Spheres of Might class tiers?

[Endless Rain]

What are the tiers of the various Spheres of Might classes? (The SoM classes Armiger, Blacksmith, Commander, Conscript, Scholar, Sentinel, Striker, and Technician)

I don't have much experience with the SoM system, so I'm having trouble figuring out their tiers like I normally do. Assume that no archetypes are taken, the players are medium-op to high-op, and all legendary talents are allowed. I'm expecting them to mostly be high-T4, but I'd like input from someone who's had more experience with the system.

Also, what about the Champions of the Spheres classes that use the same subsystem? (The Prodigy, Sage, Troubadour, and Warden) I think the Prodigy and Warden are almost certainly T3 because they're Spheres of Power mid-casters, but I'm unsure about the Sage and Troubadour.

[Zecrin]

In my opinion, the Armiger, with their ability to change one talent in 10 minutes, probably qualifies as tier 3.

While the Blacksmith is probably tier 4, the essence smith archetype might bring that class up to 3 as well.

The Scholar can competently dish out save or suck with flashbangs, do a lot of damage with trick arrows, competently heal, and offer the party a fair amount of utility with skills, combat talents, and material impositions. The conscript and technician may also have so many variable class features that they enter the lower bounds of tier three via versatility alone.

I think that most of the others are high 4 as you've conjectured.

[TheTeaMustFlow]

I'd say you both underestimate them a bit. I'd put most well-built SoM characters at tier 3, albeit often the lower end.

The Tome of Battle classes are archetypal tier 3s, and I'd say the 'average' SoM character is roughly equivalent - very good in their niche (normally some form of direct combat) and with some fairly useful options outside it. (Notably, virtually every SoM character is a decent skillmonkey at the very least.)

Some of the worse classes/spheres (bad archetypes like Vanguard come to mind) might drag a character down to tier 4, as would denying access to legendary talents.

I'd put the Caller Scholar and Mad Scientist Technician archetypes at tier 2.

(As for Sage and Troubadour - you know they're both actually sort of high-casters, right? So I'd say tier 3 minimum.)

[Rynjin]

I think high 4 low 3 sounds about right. I am not especially impressed with Spheres of Might on the power scale of things. It basically lets you do things martial characters could already do, but easier. That's not a bad thing, but it certainly doesn't make them any more flexible (i.e higher tier) than some of the better Core martials, like the Barbarian or Ranger.

The Champions are pretty much entirely T3, and begrudgingly I put them there because aside from the Prodigy I find them to be all very unappealing classes. I find most Champion archetypes outshine the actual Champion classes (again, aside Prodigy), by a wide margin.

[Lirya]

Tome of Battle/Path of War classes are generally described as Tier 3, and I think I would place most SoM characters with legendary access as mostly equivalent.

When I read the definitions for tiers in a tier list, I find a lot of focus is on overcoming challenges that you can't or at least don't have to just fight your way out of. SoM, especially with legendary talents, give a lot of good options for this with the drawback that it comes from the same pool of resources you use to improve your combat.

In combat my experience is that at least some players will still focus on performing a single trick really well, even to the detriment of their overall performance as an adventurer. SoM does provide easier/cheaper mobility options often making it easier to apply your trick, but this can cause them to act more like a high Tier 4 character.

SoM characters usually have really good defenses in my experience. They can easily get good ac, touch ac, saves, ways to ignore nasty conditions, etc. They also have better ability than paizo martials to use positioning to kite enemies and deny them their most dangerous attacks (such as full attacks).

SoM characters can easily be skill monkeys as spheres provide many options for free skill ranks and some options for making your skills better. And while several characters won't use these options, at least they can contribute some with skills through a base of 4+Int.

I will agree that the Champion classes aside from Prodigy are unappealing and I would generally advice people to use a Champion archetype for another class if you want to mix SoM and SoP on a single character.

[Zecrin]

(As for Sage and Troubadour - you know they're both actually sort of high-casters, right? So I'd say tier 3 minimum.

I have never actually read or played these classes, so you're probably right here. My commentary was more on the SoM classes (excepting essence smith which I am somewhat familiar with). The only reason I leaned towards 4 for most of the classes was a lack of versatility, not a lack of power.

Upon further consideration however, I could see how a SoM character with legendary scout or athletics talents (i.e. things that provide out of combat utility) might be borderline tier 3.

[TheTeaMustFlow]

I will agree that the Champion classes aside from Prodigy are unappealing and I would generally advice people to use a Champion archetype for another class if you want to mix SoM and SoP on a single character.

I'm surprised that you have such a low opinion of the Incanter's Champion Archetype.

Effectively, a Sage is an Incanter that swaps a third of its magic talents for combat talents, upgrades a third of them to Esoteries (upgrades, because they can all be spent on Ki Power: Extra Magic Talent), and swaps its bonus feats/specialisations for... well, the rest of their long list of class features. Which among other things includes up to 15 more bonus talents, which actually brings it to potentially the most permanent talents of any class by my maths.

I'd call that a fairly good archetype, to be honest. Though admittedly it did need that errata that made it count as having the casting feature.

(I think the Sage looks worse than it is because the way it's written makes it look more like a Monk-equivalent melee fighting type, which it normally shouldn't be- it can be made a pretty decent melee'er, but it's probably better suited to shooting/buffing stuff with magic and generally acting like a caster with some decent close-quarters backup options and a few nonmagic tricks up their sleeve. The damage they can get with Ki Blast Barrage shenanigans is particularly obscene, even with minimal investment.)

