(3.5) Balance of various sorcerer-only spells

[GoodbyeSoberDay]

Hello all,

I was looking at sorcerer-only spells like Wings of Cover, Wings of Flurry, Arcane Fusion, its greater counterpart, and Arcane Spellsurge, and I was wondering what the Playground thought about their respective balance. The wings spells seem OP but not game-breaking, the fusions seem reasonably balanced outside combo shenanigans, and Spellsurge just looks like a broken nova machine. I suppose they're all somewhat balanced by the sorcerer's limited versatility, but... he's only limited in versatility compared to wizard and cleric and the like. That's not something to balance against IMO. Please remove my misconceptions, add other sorc-only spells to this list to analyze, and eventually derail this into a pointless raw semantics argument, because those are always fun.

[magic9mushroom]

Hello all,

I was looking at sorcerer-only spells like Wings of Cover, Wings of Flurry, Arcane Fusion, its greater counterpart, and Arcane Spellsurge, and I was wondering what the Playground thought about their respective balance. The wings spells seem OP but not game-breaking, the fusions seem reasonably balanced outside combo shenanigans, and Spellsurge just looks like a broken nova machine. I suppose they're all somewhat balanced by the sorcerer's limited versatility, but... he's only limited in versatility compared to wizard and cleric and the like. That's not something to balance against IMO. Please remove my misconceptions, add other sorc-only spells to this list to analyze, and eventually derail this into a pointless raw semantics argument, because those are always fun.

They bring sorcerer into a kind of balance with wizards, in that sorcerers can do what they do better, but wizards can do more things.

Yes, full casters are OP. WotC evidently saw that wizards > sorcerers, but refused, as usual, to admit that full casters >> non-full casters. Hence the attempt to balance the sorc against the wiz without touching the extreme power of both.

[Claudius Maximus]

Arcane Spellsurge is not Sorcerer only. It just works best for Sorcerers (and gishes and theurges).

[Optimystik]

Yes, full casters are OP. WotC evidently saw that wizards > sorcerers, but refused, as usual, to admit that full casters >> non-full casters. Hence the attempt to balance the sorc against the wiz without touching the extreme power of both.

This.

They also realized (too late) that spontaneous doesn't need to lag behind prepared, because limited spells known is a big enough negative to hold them back in power.