Quote Originally Posted by Christew View Post
Evidence it is irrevocably broken: WotC has abandoned it.
As I understand it, it was abandoned because of conceptual issues, rather than mechanical ones-- there was too much argument about if it fit into standard D&D fantasy and if it needed to be a base class or not.

1) The versatility is obscene. Nobody wants to play in a party with someone who is good at everything. Kind of defeats the purpose of the party based adventuring that d&d is designed for.
I agree with you on this one. The Mystic as written suffered from trying to cover too many bases-- it was trying to replace all ~7 of the psionic classes in 3.5 (Psion, Psychic Warrior, Soulknife, Lurk, Ardent, Divine Mind, Psychic Warrior) and offer support for all possible archetypes, so you wound up being able to pick and choose the best options from everything. Like if you had a single "Mage" class who could learn every spell in the game. When you combine that with the fact that a bunch of the Disciplines and-- especially-- Psionic Focus abilities were overtuned... yeah, you get someone who can be the best at everything.

(And to be honest, I think (some of) that was known. The Mystic already read like something that was going to get chopped up after playtesting. The developers wanted to get feedback on everything, so they front-loaded the class and left in a ton of options so that every part would get tested. You see the front-loading a lot in experimental UA like the early Ranger revisions.)

But it's not beyond repair. Fix the Disciplines, and you get rid of the "better than everyone else at their own schtick" problem. Restrict subclass Disciplines to subclasses, maybe break off the gish archtypes into their own class (as I did in my rewrite), and things get far, far better.

2) The Psi point system is poorly implemented. Having the spell points of a full caster but with enhanced flexibility is a significant power boost over other classes.
It's 100% identical to the Spell Points variant in the DMG. There are issues (you can nova harder than other full casters, the way psi limit is written loses the one-leveled-spell-per-turn restriction), but they're hardly irrevocable.

3) The covert nature of psionics is overpowered. Subtle spell costs sorcery points. The mystic can do this without cost.
That can be fixed with one sentence.