be.

[remetagross]

Perhaps love is a function of the soul and not the mind?

That's a philosophical question up in the air, but not, in my opinion, a RAW question.

Apart from this, when talking in D&D terms, love is not defined anywhere to be different than the common definition. Mindrape explicitely allows the caster to "alter emotions, opinions, and even alignment". It's not just the mind here, it's also the heart. It would take a rather dickish GM to argue that "love" does not fall under the purview of "emotions" so as to make the combo useless. And anyway, that also works with "closest friend", if you feel friendship is a less tricky emotion to manipulate. Just kill everyone the peasant knows (for example, by casting Love's Pain before Mindrape a bunch of times), so that they don't know anyone alive anymore. Then, Mindrape so that they now know the BBEG. Since the BBEG will then be the only person that the peasant knows, it defaults to being their "closest friend" and "dearest loved one". Then, go to town.

About the [mind-affecting] tag applying even to the loved one...there's definitely leeway for argumentation there. Target says "One living creature", and not "one living creature and their dearest loved one".

[RandomPeasant]

Perhaps love is a function of the soul and not the mind?

That strikes me as grasping at straws. Plus, the spell hits the target's "closest friend or dearest loved one", so if push comes to shove you can just mindrape them into being really good buddies with the BBEG. I don't think "friendship is a property of the soul" is even remotely plausible.


Oh, and with Miracle, it's also worth mentioning that its upper limit (admittedly with an XP cost) is pretty much "anything a deity can do". And it's also possible to get Miracle without the intervention of the actual deity, through Shadowcraft Mage. What, precisely, this means is ill-defined, but it's safe to say that it's way up there in power.

Shadowcraft miracles don't work for a number of reasons. Also if they did work, the spell that would get credit would be silent image, not miracle. The real question is what miracle does if you aren't devoted to a specific deity. It says that "a request that is out of line with the deity’s (or alignment’s) nature", so presumably you can ask for stuff from "Good", but can you ask for stuff from "Badgers" or "Yourself" if that's what you happen to worship? The implication seems to be that, used this way, the spell can only do stuff the deity can do, but it doesn't seem like "Good" does anything on its own, so what the limits are there seems unclear.


About the [mind-affecting] tag applying even to the loved one...there's definitely leeway for argumentation there. Target says "One living creature", and not "one living creature and their dearest loved one".

wall of fire doesn't target a creature, but creatures that are immune to fire still don't take damage.

[Anthrowhale]

I swapped down Absorption and Time Stop for Hide Life and Teleport Through Time. The "unbounded spells" effect of Absorption is more efficiently accomplished via Unfettered Heroism+Wand Surge. it's not quite as good since you need to operate off a staff, but it seems good enough that the delta from Absorption isn't worthwhile. For Time Stop, it seems you can get around the casting time of Energy Transformation Field using Miracle[Energy Transformation Field] and otherwise multiply your actions via Greater Arcane Fusion + Celerity. The synergy with Disjunction must be handled by simply casting Disjunction at a minimal save DC which seems close enough to not destroying possessed loot. The ability to under-represent your casting stat is not a stated game property as far as I know, but I expect it's commonly available. Using that Sanctum Disjunction could have a DC as low as 22.

Looking at RandomPeasant's remaining list:
Astral Projection: I'm still finding this iffy since it creates a huge vulnerability via Greater Spirit Binding
True resurrection: Accessing via Greater Planar Binding[Planetar] seems entirely reasonable for applications.
Chain contingency: I'm not seeing a substantial advantage over Contingency in light of the ability to nova actions via GAF. Precast efficiency has some value, but maybe not enough to displace an existing spell.
Putrefaction: Not quite as good of a minion since the ghost can only move within 30' of you and the numbers are limited by Cha, and Amber Sarcophagus is a better action shutdown.


The rules do give defaults for the categories of planar traits.
In the SRD, I see defaults for gravity, time, and magic, but not morphic, alignment, elemental, or energy. (Size is set by the spell.) Were you looking somewhere else? In any case, I believe this:

The spellcaster determines the environment within the demiplane...implies the ability to set traits, because it's hard to imagine traits not being a part of environment.


I agree with a previous poster about being uncomfortable with combos.
Noted. For myself, a list which does not take into account other spells on the list seems less interesting to me.


The casting time ...
Note that you can cast it in advance and hold the charge. It's something like walking around with a nuclear weapon in your hand.


If Teleport Through Time is a viable option for this list, it basically has to be on it.
Yeah, I concur. I believe this is meant to be an NPC spell in the same sense that Beholder Mage is meant to be an NPC class, but that distinction is not explicit.


...they are immune to having their own personal buffs dispelled in the same way that they are immune to e.g. a non-spell damaging aura you might happen to have.
I don't see a way to avoid simply disagreeing here, but it doesn't seem to have a material impact on list decisions.


But you can wish for a scroll with whatever caster level, or a staff that also provides a big bonus to your casting stat.
Ah, I see what you mean. Yes, XP free wish is quite broken. In some sense, we're lucky that doesn't appear viable via spells.


planar binding is. spirit binding just says SR: Yes, so I think you can reasonably argue that SR applies to the whole thing in that case.

The 'functions as lesser planar binding' clause makes me think you still get called.


Regardless, if we do assume you don't get the SR until called, the effect is that they call your astral duplicate (as that's the thing that counts as a spirit), so they have just summoned a fully-functional but completely disposable copy of you into their immediate presence. Seems not great for them.

At a surface level, this implies disruption to your plans at arbitrary moments for large blocks of time, which is not great. But, a clever adversary may be able to take all kinds of information out of you and then nail your astral cord with a silver sword. Of these effects {plan disruption, secret loss, death}, death is probably the least problematic.

It seems to me that we can either assume we're stopping at 20 (in which case there's no more advancement to lose)...
You're arguing that Astral Projection is an ECL20 only spell? Instead of 18&20. A difficulty here is that if you add HD you are not longer ECL20.

...A particular being, sure, but not a unique one.
That's contrary to the english definition of unique. Do you have some rules assigning a specific non-english meaning to unique?


It's a spell that doesn't break the game...

I believe it actually does break the game in a substantial way. You can precast Erupt since it's a touch spell, and with other spells you can engage in caster level escalation so it's a no-save-just-die in line of effect. The notion of an "encounter" is rather broken when it ends with a single action.


And jumping off of this, I want to point out that this is notably a function that miracle does not have. As good as it is to duplicate spells, the truly broken functionality of wish is on an entirely different vector of infinite loops and broken combos. At high optimization levels, the two are actually very different spells, IMO.
I agree with this. At the level of optimizing over spells, it seems like high-op use of Wish isn't done via the spellcaster's native list. Instead it's Planar Binding[Efreeti[Wish]] or something similar.



The question is just, what should be dropped for it?
I don't see an inherent+5 bonus as that important to what a familiar can do.


And being able to set planar traits is abso-frickin-lutely bonkers...
The static trait deserves mentioning as well. It's something like Time Stop's invulnerability clause except applying in regular time. Far more minor but amusing is subjective directional gravity which allows you to fly at high speed and subvert the 'vertical' constraint on some walls.

[RandomPeasant]

True resurrection: Accessing via Greater Planar Binding[Planetar] seems entirely reasonable for applications.

I still don't understand the principled distinction between doing this and getting XP-free wish from an Efreet to replace every spell that is not named planar binding.


Chain contingency: I'm not seeing a substantial advantage over Contingency in light of the ability to nova actions via GAF. Precast efficiency has some value, but maybe not enough to displace an existing spell.

The fact that your chain contingency can come into effect under different circumstances than your regular contingency is quite useful. You can have your regular contingency hold a defensive or escape spell, and your chain contingency hold triple-celerity or something. Then you don't have to pick between having an automatic getaway and novaing.


Putrefaction: Not quite as good of a minion since the ghost can only move within 30' of you and the numbers are limited by Cha, and Amber Sarcophagus is a better action shutdown.

This is better than erupt in almost all cases, though it is potentially possible for your DM to limit the viable minions you encounter.


Noted. For myself, a list which does not take into account other spells on the list seems less interesting to me.

"Other spells on the list" is not a particularly natural category. There is no character that natively learns e.g. body outside body and greater mighty wallop, because the former is Wu Jen-only and the latter Sorcerer/Wizard-only. It seems far more reasonable to me to talk about synergies in terms of what is available to the class that learns the spell.


Note that you can cast it in advance and hold the charge. It's something like walking around with a nuclear weapon in your hand.

Which goes off when "you touch anything or anyone". That seems, uh, not great? Yeah, not great.


Ah, I see what you mean. Yes, XP free wish is quite broken. In some sense, we're lucky that doesn't appear viable via spells.

The "via spells" distinction you're making is silly. The issue is that, even if you natively ignored all XP costs, it would still be bad to cast wish if you wanted to do XP-free wish because shapechange is just better at that.


The 'functions as lesser planar binding' clause makes me think you still get called.

mass bull's strength "functions like bull’s strength". Does that mean it is also touch range, or does "as" imply that the spell being inherited from overrides the explicitly-listed properties of the the inheriting spell in a way that "like" does not?


At a surface level, this implies disruption to your plans at arbitrary moments for large blocks of time, which is not great.

It implies your plans are "disrupted" by having a disposable clone of you brought into the direct presence of one of your enemies where, even on the disfavorable reading of when you get SR, you can immediately break out and attack them (assuming they haven't done more CL boosting than you). That doesn't seem like terribly much disruption, even if we ignore the possibility of being immune.


You're arguing that Astral Projection is an ECL20 only spell? Instead of 18&20. A difficulty here is that if you add HD you are not longer ECL20.

Wouldn't that also imply that, upon boosting your HD in this way, you can Dark Chaos Shuffle into Epic Spellcasting?


That's contrary to the english definition of unique. Do you have some rules assigning a specific non-english meaning to unique?

The spell mentions "unique beings" and "particular beings" as functioning in different ways. Is your contention that every being is "unique"? Because that implies that the calling functionality can't call anything, which strikes me as just as dysfunctional as the readings that allow Free Vacation: No Save, in its own way.


I believe it actually does break the game in a substantial way. You can precast Erupt since it's a touch spell, and with other spells you can engage in caster level escalation so it's a no-save-just-die in line of effect. The notion of an "encounter" is rather broken when it ends with a single action.

Creatures can be immune (yes, Searing Spell bypasses, but at that point even CL 60 doesn't kill a Balor that makes its save), have spell resistance, be out of line of effect, or have Mettle. That's not really game-breaking, especially when you compare it to what the other spells do:

shapechange: You can use no-XP wish every other round, and depending on how you think form-changing generally and shapechange specifically work do various other broken things.
gate: You can summon allies that are stronger than you are and/or can use gate themselves, and you can do the Free Vacation: No Save trick. Plus it's the best travel spell, and some people do think those are game-breaking.
ice assassin: Once you have enough XP to make an ice assassin that can cast ice assassin you can have unlimited minions as strong as you are under your complete mental control.
mindrape/programmed amnesia: You can make anyone into a perfectly loyal servant in a way that is permanent and not subject to incidental removal.
hide life: Become literally unkillable.
teleport through time: The game becomes completely intractable to run.
genesis: All the broken stuff you can do with planar traits, plus more prosaic WBL-breaking if you have your demiplane be made of stuff that is extremely expensive.
astral projection: Any bad thing that happens to you while you are adventuring doesn't really happen to you. You can copy all your gear.

As I said, a spell that was literally an AoE no-save-no-nothing-just-die spell might not make the list at 9th. The competition is incredibly stacked. Plus holy word and the like compete with erupt as ways to kill people with a really high CL. The AoE is smaller, but it's a spread rather than a burst, and the kill is much more absolute.

[Troacctid]

I Ah, I see what you mean. Yes, XP free wish is quite broken. In some sense, we're lucky that doesn't appear viable via spells.

