Tiering the Spells

[eggynack]

Alter Self breaks the low and mid op game but not high op

I'm not sure what you mean by op here. Alter self is a clearly good option in high optimization settings.

Combined with other shenanigans i.e. Dwarven Ancestor or what I've done in every single one of my builds (assume supernatural ability + ravid) shows that Alter Self is inconceivably superior to Web and Glitterdust. You can make entire builds around Alter Self like I have done which inevitably completely trivializes a lot of your party members to the point some DMs just don't know how to deal with the spell (and end up breaking the low or mid op game) but not Glitterdust or Web so Alter Self needs to be in its own tier.

Alter self is great without arbitrary combo nonsense. When I say it's tier one, I mean it's tier one when applied to a normal human without using feats or whatever.

So I think it's a good metric. You take one look at this list and you can see which spells are so powerful they can potentially derail games and you can make entire builds around, and which spells are just good to prepare but nothing else. And a new player looking at this list would know which spells he needs to do in-depth research on. It's more useful than a list that puts Limited Wish at tier 1 imo, because you can't do jack with Limited Wish other than use it as a panic spell at the cost of 300xp. No builds, no shenanigans, yet tier 1...

You literally just put invisibility, a very strong and unique spell, into the bottom half of your tier system. That does not seem like a good metric to me. I also don't think limited wish is necessarily tier one, but not because you can't build around it. There are so few spells that you actively build around. No, the important thing is how much you want limited wish on your prepared or known list. If you always want limited wish, to the extent that you might want to not have it because it's too strong, then limited wish is tier one. I don't think that's the case though.