I agree with this. At the level of optimizing over spells, it seems like high-op use of Wish isn't done via the spellcaster's native list. Instead it's Planar Binding[Efreeti[Wish]] or something similar.
There are a variety of ways to do it and all of them are among the most broken effects in the game as a result.


The fact that your chain contingency can come into effect under different circumstances than your regular contingency is quite useful. You can have your regular contingency hold a defensive or escape spell, and your chain contingency hold triple-celerity or something. Then you don't have to pick between having an automatic getaway and novaing.
Also, quadrupling the number of contingencies you can have active at once is definitely not nothing.


The "via spells" distinction you're making is silly. The issue is that, even if you natively ignored all XP costs, it would still be bad to cast wish if you wanted to do XP-free wish because shapechange is just better at that.
I agree that shapechange ranks higher than wish, but there's plenty of room on the top 10 list below the #1 spot.


Plus holy word and the like compete with erupt as ways to kill people with a really high CL. The AoE is smaller, but it's a spread rather than a burst, and the kill is much more absolute.
Yeah, this is the big problem with the spell. Uncapped CL scaling isn't special. Other effects out there can do it sooner and do it better.

[remetagross]

Hmm about that Wall of Fire example, RandomPeasant... fire-immune creature are immune to it because it deals [fire] damage. Not because it is a [fire] spell. The damage from Love's Pain is not some sort of [mind-affecting] damage. See my point?

[RandomPeasant]

I agree that shapechange ranks higher than wish, but there's plenty of room on the top 10 list below the #1 spot.

Casting wish to get access to XP-free wish is more complicated and less effective than casting shapechange to do the same thing. If you are going to exclude stuff for redundancy (and that has absolutely happened), I do not think you can justify including wish (unless you're grouping it with miracle). I think you'd have a point if it was just wish v miracle, but it's not. Casting wish with Supernatural Spell is, at best, the third-best way of abusing wish.


Yeah, this is the big problem with the spell. Uncapped CL scaling isn't special. Other effects out there can do it sooner and do it better.

Also I just cannot emphasize enough how ridiculously competitive 9th level spells are. There, as noted, eight that I think you cannot reasonably leave off the list. That means erupt is competing with the likes of disjunction and effulgent epuration (good anti-magic), dominate monster and putrefaction (combat minionmancy spells that are just not quite as broken as the likes of ice assassin and mindrape), miracle and wish (the best spell emulation in the game, with potential extra abusability on wish), and true resurrection (the best version of an effect that is occasionally vital). To merit at spot in the top ten, it has to be better than six of those (or five if you're grouping wish and miracle). And anything else someone ranks higher than I do. You could have a top ten that excluded the eight broken spells entirely and erupt still might have trouble getting in. It's a powerful spell, but 9th is a level full of insane spells.


Hmm about that Wall of Fire example, RandomPeasant... fire-immune creature are immune to it because it deals [fire] damage. Not because it is a [fire] spell. The damage from Love's Pain is not some sort of [mind-affecting] damage. See my point?

I don't see why damage being dealt by a [Mind-Affecting] spell would not be blocked by immunity to [Mind-Affecting], no.

[Gruftzwerg]

I don't see an inherent+5 bonus as that important to what a familiar can do.


a) If you are a playing a gish, you probable share your combat spells with your familiar for it to join combat. There it will profit from the +5 inherent bonus to strength that you could share with him.

b) If you have an improved familiar, chances are that is has an ability that might scale with CON or CHA. Both possible stats that you might wanna increase anyway depending on class and build.

c) since sharing is free, any value is a good payoff. No matter what stat you would increase anyway:
STR = + melee to hit and dmg
DEX = better reflex saves (important for evasion) and AC
CON = some abilities scale with CON; Fortitude save
INT = it does understand you commands better and can gasp more complex things.
WIS = Will save
CHA = some abilities scale with CHA

d) Also remind you that your familiar has access to your skillranks. Thus any skill it might wanna use can possibly also profit from this. Simplest case here would be a wizard (INT mainstat) with a bunch of knowledge skills. Take a raven familiar (or anything else that can speak) and discuss all important things with him. Let him do his own roll, which basically gives you double the rolls for all knowledge checks. And you can Aid Another each other while making the checks. The familiar in this case would greatly benefit from the free ´+5 inherent bonus to INT.

e) There are other skills where you basically can get 2 rolls to solve the problem. Like listen, Gather Information, Search. Spot, .. and such. If you should raise any associated ability score, your familiar will profit too.

I think the major point here is that it is a free bonus and can double the value in certain cases like a gish + combat familiar (not the feat) and the 2nd roll for many checks. You just need to find the value for your build (maybe not every build, but for most builds with a Familiar there should be some use here).

[Vaern]

It seems worth noting that Wish comes with the "greater effects are possible, but may backfire on you" clause which Miracle does not possess.
The possibilities of Miracle are also restricted by your deity. You can not create an effect that contradicts your deity's nature, which is arguably more restrictive than alignment. You are not restricted by what actions the deity might allow its followers to get away with as with an alignment restriction; rather, you are limited by what the deity itself wants personally.

[Feantar]

Perhaps love is a function of the soul and not the mind?

Just came to point out that, since Alignment is a function of the soul in D&D (ie, what the soul is made of) and Mindrape can force alignment change of the Instantaneous variety (as in, non-magical) it can clearly change the soul. So, even if love is a function of the soul, Mindrape changes that as well...

In generally, dnd seems to not hold to Mind / Soul duality much.

[Fero]

Just came to point out that, since Alignment is a function of the soul in D&D (ie, what the soul is made of) and Mindrape can force alignment change of the Instantaneous variety (as in, non-magical) it can clearly change the soul. So, even if love is a function of the soul, Mindrape changes that as well...

In generally, dnd seems to not hold to Mind / Soul duality much.

That is interesting. I wonder if the fact that alignment changes are easier to remove than changes to memory has any relevance. Either way, assuming convincing someone that they love BBEG is sufficient for Love's Pain, why not just use Suggestion on a friendless vagabond (or use non-magical deceit/propaganda)?

[Chronos]

I've never agreed with the interpretation that Shapechange gives an XP-free Wish every other round. When Mialee the Elf shapechanges into a Zodar, she's Mialee the Zodar. If she then changes to something else and back, she's still Mialee the Zodar, and has already used her once-per-year Wish.

That said, one XP-free Wish per year is still bonkers, because you only need one. And that's just one of the many, many tricks Shapechange allows (and all of which you can access with a single casting). So it's definitely still one of the top spells, likely #1 or #2, certainly one of the Top Ten.

[Anthrowhale]

Comments from others on Astral Projection are welcome. Aside from getting called and commanded via Greater Spirit Binding, there's a significant issue in the references to the material plane---it reads as if your body is transported to the material plane if you cast Astral Projection on some other plane. There's a significant security issue there.


The fact that your chain contingency can come into effect under different circumstances than your regular contingency is quite useful. You can have your regular contingency hold a defensive or escape spell, and your chain contingency hold triple-celerity or something. Then you don't have to pick between having an automatic getaway and novaing.


Also, quadrupling the number of contingencies you can have active at once is definitely not nothing.
Using Contingency often (i.e. every encounter) at high levels makes sense---you get to squeeze out an extra action every encounter and go first by triggering on Nerverskitter. You could consider using Chain Contingency for the same purpose, but (a) 9th level spells are always more contested by definition and (b) you can use Greater Arcane Fusion to pick up an action nova inside a single celerity, implying Contingency[Celerity[GAF[...]]] is comparable in effect to Chain Contingency[Celerity x3].

Contingency can also be used for occasional conditions as a safety system. In that case though, Chain Contingency seems to have little advantage over Craft Contingent Spell as (for example) you only need one spell to escape. It looks like Craft Contingent Item is a better use here---it costs a bit, but you can afford that and it allows you to set up to HD many condition->effect pairs.


"Other spells on the list" is not a particularly natural category.

It's what I'm looking at here. It seems very reasonable to also create class-specific lists should you wish to do so.


Which goes off when "you touch anything or anyone". That seems, uh, not great? Yeah, not great.

Where are you getting that quote from? My understanding is that as long as you don't use the hand holding the touch spell, it's fine. (Spellflower makes this explicit.)


It implies your plans are "disrupted" by having a disposable clone of you brought into the direct presence of one of your enemies where, even on the disfavorable reading of when you get SR, you can immediately break out and attack them (assuming they haven't done more CL boosting than you). That doesn't seem like terribly much disruption, even if we ignore the possibility of being immune.

It is possible that your character is so powerful that they can definitely deal with a preplanned ambush by the BBEG and his minions solo. This seems like a "why bother playing" kind of situation though, which isn't what you chose spells for. Stated another way, Astral Projection is like volunteering for a situation worse than Scry&Die, since at least there the bad guys typically have to deal with whatever friends happen to be accompanying you.


Wouldn't that also imply that, upon boosting your HD in this way, you can Dark Chaos Shuffle into Epic Spellcasting?

Plausibly, yes.


The spell mentions "unique beings" and "particular beings" as functioning in different ways.

That is not my understanding. Everything appears consistent if you treat these as synonyms, as they are in normal English. You can call a particular/unique being or you can call a kind of being. In the former case the being can choose whether or not to go through the gate while in the latter case they cannot.


Creatures can be immune (yes, Searing Spell bypasses, but at that point even CL 60 doesn't kill a Balor that makes its save), have spell resistance, be out of line of effect, or have Mettle.

Greater rods of energy substitution are 24.3K gp, which is quite affordable at this level. Spell resistance is typically bypassed with even modest caster level escalation. Mettle is rare and there are spell-based approaches to DC escalation. The line of effect issue can matter of course, but typically if you don't have line of effect to bad guys, they can't affect you either so it's simply an inappropriate time to use the effect. If you have any concerns about damage dealt, then of course you could easily use Spellflower to deliver multiples more damage.

The game-changing effect which Erupt gives you is an antidote to mass. The BBEG could bring a ginormous army of monsters to initiate a 1000:1 beatdown against the party. Erupt is a ('the' really) logical reason to not do so. There is a parallel with the development of modern warfare where it is well understood that concentrating troops is an invitation for their destruction. Adversaries must therefore respond with dispersion in space and time to prevent mass destruction. In a D&D setting, this means you are far more likely to have encounter size handfuls of creatures rather than the otherwise-logical approach of bringing massive power to bear.


...Plus holy word and the like compete with erupt as ways to kill people with a really high CL. The AoE is smaller, but it's a spread rather than a burst, and the kill is much more absolute.
The AoE is not just smaller---it's comically smaller. At caster level 40 for example, it's a factor of 1 million smaller. Given that difference, these seem like very different spells to me, employed in different ways to different effects. Erupt either wipes out the BBEGs army or forces the BBEG to use the army in a radically different manner far more amenable to tactical level spells like (indeed) Holy Word.


There are a variety of ways to do it and all of them are among the most broken effects in the game as a result.
Agreed.

Other effects out there can do it sooner and do it better.
What do you have in mind? Holy Word is killer, but it's a negligible volume and negligible range if you want a mass deterrence. Frostfell is a handy mass save-or-lose which provides a bump up in range and more useful volume. Control Weather is canceled by Control Weather and hence far from reliable. Evil Weather and Apocalypse from the Sky have more volume, but the effects seems unlikely to deter mass in most circumstances.

[AvatarVecna]

I think part of the issue is that it's not really "top 10 lvl 9 spells" it's "top 10 things you can do with 9th lvl spells, and the specific spells that are best at each of those things". That's why Erupt makes the list but Wish doesn't; Erupt is top of its field at army-clearing, and Wish isn't at the top of its field because Miracle exists.

[RandomPeasant]

I've never agreed with the interpretation that Shapechange gives an XP-free Wish every other round. When Mialee the Elf shapechanges into a Zodar, she's Mialee the Zodar. If she then changes to something else and back, she's still Mialee the Zodar, and has already used her once-per-year Wish.

I don't really buy that interpretation because it implies an ability you don't have can be expended. I think if you want to make an argument against Zodar shapechange it has to be "abilities aren't necessarily refreshed when you get them", which means zero usages of wish. But frankly I think that's motivated reasoning, and I really don't want to get into the "how does shapechange work" can of worms because that's the maybe the biggest single can of worms in the game.


Using Contingency often (i.e. every encounter) at high levels makes sense---you get to squeeze out an extra action every encounter and go first by triggering on Nerverskitter.

Not really. You might want to use contingency every day, but using it every encounter is still quite a few resources, even at high level. As a Wizard you never get more than four 6th level spells per day baseline, and you don't want to spend all of them on contingency. Having some for defensive buffs like energy immunity or utility effects like antimagic field is good. If you look at just the top ten list, there's five spells that aren't contigency you might want to use 6th level slots for.


Where are you getting that quote from? My understanding is that as long as you don't use the hand holding the touch spell, it's fine. (Spellflower makes this explicit.)

If you don’t discharge the spell in the round when you cast the spell, you can hold the discharge of the spell (hold the charge) indefinitely. You can continue to make touch attacks round after round. You can touch one friend as a standard action or up to six friends as a full-round action. If you touch anything or anyone while holding a charge, even unintentionally, the spell discharges. If you cast another spell, the touch spell dissipates. Alternatively, you may make a normal unarmed attack (or an attack with a natural weapon) while holding a charge. In this case, you aren’t considered armed and you provoke attacks of opportunity as normal for the attack. (If your unarmed attack or natural weapon attack doesn’t provoke attacks of opportunity, neither does this attack.) If the attack hits, you deal normal damage for your unarmed attack or natural weapon and the spell discharges. If the attack misses, you are still holding the charge.


It is possible that your character is so powerful that they can definitely deal with a preplanned ambush by the BBEG and his minions solo.

If your astral duplicate causes your BBEG to expend more than one 9th level spell, you are ahead on resources for the exchange. Because, like everything but attacking your cord and finding your body, the greater spirit binding trick doesn't do anything to "you".


This seems like a "why bother playing" kind of situation though

Yes those are the situations that good 9th level spells create. Why bother playing when you can time travel back before the BBEG even existed and re-write history so he doesn't? Why bother playing when you have an infinite army of duplicates, each among the most powerful beings in the world? Why bother playing when you can have any magic item you can describe five times a minute for three hours? Why bother playing when you can order any enemy that isn't a god to appear in your presence and do jumping jacks while you beat them to death? Why bother playing when nothing you do carries any personal risk and it is not meaningfully possible for you to lose?


That is not my understanding. Everything appears consistent if you treat these as synonyms, as they are in normal English. You can call a particular/unique being or you can call a kind of being. In the former case the being can choose whether or not to go through the gate while in the latter case they cannot.

It is not parsimonious to assume the text uses different words to refer to the same thing. The text says that you can name "a particular being or kind of being" and that it is then pulled through "willing or unwilling". It then later describes exceptions to that happening, but it uses different terminology ("Deities and unique beings").

But there's also a subtler problem. By my reading, the ability to ignore gates applies to categories of creature. Hextor or Dagon can refuse to come through a gate because they are, respectively, a deity and a unique being. Bob the Balor cannot, because while he is a particular being, he is not a unique being. Under your reading the immunity attaches to the way gate is used. Things can opt out if you call for them specifically, because that's calling for them as unique beings. But that implies that the immunity does not apply to categories of being. So I can ask for a being of the kind "god" and it has to come through the gate and obey. Frankly, that might be more broken than Free Vacation: No Save.


Greater rods of energy substitution are 24.3K gp, which is quite affordable at this level. Spell resistance is typically bypassed with even modest caster level escalation. Mettle is rare and there are spell-based approaches to DC escalation.

You seem to be assuming you will play an extremely optimized caster and fight monsters taken unmodified from the Monster Manual. Why would you assume that?


The game-changing effect which Erupt gives you is an antidote to mass. The BBEG could bring a ginormous army of monsters to initiate a 1000:1 beatdown against the party. Erupt is a ('the' really) logical reason to not do so.

erupt doesn't give you a counter to mass. Immunities do. If the BBEG sends a pack of 10th level casters after you, the fact that you can kill all of them when you act doesn't mean anything compared to the fact that some of them will beat your initiative, and you will fail your save against some of their death spells if you aren't immune.


The AoE is not just smaller---it's comically smaller. At caster level 40 for example, it's a factor of 1 million smaller.

Yes, I like spells that I can cast anywhere close to anything I care about. erupt's AoE is, frankly, too big. It only works if you can drop it on an army that is not anywhere near anything you care about, and if you are playing a high-op game that army is going to use teleportation circle (honestly as much of a contender as erupt) to go directly from its base, or quite possibly bases, to whatever it wants to attack and you want to defend.


I think part of the issue is that it's not really "top 10 lvl 9 spells" it's "top 10 things you can do with 9th lvl spells, and the specific spells that are best at each of those things". That's why Erupt makes the list but Wish doesn't; Erupt is top of its field at army-clearing, and Wish isn't at the top of its field because Miracle exists.

Even if you're doing that, erupt still has to beat out the best action economy (time stop or chain contingency), the best status removal (true resurrection), the best anti-magic (disjunction or effulgent epuration), and the combat spells that are good without needing a bunch of setup (weird, wail of the banshee, putrefaction, dominate monster, and so on), as pretty much all the really broken stuff has its own niche (you could maybe try to compress gate, ice assassin, and mindrape, but they all play to pretty different strengths). 9th is a very competitive level, and killing an army is not that important of a niche (nor, frankly, is erupt particularly stellar at killing a high-op army).

[Silva Stormrage]

Ya the argument that Erupt can be good because you can use a dragon magazine spell to apply free metamagic to it to boost it's effectiveness seems a bit weird. There is the argument already brought up that if you want it's damage to be viable you better not have any allies or things you want to protect in the area. But also at that level of optimization it's not going to destroy anything either.

Energy immunity is easy to get for anyone important, foresight or Weapon of Legacy with Cunning (Can't be flatfooted and isn't a divination effect) means you probably won't get it off without the enemy being aware of it. It doesn't break through walls of force so any fortification that is a threat to a high op wizard would probably just flat out ignore it if its made of Riverine or has a Wall of Force on it's exterior.

It feels like there are several different levels of optimization being discussed here. On one hand Astral Projection was dismissed as not being dangerous because any villain is going to have Greater Spirit Binding traps to spam out and immediately figure out when the wizard is astral projecting and set up a perfect ambush. But that same villain isn't going to have any defenses against a burst of AOE damage? Seriously Wings of Cover blocks Erupt, it's good but hardly perfect. Hell it can be argued that it wouldn't even affect flying enemies as it says it draws up lava from the ground and if you argue that it drags lava up a mile into the air and then drops you have another super dramatic effect of the spell that the designers just didn't mention for some reason. The spell doesn't create lava it is transmutation and even without CL boosts it would throw lava nearly 2k feet into the air and then have it drop which would be like a mini meteor hitting the area.

So ya put me down for Astral Projection above Erupt as well. Astral Projection can alone duplicate charged items and such like scrolls for free. Even if you are worried about Greater Spirit Binding you can just cast Astral Projection right before you attack somewhere. Unless your enemy has some epic level divinations that can get around Mind Blank or has greater spirit binding traps being spammed 24/7 every second for you specifically they won't have time to cast it. (Even then boosting saves is significantly easier than boosting save DC. You should be able to beat the DC of a will negates spell at this level fairly easily). They also have to know your actual name which isn't a guarantee if you hide your identity and they don't know who is working against them. So ya Greater Spirit Binding is a threat but not like a major one or something so effective I think it prevents all of Astral Projections other benefits. And even then if it is SO concerning or they have an unbeatable greater spirit binding trap set up or something. Just temporarily make yourself a lycanthrope of a battletitan or something similar via Wish or some other method. There you go free HD to boost yourself out of range of Greater Spirit Binding. Just cure yourself after the fight.

Hell the only reason I wouldn't put astral projection there is because a nightmare can cast the spell at will so its almost always worth it to use a nightmare to cast it instead of yourself but they are still using astral projection even if you can get it via lesser planar binding.

[Fero]

From the spells we have considered, I would roughly rank them as follows:

***Top Tier: These are the best of the best

Teleport Through Time: It's Time Travel

Shapechange: Free access to 5+ books of DM content for a longish duration.

Miracle: Lets Clerics spontaneously cast from 80% of the wizard and Druid catalogs.

Genesis: Get a shockingly good home base if you can define Planar traits. Note that "backward" may be a viable time trait (See e.g. the description of the Abyss's time trait in MP).

Hide Life: Pseudo Immortality. I don't see any major downside.


***Tier 2: Amazing spells, but not as world shattering as tier 1

Blinding Glory/Utterdark: Your enemies can't see all day long. Likely trivialize most, even high level, encounters.

Unname: As noted above, this is an underwhelming combat spell and there are better tools to prevent resurrection. However, the ability to fully delete mcguffins from existence is, to my knowledge, unique and extremely powerful.

True Resurrection: Death happens and level loss hurts. This spell probably increases the average level of most parties by a significant enough amount to include it on this list.

Putrification: I do not have access to this spell atm but the minionomancy aspect seems awesome. Do you control the undead? Any HD limits? Do the ghosts go with you if you teleport or plane shift?

***Tier 3: Stull amazing, but niche, have some significant glaw/s or can be mimicked/replaced by lower level spells:

Programmed Amnesia: Powerful but Dominate effects can provide similar value. Love's Pain combos are interesting but depend heavily on how your DM defines love. Also, you may be able to accomplish the same combo with lower level suggestion spells.

Foresight: Immune to flat footed is a big deal at high levels. However, there are a few other ways to get it. The Mark of the Stars feat grants the immunity, but is hard to aquire. The Fell Conspiracy Feat gives a pseudo immunity to being flat footed. Similarly, a few Weapons of Legacy give the immunity in exchange for some stat debuffs. Anything else?

Astral Projection: This is an exceedingly powerful spell that grants quasi Immortality and free item use. I would 100% include this but for the fact that it is easy to obtain at lower levels with spells such as Call Nightmare. Admittedly, the same thing is true with most spells on this list.

Eye of Power: Arcane Eye that you can cast through. This is an awesome effect, especially if you have some method to send the Eye long distances. However, some existing spells (Nightmare etc.) already work at infinite range, making me question what the practical uses of Eye of Power are. Does anyone have any ideas/experience with this spell?

Invoke Magic: As noted above, while casting in an AMF is fairly niche at lower levels, it becomes increasingly important at near-epic and epic levels. As such, I would argue it belongs in the top 10 when you get it. However, you can achieve similar results with a 3rd level Shrink Item hat trick, significantly reducing this spell's value.

Gate: This is a very powerful calling spell but expensive enough to prevent casual use.

Implore: Elder Evils are cool but I am not sure the extent to which this otherwise is better than Greater Planar Binding.

Ice Assassin: Spend a ton of gold and XP to get an Assassin that will almost always lose one on one fights against its original (who likely has gear and friends). You can try to order the Assassin to ignore its "all consuming" urge to hunt the original, but be careful with your instructions lest you give the DM an excuse to let the spell work as intended. Even if you succeed, RaW you lose control and the Assassin will "seek out its nemesis" once you are a mile apart.

Wish: This supremely powerful spell has a huge XP costs. For those rare builds that can bypass the cost, this is likely the best spell in the game. For everyone else, it is an expensive investment or gamble.

Shades: Has some amazing uses but lacks the raw power of the spells in Tier 1 and Tier 2.

Undermaster: This is an amazing target for persisting, but is relatively niche otherwise. Very flavorful and fun though.

Erupt: This seems like a niche direct damage spell for war scenarios. It can be augmented to be very good. However, similar efforts can yield better fruit with other spells.

Time Stop: Action economy is great but not unique or new and TS is not a huge upgrade over earlier bonus action spells.

End to Strife: Cool effect but limits the party as well as its foes.

Chain Contingency: Awesome effect but easy to mimic with Craft Contingent Spell, Spell Phylactery, etc.

Black Labyrinth (Shadowcaster): This is a potent castle defense spell but players seldom defend castles and DMs lose players if they force everyone to travel in random directions.

Transcend Mortality: Potent defenses that cost you your life. Good in some circumstances bit the DR/epic has a short shelf life.

Absorption: Good protection and some combos result in semi-infinite spell regeneration. However, lower level spells can create similar results with similar amounts of effort.

Precipitate Complete Breach: Can create some planar trait effects otherwise not accessible in your multiverse but is highly random and likely subsumed by Genesis.

Prismatic Sphere: The worst offense is a good defense. High level combat tends to be fast and mobile, limiting the usefulness for this supreme defensive spell.

Disjunction: Dispelling effects are always important and nothing does it better than Disjunction. The lost gear hurts however.

Did I miss any?

[remetagross]

I don't see why damage being dealt by a [Mind-Affecting] spell would not be blocked by immunity to [Mind-Affecting], no.

And yet, if a summoned Fire elemental starts clubbing a creature immune to [fire] damage, that creature will still take the regular bludgeoning, non-fire damage of the elemental's melee attack. Despite the fact that the summoning spell has the [fire] tag.


That is interesting. I wonder if the fact that alignment changes are easier to remove than changes to memory has any relevance. Either way, assuming convincing someone that they love BBEG is sufficient for Love's Pain, why not just use Suggestion on a friendless vagabond (or use non-magical deceit/propaganda)?

This is actually an excellent point.

[Beni-Kujaku]

And yet, if a summoned Fire elemental starts clubbing a creature immune to [fire] damage, that creature will still take the regular bludgeoning, non-fire damage of the elemental's melee attack. Despite the fact that the summoning spell has the [fire] tag.

You said it yourself, a creature is immune to fire damage, not to [fire] spells (note the difference between the descriptor and simply the type of damage. A [fire] spell can deal non-fire damage, and creatures immune to fire damage will still take the non-fire damage. the best example is Flame Strike). But a creature is immune to [mind-affecting] spells and effects, not specifically to damage from these spells. They are thus protected against all effects of spells with that descriptor.

[RandomPeasant]

Energy immunity is easy to get for anyone important

Immunity doesn't technically do it, because you can apply Searing Spell and pierce immunity. However, that halves your damage, which requires you to boost your CL even more for it to be effective. But SR from something that scales with a boosted caster level, an antimagic field, or getting Mettle somewhere (which is not trivial, but not impossible either if you're talking about a Serpent Kingdoms spell with a BoED metamagic applied by a Dragon Magazine spell).


On one hand Astral Projection was dismissed as not being dangerous because any villain is going to have Greater Spirit Binding traps to spam out and immediately figure out when the wizard is astral projecting and set up a perfect ambush.

One thing I hadn't mentioned that's worth pointing out here is that greater spirit binding has a 10 minute casting time, which gives you plenty of time (in terms of high-level combat) to adventure even if the BBEG starts casting as soon as you're an eligible target.


Astral Projection can alone duplicate charged items and such like scrolls for free.

This is also true. It's pretty abusable even if you never use it offensively. Having infinite replication of any item you buy is really, really strong.


Miracle: Lets Clerics spontaneously cast from 80% of the wizard and Druid catalogs.

This is good, but not remotely comparable to how broken the other spells are.


Programmed Amnesia: Powerful but Dominate effects can provide similar value. Love's Pain combos are interesting but depend heavily on how your DM defines love. Also, you may be able to accomplish the same combo with lower level suggestion spells.

mindrape is the point of reference here because it's Instantaneous, rather than programmed amnesia's Permanent. That means you don't have to worry about dispelling or AMFs or anything like that. That makes it extremely powerful, beating out dominate monster. I had been assuming programmed amnesia was Instantaneous too. Since it's not I think the ranking is probably mindrape > dominate monster > programmed amnesia. I think being able to use dominate monster in combat makes it more effective than a rewrite that's relatively easy to remove.


Foresight: Immune to flat footed is a big deal at high levels. However, there are a few other ways to get it. The Mark of the Stars feat grants the immunity, but is hard to aquire. The Fell Conspiracy Feat gives a pseudo immunity to being flat footed. Similarly, a few Weapons of Legacy give the immunity in exchange for some stat debuffs. Anything else?

As I've said the argument is not so much the immunity to flat footed as how powerful that "general idea of what action you might take to best protect yourself" means. Potentially it's very strong, but I sort of expect most DMs will not give you much for it. Without it I don't think it's anywhere close to a 9th level spell.


Gate: This is a very powerful calling spell but expensive enough to prevent casual use.

You get enough XP from an encounter at 20th level to come out ahead, especially since Free Vacation: No Save makes a lot of encounters completely risk-free.


Ice Assassin: Spend a ton of gold and XP to get an Assassin that will almost always lose one on one fights against its original (who likely has gear and friends). You can try to order the Assassin to ignore its "all consuming" urge to hunt the original, but be careful with your instructions lest you give the DM an excuse to let the spell work as intended. Even if you succeed, RaW you lose control and the Assassin will "seek out its nemesis" once you are a mile apart.

The costs don't really mean much. If you're going to be using ice assassin at all, you're almost certainly in a campaign where you can make as much gold as you want pretty trivially. The XP cost is harder to dodge, but if you're creating copies of yourself it doesn't matter, because those copies will get fresh XP counters to create more copies. If you're concerned about the nemesis-hunting backfiring on you, create one ice assassin of yourself, then have all the other ice assassin castings replicate that and keep the original on your person, but polymorph any object'd into a coin or something. Then anything that breaks control will have to come back into the control radius to get its killing done.


And yet, if a summoned Fire elemental starts clubbing a creature immune to [fire] damage, that creature will still take the regular bludgeoning, non-fire damage of the elemental's melee attack. Despite the fact that the summoning spell has the [fire] tag.

A summoned creature's attacks are not an effect of the spell summoning it.

[Chronos]

The problem with Ice Assassining yourself isn't just the range limit on the control. It's whether its "all-consuming drive" or your "absolute control" is stronger. A DM could easily rule either way, or maybe rule something like saying that since they're incompatible, it's impossible to make one of yourself.

[RandomPeasant]

The problem with Ice Assassining yourself isn't just the range limit on the control. It's whether its "all-consuming drive" or your "absolute control" is stronger. A DM could easily rule either way, or maybe rule something like saying that since they're incompatible, it's impossible to make one of yourself.

I don't really buy that argument. If the "all-consuming drive" overrides control, that seems like it must imply that an ice assassin is immune to, for instance, dominate monster which is unintuitive and bizarre. Plus, unless your DM goes all the way to "no ice assassin of yourself" (which seems like a houserule to me), you can always create one ice assassin of yourself and have all the others be of that one, which removes any concern of your mooks trying to kill you.

[remetagross]

You said it yourself, a creature is immune to fire damage, not to [fire] spells (note the difference between the descriptor and simply the type of damage. A [fire] spell can deal non-fire damage, and creatures immune to fire damage will still take the non-fire damage. the best example is Flame Strike). But a creature is immune to [mind-affecting] spells and effects, not specifically to damage from these spells. They are thus protected against all effects of spells with that descriptor.

Hmmm...I still think it's open-ended.

Suppose I hit a commoner with Confusion, and on their turn the random behaviour of the spell has them wailing on a nearby skeleton. Should the skeleton be immune to the damage caused by this attack since it's the effect of a [mind-affecting] spell?

[Chronos]

The damage isn't a result of a spell. It's the result of the club the commoner is wielding, which they could have wielded with or without the spell.

However, a commoner can't ordinarily deal damage to their loved one from halfway across the planet. That only happens as a result of the spell.

[Anthrowhale]

I think part of the issue is that it's not really "top 10 lvl 9 spells" it's "top 10 things you can do with 9th lvl spells, and the specific spells that are best at each of those things". That's why Erupt makes the list but Wish doesn't; Erupt is top of its field at army-clearing, and Wish isn't at the top of its field because Miracle exists.
This is roughly right---there's also a debate over what the top 10 categories are. Is army destruction a top-10 category? For an ECL-appropriate army, the answer is 'no': the average level is so far below the PCs they might as well not exist. On the other hand, an adventure typically has a series of encounters with ECL-appropriate monsters. If they are intelligent, as they often are at a high level, why wouldn't your next 30 encounters gang up?



You might want to use contingency every day, but using it every encounter is still quite a few resources, even at high level.

I'm skeptical here, if we are thinking about a standardish 4 encounters/day. In terms of spells available, I expect 6 6th level spells is a minimum at a high level (casting stat 30, not a specialist), 8 6th level spells seems reasonable, and you can imagine considerably if you are considering Power Leech. The other virtue here is that you can spam Nerveskitter without regretting a lost swift action. And of course if an encounter doesn't merit an extra action at the beginning, you can just not cast Nerveskitter.



Because, like everything but attacking your cord and finding your body, the greater spirit binding trick doesn't do anything to "you".

What if the BBEG nails you with Truename Dispel (to avoid wiping the Astral Projection while clearing out your buffs) and then Mindrapes you into spilling the secrets of your fortress and causing you to agree that slaughtering your allies is the best idea ever? Then, of course you "choose to return your spirit" and execute everyone else while they are still astral projecting and open up the front door for the BBEG to come in and take over.


It is not parsimonious to assume the text uses different words to refer to the same thing. The text says that you can name "a particular being or kind of being" and that it is then pulled through "willing or unwilling". It then later describes exceptions to that happening, but it uses different terminology ("Deities and unique beings").

The critical text here is:

By naming a particular being or kind of being as you cast the spell, you cause the gate to open in the immediate vicinity of the desired creature and pull the subject through, willing or unwilling. Deities and unique beings are under no compulsion to come through the gate...
If you believe in parsimony, "willing or unwilling" is completely superfluous to the sentence under your reading. Clearly, the editors were not going for parsimony. An alternative reading is: 'particular being or kind of being' is the target specification clause. In particular, you are allowed to call anything you can name like Jim-the-Balor or you can just call a generic "Balor" or even a generic "demigod". The "Deities and unique beings" clause then specifies that Jim-the-Balor and "demigod" need not come when called, but generic "Balor" has no choice.


Bob the Balor cannot, because while he is a particular being, he is not a unique being.

"Particular but not unique" seems internally inconsistent to me.


Under your reading ... I can ask for a being of the kind "god" and it has to come through the gate and obey.

No, because deities are also (and separately) excepted.


You seem to be assuming you will play an extremely optimized caster and fight monsters taken unmodified from the Monster Manual. Why would you assume that?

As a practical matter, there may be some DM NPCs in a game, but there probably aren't many, since that's challenging to specify.


erupt doesn't give you a counter to mass. Immunities do. If the BBEG sends a pack of 10th level casters after you, the fact that you can kill all of them when you act doesn't mean anything compared to the fact that some of them will beat your initiative, and you will fail your save against some of their death spells if you aren't immune.

Is the army CR10 creatures or CR20 creatures? I agree immunities are good for low-level enemies, but that's not the mass I was concerned with to begin with.


...erupt's AoE is, frankly, too big.

This is an issue.

...killing an army is not that important of a niche (nor, frankly, is erupt particularly stellar at killing a high-op army).
I'm not following---Erupt seems like the best thing available for killing a high-op army. Crank up the caster level, throw on Searing Spell or use Planar Sorcerer 5 (or both), spellflower a bunch of them, teleport in, apply multiple nukes. Not much is going to survive and it seems entirely reasonable to use multiple 9th level spells to clean out a high-op army, since it's presumably well over ECL20.


...Erupt...

A couple comments here: Mindworms is just used because it's a spell-based approach to applying metamagic. In general, there are many other approaches and there may not be a necessity to applying metamagic.

The other thing is that you seem to be imagining using Erupt vs. the BBEG. This seems like the wrong concept since there are many spells that are very good against a single creature. Instead, you should imagine using it vs. the BBEGs army.


...Astral Projection can alone duplicate charged items and such like scrolls for free...
That's an interesting point.

Unless your enemy has some epic level divinations that can get around Mind Blank
Minor side note: you can penetrate Mindblank pre-epic using Metafaculty (https://www.d20srd.org/srd/psionic/powers/metafaculty.htm).

They also have to know your actual name which isn't a guarantee if you hide your identity and they don't know who is working against them.
The "you must hide your identity" aspect of the game is interesting.

...its almost always worth it to use a nightmare to cast it instead of yourself...
Another interesting point.


***Top Tier:
Agreed here :-)


Blinding Glory/Utterdark: Your enemies can't see all day long. Likely trivialize most, even high level, encounters.

I'm not finding Blinding Glory that compelling. It's countered by a cantrip (No Light) and it's encountered by a mobile creature with a 2nd level spell (Darkness). Utterdark is similar: you can see through it with Ebon Eyes. Furthermore, the effect is not really disabling, so creatures can cast spells so they can see, switch to blindsight, etc...


Unname: As noted above, this is an underwhelming combat spell and there are better tools to prevent resurrection. However, the ability to fully delete mcguffins from existence is, to my knowledge, unique and extremely powerful.

This seems neat but niche to me.


True Resurrection: Death happens and level loss hurts. This spell probably increases the average level of most parties by a significant enough amount to include it on this list.

Why is the GPB[Planetar] approach uncompelling to you?


Putrification: I do not have access to this spell atm but the minionomancy aspect seems awesome. Do you control the undead? Any HD limits? Do the ghosts go with you if you teleport or plane shift?

You control the undead up to a limit given by your Cha. There are not HD limits. No, the ghosts don't go with you if you teleport. My understanding is that they can only make moves towards you if they are more than 30' away. As a consequence they may get stuck.


Gate: This is a very powerful calling spell but expensive enough to prevent casual use.

Ice Assassin: Spend a ton of gold and XP to get an Assassin that will almost always lose one on one fights against its original (who likely has gear and friends).

These spells complement each other since Gate is a short duration, yet long enough to provide a means to cast Ice Assassin. Even if the Ice Assassin of the Great Wyrm Prismatic Dragon is a bit more delicate than the original, it can curbstomp many ECL20 encounters.


Erupt: This seems like a niche direct damage spell for war scenarios. It can be augmented to be very good. However, similar efforts can yield better fruit with other spells.

What's an example of "similar efforts yielding better fruit with other spells" for the purpose of army disassembly?


Disjunction: Dispelling effects are always important and nothing does it better than Disjunction. The lost gear hurts however.
And what if you cast it at a minimal stat level?



One thing I hadn't mentioned that's worth pointing out here is that greater spirit binding has a 10 minute casting time, which gives you plenty of time (in terms of high-level combat) to adventure even if the BBEG starts casting as soon as you're an eligible target.

So Astral Projection for <10 minute windows is relatively safe.


The costs don't really mean much. If you're going to be using ice assassin at all, you're almost certainly in a campaign where you can make as much gold as you want pretty trivially. The XP cost is harder to dodge, but if you're creating copies of yourself it doesn't matter, because those copies will get fresh XP counters to create more copies. If you're concerned about the nemesis-hunting backfiring on you, create one ice assassin of yourself, then have all the other ice assassin castings replicate that and keep the original on your person, but polymorph any object'd into a coin or something. Then anything that breaks control will have to come back into the control radius to get its killing done.

It seems easier to just let the Ice Assassin[Ice Assasin[You]] kill Ice Assassin[you]. And a slightly better alternative is Ice Assassin[Searing Seed[You]]. It saves on the costs and adds a bit of oomph to the Ice Assassin.


However, a commoner can't ordinarily deal damage to their loved one from halfway across the planet. That only happens as a result of the spell.
Yeah, agree here---I think the [mind-affecting] tag technically applies to the damage. It is a nifty spell though, I could imagine using it to take out some strong minions who aren't immune to [mind-affecting] effects.

[RandomPeasant]

Suppose I hit a commoner with Confusion, and on their turn the random behaviour of the spell has them wailing on a nearby skeleton. Should the skeleton be immune to the damage caused by this attack since it's the effect of a [mind-affecting] spell?

It seems to me that the really obvious distinction is that the attack is an ability of a creature confusion is causing it to use, not a part of confusion directly. The damage dealt by love's pain is a part of the spell. It's worth noting that, while the loved one doesn't get SR or a save, they do ignore the spell if they're in an AMF. That seems to me to indicate that the damage is part of the spell's effect, and that relevant immunities would apply.


On the other hand, an adventure typically has a series of encounters with ECL-appropriate monsters. If they are intelligent, as they often are at a high level, why wouldn't your next 30 encounters gang up?

Probably teleport through time to back before they were born and convince their parents to use protection. Or use shapechange to turn into a Zodar and wish for a magic item that did use-activated Twinned celerity, permanent favor of the martyr, and command word holy word at a caster level of ten trillion, then take an unlimited number of actions to alternate between moving within 40ft of them and killing them. Or command my unbounded number of ice assassins to go mano-a-mano with them. Or wear them down with astral projections while they can't harm me. Or just walk up to them and have them fail to kill me because I cannot die until they find every part of me I have hide life'd. I suppose I could try to kill all of them with a burst that does a pretty large amount of damage, but I feel like that could end poorly for me if I have enemies who've heard of walls.


I'm skeptical here, if we are thinking about a standardish 4 encounters/day. In terms of spells available, I expect 6 6th level spells is a minimum at a high level (casting stat 30, not a specialist), 8 6th level spells seems reasonable, and you can imagine considerably if you are considering Power Leech.

Sure, it's not implausible that you could have six or eight 6th level spells (though likely not more than six that can cast contingency -- it's not like you're specializing in Evocation). But contingency isn't the only thing you want to do with those. You might want an antimagic field to throw out in situations where that's useful (or simply as part of your buff routine, if you're one of those Initiate of Mystra or Extraordinary Spell Aim types). You might want energy immunity in case you run into dragons or nasty planar environments or other sources of energy damage. You might want eyes of the oracle as another source of extra actions. You might want heal for some all-purpose status removal. You might have a familiar and wish to cast imbue familiar with spell ability on it. You might want superior resistance or greater anticipate teleportation or starmantle or empyreal ecstasy, as they're all good defensive effects. Perhaps your party's beatstick prefers a form with the [Cold] subtype and you can make some use of algid enhancement. You can even make a case to walk around with planar binding prepared, because it gives you an enormous amount of versatility if you have enough downtime to use it during an adventuring day. You certainly can make aggressive use of contingency, but it comes at a real cost even as a 20th level character.

I'm not even sure power leech helps your case that much. Yes, you can prepare way more spells. But that's true at every spell level, and you also have way higher DCs. So it seems to me that you'd rather have foresight up so you're never surprised and churn out celerity via greater arcane fusion, because that gets you +2 standards for an 8th level slot (or +5 for a 9th if you can get Twin down to +1) instead of +1 for a 6th level slot (and, unlike celerity, it can be repeated for credit). Then you just crank up the DC on a rainbow of offensive sixth level spells at assume something beats your enemy's immunities.


What if the BBEG nails you with Truename Dispel (to avoid wiping the Astral Projection while clearing out your buffs) and then Mindrapes you into spilling the secrets of your fortress and causing you to agree that slaughtering your allies is the best idea ever?

I suppose you would probably be pretty hosed. Of course, that's because you want to use contingency offensively instead of just having a dispel magic set to "whenever someone does something to my astral duplicate that would effect me". That would automatically end the astral projection, as a caster dispels their own spells without fail.


If you believe in parsimony, "willing or unwilling" is completely superfluous to the sentence under your reading.

No it's not. You can be willing to be pulled, and without that clause "what happens if the creature doesn't want to come" is indeterminate.


"Particular but not unique" seems internally inconsistent to me.

Not at all. "My copy of the Monster Manual" is a particular book. "The collectible copy of the Monster Manual signed by the original design team for a charity auction" is a unique book. You can ask me for "a copy of the Monster Manual", or "RandomPeasant's Monster Manual", or "the signed Monster Manual" and those are all distinct sorts of requests. gate allows you to force the first two and makes both the third and giving you the signed book in response to the first optional.


No, because deities are also (and separately) excepted.

It's the same exception. I do not believe that a standard where different words refer to the same thing, but the same clause works in different ways, is a reasonable foundation on which to build an interpretation of the rules.


As a practical matter, there may be some DM NPCs in a game, but there probably aren't many, since that's challenging to specify.

As a practical matter, it is hard to run a campaign where players are allowed to learn and cast ice assassin, teleport through time, shapechange, mindrape, wish, hide life, astral projection, genesis, and gate. Nevertheless, the DM is apparently soldiering on.


Is the army CR10 creatures or CR20 creatures? I agree immunities are good for low-level enemies, but that's not the mass I was concerned with to begin with.

You need immunities in either case. Some of your enemies are going to act before you do, and if you want to win "1000:1" iterative probability means you need to be immune.


I'm not following---Erupt seems like the best thing available for killing a high-op army.

There are like four ways to be immune to erupt and none of them are particularly complicated or esoteric. An army that can't muster any of them (let alone the complicated or esoteric solutions like having everybody cast hide life) is not a high-op army.


Why is the GPB[Planetar] approach uncompelling to you?

Because there are levels above 6th where we have a list of spells that contains elements other than planar binding.

In fairness, I will note that this argument means wish gets into the "unambiguously on the list" section (though I still think it's sort of silly to list it separately from miracle -- one is better at low op, one is better at high op, functionally they are very close to the same in most cases).

[Chronos]

Unname would also erase someone who's Astral Projecting. Though, yeah, if you're routinely using Astral Projection, a Contingency to dispel it on yourself when needed would be a decent idea (might need some fine-tuning for the trigger condition).

And while I do agree that army-killing is a worthwhile niche, I don't agree that that puts Erupt on the Top Ten list, because there are other spells that do the job at lower levels. Sure, Erupt does the job better, but is it enough better to justify a 9th-level slot? Is it enough better to be considered one of the top 10 9th-level spells, peer to the likes of Shapechange, Genesis, and Miracle? I think not.

[RandomPeasant]

Unname would also erase someone who's Astral Projecting. Though, yeah, if you're routinely using Astral Projection, a Contingency to dispel it on yourself when needed would be a decent idea (might need some fine-tuning for the trigger condition).

It's worth point out that, even if you don't ever put the copy in harm's way, astral projection is still extremely abusable. It duplicates all your items every time you use it. That's insanely powerful! For instance: you know the trick where you use absorption, a bunch of metamagic reduction, and some minions to get unlimited spells? astral projection does that with just some pearls of power. Plus, if you have a scroll of a spell that makes money, astral projection is an infinite money loop to buy you all the pearls you need for that particular trick.

Also, from the other side, while there are ways you can attack the astral copy that spill over to the original, those ways work on someone who isn't using astral projection too. Yes, someone could pop truename dispel + mindrape or unname or the like. But they could also do that if you personally showed up to fight them. Like hide life, astral projection doesn't make you literally invincible. But it makes you way less vincible, and astral projection is also a wealth loop.


And while I do agree that army-killing is a worthwhile niche, I don't agree that that puts Erupt on the Top Ten list, because there are other spells that do the job at lower levels. Sure, Erupt does the job better, but is it enough better to justify a 9th-level slot? Is it enough better to be considered one of the top 10 9th-level spells, peer to the likes of Shapechange, Genesis, and Miracle? I think not.

Again, this is the issue. 9th is an insanely competitive level. It would be an insanely competitive level if you excluded the game-destroyingly broken spells. erupt is a good spell. But "it's good against large groups of enemies if you do a bunch of work and they don't have any of the relevant defenses" doesn't cut it when the competitors are "the entire game shatters like glass". 9th level is so stacked that erupt would have a tough time making it in if you excluded the completely broken spells (to be clear, I think it probably does then, but it's in the bottom half).

[Crichton]

while there are ways you can attack the astral copy that spill over to the original, those ways work on someone who isn't using astral projection too. Yes, someone could pop truename dispel + mindrape or unname or the like. But they could also do that if you personally showed up to fight them.


That's exactly it. Those things don't count as a strike against Astral Projection, they're just things an opponent with access to them could do to you or anyone who showed up to fight them, regardless of AP or not.

I'm also not entirely convinced that Greater Spirit Binding even works on your astrally projected self. Yes, according to Complete Divine's sidebar, you'd count as a 'spirit' but that's only for purposes of a Spirit Shaman's abilities that focus on 'spirits.' GSB specifies that it only works on 'spirit creatures' and your astrally projected self isn't a separate creature, and your actual you isn't a 'spirit creature' either. The sidebar in CD even differentiates between astral forms and 'creatures with the [spirit] subtype', etc. I don't think I'd rule that you, nor your astrally projected self, count as a 'spirit creature' unless there's some other rules text somewhere else that clearly state that you are. And on top of all that, even if it does apply, GSB has a very long casting time, a Will save to negate, and potentially SR:Yes to escape, in addition to being able to potentially use extradimensional travel to escape, or even a regular Charisma contest (a well prepared caller can defend against these, yes, but it's by no means perfect). Additionally it only works on one creature at a time, so it's no defense against your party members coming to rescue you.

By the time you're worrying about an NPC enemy who's so highly optimized that you think they might use a WuJen 8 spell, AND Truename Dispel AND Mindrape AND Unname etc on you (nevermind getting access to all of those things in one character), you really shouldn't be concerned with things that let you save to negate, and also have SR, and also have long casting times during which you can be murdalizing the NPC who's trying to cast GSB. They'd also have to know who you are and know your correct truename, and know that/when you're astrally projecting to use GSB to summon/call and bind you ahead of time, casting it at some point after you cast AP, but before you show up and wreck them, and even then you get a save and SR to negate them.

I feel like we have a massive disconnect in what differing optimization levels contribute to the various spells on the list. On the one hand we're discounting Astral Projection as a 'probably not' solely due to a dubious vulnerability to GSB, which has basic built-in negations to protect the astral projecting character, but we're including Erupt and Ice Assassin and Mindrape, assuming that they include optimization assistance from Uncanny Forethought or Dweomerkeeper or Energy Immunity or Purify Spell or Mindworms Chain Spell, etc




doesn't make you literally invincible. But it makes you way less vincible


This is my new favorite phrase to use to describe high-op defenses

[AvatarVecna]

The only thing Astral Projection makes you more vulnerable to is githyanki silver swords. Which, in fairness, becomes a "no save just die" if they happen across your astral thread?

[Crichton]

The only thing Astral Projection makes you more vulnerable to is githyanki silver swords. Which, in fairness, becomes a "no save just die" if they happen across your astral thread?

Yeah, it's always seemed to me that the whole silver thread thing is basically there solely to provide the DM a quick pre-justified 'nope' button to keep you from getting too big for your (astral) britches. You're entirely unkillable except for this one specific and obscure weakness, but if that one specific obscure thing is utilized it's a simple immediate autokill

[Anthrowhale]

I swapped Erupt->Astral Projection as I'm now convinced the downsides are addressable.

In terms of disputes, Fero is advocating for a few alternatives, and I have some outstanding questions to him above. Are there others to be concerned with?



Of course, that's because you want to use contingency offensively instead of just having a dispel magic set to "whenever someone does something to my astral duplicate that would effect me".

That's interesting. Contingency[Called][Dispel Magic on Astral Form] is the proposal. I'd probably do it as a Craft Contingent Spell just because I like making more use of Contingency. My understanding is that contingency doesn't interrupt like a readied action, but even if the call completes you can dispel yourself away before any other actions occur.


You can be willing to be pulled, and without that clause "what happens if the creature doesn't want to come" is indeterminate.

I disagree here. "...you cause the gate to open in the immediate vicinity of the desired creature and pull the subject through..." seems determinate.


..."My copy of the Monster Manual"...

This seems like an inequivalent example to me since copies of the MM are intentionally identical while creatures (and their personalities) almost certainly are not.

Regardless, this seems like a stale argument---neither of us are arguing that Gate should not be in the top 10.


It's the same exception.

I'm not following.


You need immunities in either case.

I'm not disputing the desirability of immunities.



And while I do agree that army-killing is a worthwhile niche, I don't agree that that puts Erupt on the Top Ten list, because there are other spells that do the job at lower levels. Sure, Erupt does the job better, but is it enough better to justify a 9th-level slot? Is it enough better to be considered one of the top 10 9th-level spells, peer to the likes of Shapechange, Genesis, and Miracle? I think not.
Noted.



Yes, someone could pop truename dispel + mindrape or unname or the like. But they could also do that if you personally showed up to fight them.

That's exactly it. Those things don't count as a strike against Astral Projection, they're just things an opponent with access to them could do to you or anyone who showed up to fight them, regardless of AP or not.
I agree these effects can be used in combat, but I believe the "you are called" situation is far worse because it isolates you from allies on your adversary's timetable.



I'm also not entirely convinced that Greater Spirit Binding even works on your astrally projected self.
You can go with multiple definitions of spirit in the game... it seems complex and unlikely to be the way things work at many tables.


The only thing Astral Projection makes you more vulnerable to is githyanki silver swords. Which, in fairness, becomes a "no save just die" if they happen across your astral thread?
Silver Swords are a menace, but at least they have to get proximally close for use implying a real risk of being subject to counterattack. GSB is a multiplanar effect.

[Chronos]

Quoth Anthrowhale:

I agree these effects can be used in combat, but I believe the "you are called" situation is far worse because it isolates you from allies on your adversary's timetable.
Or you can argue exactly the opposite: Anyone who has the motive, means, and opportunity to do that to you is someone you really want to deal with, probably sooner rather than later. They're probably someone it's worth going through an entire adventure to reach, to deal with them. And here, they're skipping you right to the boss fight end of the adventure, without all the trouble to find and reach them. And they're not actually doing it to you; they're doing it to a disposable copy of you, so even if you die in the fight, no foul, that was just for practice. That's an opportunity you should be grateful for.

[RandomPeasant]

GSB specifies that it only works on 'spirit creatures' and your astrally projected self isn't a separate creature, and your actual you isn't a 'spirit creature' either.

Thinking about it, it seems like there's an inconsistency between using greater spirit binding to capture someone who's astrally projecting and using spells like unname or mindrape to permanently effect someone by targeting their astral duplicate. If astral-you is a different creature from material-you (which it must be to be subject to greater spirit binding), then there's no reason to think that doing something nasty to astral-you would effect material-you at all. Something like "mindrape the astral copy into revealing all the original's secrets" would work in any case, but RAW simulacrum and ice assassin at least arguably get the original's memories, so it's not really a new attack surface.


The only thing Astral Projection makes you more vulnerable to is githyanki silver swords. Which, in fairness, becomes a "no save just die" if they happen across your astral thread?

It's a no save death effect, but it only makes you regular dead, and if you have access to astral projection you should also have access to death pact and/or true resurrection, which make death easy to deal with. You can also set up contingency to hit you with dispel magic if someone with a silver sword comes near your cord (though if you only have one contingent effect, having a way to end your astral projection if someone threatens lasting consequences is more important). Or you can just use both astral projection and hide life and ignore "damage or a spell effect would normally render you disabled, dying, or dead", though there's a fair interpretation that breaking the cord ends the effect even if it doesn't kill you.

Ultimately, your DM probably can stop you from using astral projection offensively if he declares that githyanki killsquads are patrolling the astral plane waiting to gank anyone who uses it. However, that only mitigates a part of the power of astral projection. Preparing astral projection and owning a 9th level pearl of power is still an infinite loop that allows you to use any charged item you own every 30 minutes, which is game-breaking with anything that has lasting effects. Getting to use a scroll of hide life or ice assassin or some other spell with expensive components infinitely is pretty broken, even if you have to take normal risks while adventuring.


This seems like an inequivalent example to me since copies of the MM are intentionally identical while creatures (and their personalities) almost certainly are not.

My copy of the Monster Manual has a particular pattern of wear and tear that other copies of the Monster Manual do not. You might also think in terms of coins, where various quarters might have particular state designs on the back. A Washington or Colorado or New Hampshire quarter is different from other quarters, but not unique in any sense that does not apply to every existing object.


I agree these effects can be used in combat, but I believe the "you are called" situation is far worse because it isolates you from allies on your adversary's timetable.

It isolates you from your allies, but it also puts you in the presence of that enemy, and only a SR check away from being free to act against them. Would you put yourself on the other end of that voluntarily?

[AvatarVecna]

I went to check out Greater Spirit Binding finally to see if it was actually worth worrying about and I'm baffled that anyone would consider this a solid counter to Astral Projection. It's a targeted spell. Spellblades exist.

[Fero]

Blinding Glory: At CL 20 this creates a 2,000 radius area of light that blinds evil creatures allowing neither save nor SR. Note that undead and constructs are NOT immune. Even creatures with magic immunity are affected as the spell is SR: No. The huge AoE moves with you so you get the benefit of the spell all day long. The AoE is a spread so cover etc. is mostly useless and you can easily blind an entire dungeon as you walk in the entrance.

Blinded is a brutal debuff that removes almost all ranged combat ability and significantly impairs melee. Removing the blindness does basically nothing as the spell will simply reapply the condition as long as the evil foes is in the AoE.

By CL 20, many (I would guess roughly 50%) of foes have alternate ways to pinpoint foes (blindsense, tremorsense, very high listen checks, etc.) However, those abilities typically operate at relatively short ranges. As such, I see Blinding Glory as a spell that, at least against evil foes, trivialize roughly 90% of enemies in long range encounters and roughly 50% of enemies at closer ranges. Even the evil foes that can still "see" are significantly debuffed as tremorsense and the like tend to be easy to trick (flight stops tremorsense, Silence stops blindsight, various alchemical items stop Scent, etc.)

No magic darkness counters or dispels Blinding Glory so Darkness would not do anything (even assuming your foe knew to cast it before you move within 2,000 feet). No Light is interesting b/c it is not a "[darkness]" spell. However, No Light only works on "normal light sources" and the light spell specifically. As such, it would be a stretch to apply it to Blinding Glory.

In summary, Blinding Glory dramatically reduces the combat effectiveness of any evil foes that you encounter during the day you cast the spell.

Utterdark: On reviewing the LoM revisions to the spell, I remove it from consideration (largely b/c the AoE no longer centers on the caster).

Unname: The ability to fully delete a McGuffin from reality is admittedly niche. However, it is also very powerful when it applies and is, to my knowledge, unique to this spell. This is not a practical spell for adventuring but can change the long term fate of an entire campaign setting.

True Resurrection: I don't think we should exclude spells b/c we can replicate them with the X Binding family of spells. If we did, we would have to delete virtually every spell from these lists. After all, we could just GSB the ghost of an 18th level wizard or cleric to cast everything for us. As a practical matter, True Res is one of theist important 9th level spells and significantly improves the average level of many parties.

Putrification: The limits on the number of ghosts you can control is a bummer, as is the limited area of control. I would not want to give up teleporting to keep my ghosts in formation. Do similar restrictions apply to the zombies? Zombies can actually be very powerful and are worth looking into.

Gate: I don't have much to add here. It is very powerful but the XP cost stings with regular use. Even if the encounter yields more than 1,000 xp, you will still fall behind the other players.

Ice Assassin: I think people are playing with fire with this spell. The spell includes enough RaW that supports its intended function (assassin) that you will have to spend the rest of the campaign carefully considering your actions to prevent it from chasing the original.

Disjunction: Can you choose to cast at a lower stat or would you have to actually lower the stat? In the later case, reducing your spell DCs and spell slots seems like a risky trade unless you are certain you will cast disjunction very soon.

[RandomPeasant]

I think disjunction still takes the slot even if you can't voluntarily lower your casting stat. It's dispelling, except unlike regular dispelling it doesn't put you in a caster level arms race that you lose. Yes, blowing up loot sucks, but if you're a high-op 20th level caster you can just WBLmancy it back.

ice assassin is simply too powerful to ignore, and "absolute control" is pretty clear-cut. As noted, there are ways to work around the assassin's desire to kill you, and you only need a few for it to be absolutely insane.

[Crichton]

If astral-you is a different creature from material-you (which it must be to be subject to greater spirit binding)

Except that it isn't a different creature from material-you. I think you've hit on the key problem with GSB and AP here. The 'astral body' that AP makes isn't a different creature from you, it's not even a creature at all. It's a puppet body that you control, via your remote control silver cord. And since it's not a creature, it most certainly can't be a 'spirit creature' to be targetable by GSB. Your astral body isn't a clone or simulacrum or ice assassin. It's not a duplicate creature with a copy of your stats and memories, it's just a puppet body with a duplicate of your equipment. Your astral body can't be interrogated separately from your actual self, via magic or anything else.




You can go with multiple definitions of spirit in the game... it seems complex and unlikely to be the way things work at many tables.

Not the term 'spirit' no. That term isn't the one in question. The term that needs to be questioned is 'spirit creature' which is a different thing. In order to be a 'spirit creature' you'd have to be a creature with the [spirit] subtype, or have the words 'is a spirit creature' somewhere in the creature's applicable rules entry.

Additionally, the sidebar you're citing from CD prefaces itself by saying it applies to spirit shaman's abilities and does not claim that it applies to anything else at all:

"Several of the spirit shaman’s abilities affect spirits. For purposes of the spirit shaman’s ability, a “spirit” includes any of the following creatures"

GSB isn't a spirit shaman ability, it's a WuJen spell from a different book entirely. This sidebar doesn't apply

Add to that the fact that the astral body isn't a creature at all so it isn't targetable, and I don't see how GSB could be used to call the astral body to the caster. Even if it did, AP states that "The spell lasts until you desire to end it," so you can end the projection at any time at all.


Unless you're claiming that GSB can be used to call your actual self from your safe space in which you're casting AP? I don't see any way that would work, so I don't see GSB as applicable to AP at all

[Anthrowhale]

And here, they're skipping you right to the boss fight end of the adventure, without all the trouble to find and reach them. And they're not actually doing it to you; they're doing it to a disposable copy of you, so even if you die in the fight, no foul, that was just for practice. That's an opportunity you should be grateful for.

It isolates you from your allies, but it also puts you in the presence of that enemy, and only a SR check away from being free to act against them. Would you put yourself on the other end of that voluntarily?
This seems like a great story but terrible tactics. The story aspect is nontrivial in a roleplaying game, but the tactic of voluntarily walking into an ambush solo is perhaps the worst imaginable in real life.


If astral-you is a different creature from material-you (which it must be to be subject to greater spirit binding), then there's no reason to think that doing something nasty to astral-you would effect material-you at all.

Does a character earn experience while astrally projecting? Most would say "yes", I believe.


I went to check out Greater Spirit Binding finally to see if it was actually worth worrying about and I'm baffled that anyone would consider this a solid counter to Astral Projection. It's a targeted spell. Spellblades exist.
The "direct at a new target" option has some interesting possibilities.



No magic darkness counters or dispels Blinding Glory so Darkness would not do anything (even assuming your foe knew to cast it before you move within 2,000 feet). No Light is interesting b/c it is not a "[darkness]" spell. However, No Light only works on "normal light sources" and the light spell specifically. As such, it would be a stretch to apply it to Blinding Glory.

The line I worry about is:

Blinding glory brought into an area of magical darkness (or vice versa), including an utterdark spell, is temporarily negated, so that the otherwise prevailing light conditions exist in the overlapping areas of effect.
My understanding is that Blinding Glory (a 9th level spell) is "temporarily negated" in the are of No Light (a cantrip), and that any evil creature possessing a rock that has Darkness (a second level spell) cast on it can move and attack within the AoE of Blinding Glory while retaining vision.


Unname: The ability to fully delete a McGuffin from reality is admittedly niche. However, it is also very powerful when it applies and is, to my knowledge, unique to this spell. This is not a practical spell for adventuring but can change the long term fate of an entire campaign setting.

Deleting the one ring does seem pretty powerful, although I guess you can do that with Disjunction as well.


True Resurrection: I don't think we should exclude spells b/c we can replicate them with the X Binding family of spells. If we did, we would have to delete virtually every spell from these lists. After all, we could just GSB the ghost of an 18th level wizard or cleric to cast everything for us. As a practical matter, True Res is one of theist important 9th level spells and significantly improves the average level of many parties.

I'm not seeing the "improves average level of many parties". If a body is missing, you could use a Ring of 3 Wishes(oddly, buildable with Miracle) via Astral Projection to create a body, and once you have a body there are several options for bringing back the dead without level loss. What's the new thing you can do here?


Putrification: The limits on the number of ghosts you can control is a bummer, as is the limited area of control. I would not want to give up teleporting to keep my ghosts in formation. Do similar restrictions apply to the zombies? Zombies can actually be very powerful and are worth looking into.

The zombies seem less restricted, but I'm not seeing how zombies matter much at this level.



Gate: I don't have much to add here. It is very powerful but the XP cost stings with regular use. Even if the encounter yields more than 1,000 xp, you will still fall behind the other players.

Ice Assassin: I think people are playing with fire with this spell. The spell includes enough RaW that supports its intended function (assassin) that you will have to spend the rest of the campaign carefully considering your actions to prevent it from chasing the original.

Suppose for example you Gate a Great Wyrm Prismatic Dragon (https://www.d20srd.org/srd/epic/monsters/dragonEpic.htm#prismaticDragon) (caster level 40), and then kill it with a vorpal sword + Surge of Fortune + Sense Weakness combo. You have lots of body parts, so you can make an ice statue of GWPD and scribe a scroll of Ice Assassin. Then you can astrally project to the astral plane and cast Ice Assassin off the scroll to create a GWPD minion. Then you can do it again, and again, and again. The result has no unsatisfied homicidal tendencies while being an extraordinarily robust and capable minion.


Even if it did, AP states that "The spell lasts until you desire to end it," so you can end the projection at any time at all.
Traveling companions can't end it though.

[Crichton]

Traveling companions can't end it though.

Ummmm... Why would they need to? I'm super confused by this response. I'm also super confused why it's the one minor point you chose to respond to, ignoring all the rest?

[RandomPeasant]

This seems like a great story but terrible tactics. The story aspect is nontrivial in a roleplaying game, but the tactic of voluntarily walking into an ambush solo is perhaps the worst imaginable in real life.

It's terrible tactics if the ambush can kill you. The point here is that it can't. The whole reason astral projection is so powerful is that it creates disposable pawns with your capabilities, and the bottom line of your concern is "what if the disposable pawn was put in the presence of one of your enemies".


Does a character earn experience while astrally projecting? Most would say "yes", I believe.

Sure. And that implies that "astral you" is the same creature as "regular you", which means it is not subject to greater spirit binding, because "regular you" is not a spirit creature. So the whole ambush scenario evaporates in a puff.


Traveling companions can't end it though.

Is there any reason to think ending it for you doesn't end it for them?

[Beni-Kujaku]

On the whole Greater Spirit Binding thing:
Spirit was a subtype in OA, explicitly said to make the creature affected by spells affecting spirits. Nowhere in the book is it implied that anything without the spirit subtype is a spirit, and every previous creature that is supposed to be a spirit in Rukongai (like the ghost) is explicitly given the subtype. There was no update to that definition in either Dragon #318 or Complete Arcane where GSB appeared. The definition of the subtype even reads "Spirit creatures include some feys and elementals, outsiders, undead and even dragons", implying not all feys and elementals should get the subtype, contrary to the Complete Divine definition. I don't get how the Complete Divine definition (as a reminder, published more than 3 years later), explicitly only applying to the Spirit Shaman's abilities, increases the number of creatures that can be bound by Spirit Binding. The subtype definition encourages DMs to apply this subtype to other creatures, but it shouldn't be the default. All feys shouldn't be spirits the same way all outsiders shouldn't be spirits.

Also, yeah, spellblades exist, are cheap, and can be copied using Astral Projection, so it's basically a non-issue anyway, but I just wanted to say that.

[Gusmo]

Random shout out to invoke magic with the level 4 version of dismissal (exorcism or balance domains), if you can get it. Casting dismissal on yourself is an excellent escape tool, if you're playing with the more lenient interpretation of invoke magic.

[remetagross]

Okay, fair enough about the Love's Pain argument.

[Gusmo]

I think that Unname deserves consideration. At this level, any enemy of any significance is almost guaranteed to have allies capable of casting Raise Dead, and is likely to have allies capable of Resurrection or True Resurrection. Which means that for most of them, death is a mere inconvenience. Unname addresses the niche of when you want an enemy really, truly gone.

As mentioned in the 8th level thread, there are ways to make the True Speech check. They require multiple other spells to set up, so you're probably not casting this in the middle of battle. But if you can incapacitate your enemy some other (temporary) way, then you can take the time to buff up your skills and finish them off.

This also makes me think of necrotic termination. The necrotic cyst line of spells is interesting in other ways, for instance necrotic domination isn't enchantment or mind-affecting. Necrotic empowerment is a +8 enhancement bonus to dex/int/wisdom if you can finagle a way to keep it up.

[Anthrowhale]

Ummmm... Why would they need to?
Well, if they were called by GSB, they may be in a bad situation.

I'm also super confused why it's the one minor point you chose to respond to, ignoring all the rest?
The argument that Astral Projection should be included in the top 10 was won, so the subargument seems irrelevant. Also, I debates about whether a [spirit] creature is a spirit creature just don't interest me.


Is there any reason to think ending it for you doesn't end it for them?
Well, AP says:

These fellow travelers are dependent upon you and must accompany you at all times. If something happens to you during the journey, your companions are stranded wherever you left them.
So "getting called" could be a form of "something happens to you". There's some DM judgement here.


On the whole Greater Spirit Binding thing:
Maybe there are DMs with multiple definitions of spirit used in their game. And maybe there are some that do not have such. From the RAW legal standpoint, Complete Divine was published after Dragon #318 and hence could be regarded as an update to a singular-definition DM. Complete Arcane was also published after Complete Divine.

Also, yeah, spellblades exist, are cheap, and can be copied using Astral Projection, so it's basically a non-issue anyway, but I just wanted to say that.
Spellblades do seem like a counter.


This also makes me think of necrotic termination. The necrotic cyst line of spells is interesting in other ways, for instance necrotic domination isn't enchantment or mind-affecting. Necrotic empowerment is a +8 enhancement bonus to dex/int/wisdom if you can finagle a way to keep it up.
Again, stab someone with a Thinuan blade and then hide the blade to keep the bad guys from coming back.

The other Necrotic Cyst spells are all strong, but didn't quite make the cut. Necrotic Tumor was the closest.

[Chronos]

I still think Teleport Through Time shouldn't be on the list. Yes, it's tremendously powerful, possibly more so than any other spell on the list... but the problem is who gets that power. It gives its power, not to the caster, but to the DM. It's the DM who decides how time travel works in the first place in their game, and however they decide, it's also the DM who implements how it works. Casting Teleport Through Time basically forces the DM to railroad you, in order to make it resolvable at all.

[Fero]

I still think Teleport Through Time shouldn't be on the list. Yes, it's tremendously powerful, possibly more so than any other spell on the list... but the problem is who gets that power. It gives its power, not to the caster, but to the DM. It's the DM who decides how time travel works in the first place in their game, and however they decide, it's also the DM who implements how it works. Casting Teleport Through Time basically forces the DM to railroad you, in order to make it resolvable at all.

I don't understand why time travel forces the DM to railroad the players. In a lot of ways time travel seems analogous to the low level party going the opposite direction than the DM predicted to the portions of the map that have no pre-built content. Plenty of DMs are happy to wing it

[Chronos]

Well, it only forces the DM to railroad if you're doing anything actually interesting with it. If the players use the spell to go back to the long-past Age of Heroes ten thousand years ago, well, that's just a different adventure setting, and everything proceeds as normal. Either they fail in what they're doing, or they succeed and turn out to actually be among the heroes that age was noted for. Nothing about the game actually changes... but then, a spell that means that nothing actually changes isn't a Top Ten spell.

On the other hand, if a player does something like using Teleport Through Time to help himself in a past battle, well, how do you run that? The DM can say "Well, since you didn't see yourself popping in to help yourself, it obviously didn't happen, so let's figure out what happened in that time that prevented it from happening". The DM can say "Hey, remember how at the last moment, the enemy that was about to kill you got distracted and you were able to escape? That distraction was time-traveling you.". The DM can say "OK, you go back, but your interference changes the timeline in such a way that your flower got crushed before you could use the spell, so now you can't go back after all, and your changes to the past are erased and now it's just like it was before you cast the spell.". The DM can say "Well, that was a different timeline, and the version of you in that timeline was very glad for the assistance, but now you're back in this timeline".

What the DM probably can't do is say "OK, let's re-play that encounter except now with two of you, and let's see if you still get your butt kicked as thoroughly". Because if they do that, then what's to stop you from pulling the same trick where it really matters, where you were about to not just suffer some setback, but to get permanently defeated? "OK, right now is when my future self shows up to help, because after this battle I'm going to go back to help".

[RandomPeasant]

I still think Teleport Through Time shouldn't be on the list. Yes, it's tremendously powerful, possibly more so than any other spell on the list... but the problem is who gets that power. It gives its power, not to the caster, but to the DM. It's the DM who decides how time travel works in the first place in their game, and however they decide, it's also the DM who implements how it works. Casting Teleport Through Time basically forces the DM to railroad you, in order to make it resolvable at all.

If the players are allowed to use teleport through time, the campaign becomes entirely about teleport through time. I think that earns a slot, even if a lot of the way the game becomes about teleport through time is the DM having to make up new settings for whatever time periods the players travel to.

[JNAProductions]

If the players are allowed to use teleport through time, the campaign becomes entirely about teleport through time. I think that earns a slot, even if a lot of the way the game becomes about teleport through time is the DM having to make up new settings for whatever time periods the players travel to.

The same could be said of Teleport. That can take you to distant places, effectively entire new settings, and is lower level.

[RandomPeasant]

The same could be said of Teleport. That can take you to distant places, effectively entire new settings, and is lower level.

You'll note that teleport is on the list of 5th level spells.

[JNAProductions]

You'll note that teleport is on the list of 5th level spells.

Yes-why would a stand out 5th level effect be considered a stand out 9th level effect?

[Fero]

Yes-why would a stand out 5th level effect be considered a stand out 9th level effect?

To be fair, I think that if the first long distance teleportation spell appeared at 9th, it would make this list. Same with plane shifting effects. Traveling through time, space, and dimensions are all absurdly good, game/campaign breaking abilities that they can quickly force a DM to throw his/her plans in the dumpster.

[RandomPeasant]

Yes-why would a stand out 5th level effect be considered a stand out 9th level effect?

Because it's not the same effect in any meaningful sense? Saying that "the DM has to pull out a new setting" is always the same effect is reductive to the point of being nonsensical, and if we are being that reductive why not pin that effect to "walk to a new town"?

[Anthrowhale]

As one example of how TTT changes the game, BBEGs lose the ability to force you to make a moral quandry decision. Rescue the town from the ravening evil horde? Close the gate to the abyss? Pursue the BBEG to his lair and take him out? Just pick one (it doesn't matter which) and deal with it, then TTT back to your choice point and deal with the other, then TTT back to the same choice point and deal with the third.

As another example of how TTT changes the game, suppose the special item is needed to deal with today's BBEG, but that item only existed in the remote past. TTT back in time to just prior to the moment of it's destruction, snatch and return, then use the item in the present.

As a third example, Erupt hits a town destroying everything. TTT back a bit and get everyone to leave the town before it is wiped. The town is still wiped, but now it can be rebuilt.

As a fourth example, send a minion back into the past with orders to camp in a safe place and produce a massive number of chosen permanent effects. Go visit the minion in the present to pick up supplies.

All of the above seem to be game changing effects which are conceivably playable.

[AvatarVecna]

TTT at its weakest is a powerful information gathering tool, allowing you to go through events aware of potential pitfalls and hidden costs that might be coming your way, and allowing you to dedicate twice as many slots to solving the problem as before. It's extremely powerful Divination and minionmancy in a single package.

[Endarire]

Chain contingency has the benefit of being able to cast harmful effects on others AND you can have it trigger as a free action off-turn by setting the triggering condition to be "When I want it to trigger." Chain contingency is my favorite vanilla (unmodded) Baldur's Gate II spell and the one I'd rather have the most first because of its sheer fight-ending power!

Is it more powerful than shapechange? Probably not, but shapechange is probably the best level 9 spell in 3.5, while chain contingency is probably worth a top 10 to 12 spot.

Also, what about mass heal and mass harm (Libris Mortis? Mass heal helps living creatures AND hurts undead!

[redking]

TTT at its weakest is a powerful information gathering tool, allowing you to go through events aware of potential pitfalls and hidden costs that might be coming your way, and allowing you to dedicate twice as many slots to solving the problem as before. It's extremely powerful Divination and minionmancy in a single package.

How strong Teleport Through Time is will depend on the nature of time travel. I know that in a lot of campaigns, history cannot be changed. The information gathering aspect of it is great, though, and you can add knowledge gathering to that as well.

[Anthrowhale]

Chain contingency has the benefit of being able to cast harmful effects on others AND you can have it trigger as a free action off-turn by setting the triggering condition to be "When I want it to trigger." Chain contingency is my favorite vanilla (unmodded) Baldur's Gate II spell and the one I'd rather have the most first because of its sheer fight-ending power!

Is it more powerful than shapechange? Probably not, but shapechange is probably the best level 9 spell in 3.5, while chain contingency is probably worth a top 10 to 12 spot.

I suspect Chain Contingency in 3.0 is different from Baldur's Gate II since it doesn't open up new uses beyond Contingency. Chain Contingency in 3.0 is just an extra trigger condition that can unload 3 spells.

In a vacuum Chain Contingency is very good. In an environment where you have Contingency, Celerity, and Greater Arcane Fusion it seems less compelling, you can Contingency[Celerity]->Greater Arcane Fusion[Celerity x2]->any 2 spells including possibly GAF again. This establishes that you can already achieve a nova effect which is better in several ways---you aren't limited to L6- spells and it comes online earlier.

The extra trigger condition also has value of course, but you can get up to 20 trigger conditions out of Craft Contingent Spell.


Also, what about mass heal and mass harm (Libris Mortis? Mass heal helps living creatures AND hurts undead!

Mass Heal competes with Rod[Chain] Ocular Heal. it's modestly better (more hp healed, don't need a commonly useful metamagic feat), but it comes online later. Mass Harm has a quite short range. It competes with Frostfell on the level 8 list which has more range, more AOE, and is an instawin if the save is failed with about half the damage of mass harm if you make the save. It also competes with Holy Word on the L7 list which is a no-save instakill with greater range if you use caster level escalation and Wings of Flurry on the L4 list which also can do similar damage with caster level escalation with a greater range (and in a party friendly way). And, of course there is Erupt which does more damage over much more range, but did not make the L9 list.

L9 spells are pretty much all quite potent, but the ones which repeat lower level effects except more don't seem quite as compelling.

[Troacctid]

Mass Heal competes with Rod[Chain] Ocular Heal. it's modestly better (more hp healed, don't need a commonly useful metamagic feat), but it comes online later.
Seeing as it doesn't require the expenditure of a feat and a substantial amount of gold, I'm pretty sure mass heal wins this comparison.

[Anthrowhale]

Seeing as it doesn't require the expenditure of a feat and a substantial amount of gold, I'm pretty sure mass heal wins this comparison.

There's little doubt that Mass Heal is _better_. It's just that the delta improvement doesn't seem as big as other L9 spells. If you disagree, then pick an L9 spell and tell me how it doesn't matter that much.

[RandomPeasant]

Is it more powerful than shapechange? Probably not, but shapechange is probably the best level 9 spell in 3.5, while chain contingency is probably worth a top 10 to 12 spot.

Again, the problem is the level of competition. chain contingency is very good. But it's not game-breaking, and there are two slots for spells that are "very good, but not game-breaking". Is it better that disjunction or miracle? I would say probably not. If you were doing "Top Ten Honorable Mentions" it definitely does get a spot (and I think it's better than time stop), but with the broken spells in the game it just doesn't measure up.


How strong Teleport Through Time is will depend on the nature of time travel. I know that in a lot of campaigns, history cannot be changed. The information gathering aspect of it is great, though, and you can add knowledge gathering to that as well.

Even if your DM is throwing around Fixed Points in Time like candy, the spell still lets you get an arbitrarily large amount of prep time for anything.

[Chronos]

Eh, not really. It's an arbitrary amount of prep time for you and anything you can bring with you, but there are an awful lot of things you might want to use prep time on that aren't portable (like, say, growing a garden full of many old flowers). In fact, I'd say that that constitutes the vast majority of things you'd want prep time on.

And if you're just using it for information-gathering, well, that's useful, but it's now several levels past where we could use Contact Other Plane or Commune and get most of the same information.

[Anthrowhale]

I'm wondering if we can drop Ice Assassin as redundant in light of Searing Seed and other spells.

Searing Seed seems to lack the following:

Memories of its source.
Locate creature on its source.
Cold subtype.
Disguise check for likeness.
Under absolute command within 1 mile.
Telepathic+Scry link within 1 mile.
Share Spells within 1 mile.
Only creature portion (i.e. hair, nails, etc... ) required.


Running through the lacks:

Mindrape allows for replication of your memories if desired.
If the creature is a spellcaster they can do this natively. The lists here can do it via Greater Anyspell[Locate Creature].
You could cast Miracle[Mantle of the Icy Soul] periodically.
There are other spells for disguises, or just a hat of disguise.
Mindrape can create something extremely like absolute loyalty.
Cast Telepathic Bond and Permanency. Use Scrying when needed.
Shapechange[Fiend Folio Symbiont] provides a bidrectional version of share spells. It requires contact to use but seems to leave spells in effect without a range limit.
No fix?

Looking through these, (8) is the big gap while (1) and (2) have a partial utility gap. Plausibly only (8) and (1) matter in a real sense. Weighed against these, Ice Assassin has some significant disadvantages as well:

5k XP cost
Very slow healing (1/day).

So, is Ice Assassin worth keeping?