[AvatarVecna]

Without legendary talents, I'd say most of them are solidly T3, at least as classes. They can be built to be hyper-focused on one thing so much that they fit into T4 (I imagine a Striker that focuses solely on combat talents will be vaguely comparable to a well-built barbarian), but most builds will be T3 - highly skilled at their desired role, but still able to contribute meaningfully when that role isn't viable for the current challenge, using a handful of talents to branch outside their main schtick and pick up some party support, or healing, or debuffing, or extra skills. With legendary talents on the table, you have the option to surrender some of the role flexibility I just mentioned, in exchange for picking up some absolutely absurd options for your role, which is...honestly most comparable to sorcerer, so it's at least threatening T2. Like, okay, not every talent sphere has broken options, but...

Spoiler: Alchemy

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Ambrosia formulae: Now one of your formulae options is getting rid of negative levels, even permanent ones. The four levels are roughly equivalent to Remove Curse, Restoration, Regenerate, and Greater Restoration. Oh, and if you use the Greater Restoration one, then it also counts as Wish or Miracle for the purposes of ending any effects that require Wish/Miracle to be gotten rid of.

Elixer Of Life: This one is most comparable to Breath Of Life - a resurrection mechanic with an extremely short window for using it on the deceased. Yeah, one could look at this talent and see "you have 1 round to rez somebody or it doesn't work" and think it sucks, and it probably does compared to full divine casters. But another way to look at this is...this is purely nonmagical resurrection, that comes online at level 5. And if the window of opportunity is too small for you...

Philosopher's Stone: Let's you turn time into money. Also lets you turn time into nonmagical True Resurrection spells that can be deployed in just a few rounds. Comes online at lvl 20. Late-game, but...combat-viable non-magical resurrection mechanics are no joke.

Sorcerer's Scourge: Save vs reduced CL. Keep making saves til you succeed. If you failed too many of them, you have no CL and can't cast at all. Yeah, getting spellcasters of high caliber to fail that many saves against poison is maybe asking a bit much, but even slightly penalized CL is a pretty big deal.

Spoiler: Athletics

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Dragoon's Leap: This lets you break your speed limit when jumping, and makes jumping so efficient for movement that...why not jump everywhere? At lvl 10, you've maybe got 10 ranks, Skill Focus +6, decent Str, and a Ring Of Improved Jumping...you're maybe looking at +30? That's average of ~4050 ft of horizonal movement or ~405 ft of vertical movement, as a full round action costing your martial focus. That's way better distance than Dimension Door, albeit way worse than Teleport. But it's also something you can do every other round - maybe every round if you can find a way to recover your martial focus by just moving.

Eagle's Path/Sparrow's Path: Flight on your turn at lvl 3, becomes permanent at lvl 8, improves significantly at lvl 9. It's supernatural rather than extraordinary, but still.

Spoiler: Barrage

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Cone Of Death: The first time you take this, it's a full round action and martial focus to attack a 35 ft cone, +5 ft every other level. The second time you take this, it upgrades to 200 ft cone, +10 ft every level. The third time you take this, it upgrades to 1000 ft cone, +40 ft every level. Yeah, it's the equivalent of a single ranged attack on each of the creatures in that area, but this is SoM, that's probably some pretty hefty damage...and even the weakest version is absolutely enormous AoE that continues leveling. TBH I'm not sure the 3-talent "a cone with length equal to the range of a Long Range spell" is an area that has a good comparison in the spell system, at least within Pathfinder.

Storm Of Vengeance has a radius of 360 ft, so that's covering ~16286 squares at lvl 17, compared to CoD3's 1080 ft cone covering ~36643 squares at lvl 17. SoV lasts 10 rounds and (under the strong interpretation) gets progressively worse the longer you concentrate. But even then, it's stacking up 37d6 damage per target (with 48 10d6 lightning bolts sprinkled throughout), so assuming the AoE is full...603062 d6 is put out to everyone in total (avg damage 2110717). Dealing that much damage with a single CoD3 requires dealing ~57 damage per target (and a full AoE again). Although given the duration of SoV, you're probably getting off 5 CoD3's in that time, so it's more like ~13 damage per attack you have to manage to out-damage Storm Of Vengeance with comparable action investment? I'm pretty sure that's the biggest spell AoE in the game that still deals real damage, and it's not particularly difficult for CoD3 spam to outclass it. 3.5 has "Apocalypse From The Sky" that had AoE measured in miles and dealt like 20d6 per target IIRC, but also I'm pretty sure it had a 1 day casting time and required you to destroy an artifact as part of the casting, so it's...a bit less spammable.

Death Blossom: Oh Cool, you can turn CoD into a burst instead of a Cone, quadrupling the AoE coverage. Because "more area" is exactly what CoD needed. You exclude yourself, but not your allies, so uh...be careful. XD

Spoiler: Barroom

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Eternal Buzz: All the benefits you get from being drunk are basically always on if you want them to be, regardless of how long it's been since you had a drink.

Good For What Ails Ya: Any nonmagical alcoholic beverage is now a decent Potion Of Healing for you, at least to a certain point. This significantly decreases the costs for healing you.

Magic In The Spirits: Free enhancement bonus on weapons while drunk, letting you spend money on real enchantments while still piercing DR and having decent attack bonuses. Pretty cool, although not broken - there's not a combination of weapon enchantments that's gonna ruin the game, but it's hard to say that having +14 equivalent in total enchantment on your weapon isn't breaking away from how the game's intended to function.

Perfect Relaxation: The duration isn't much, but now one of the many things alcohol can grant you is "temporary Freedom Of Movement", which is pretty great.

Spoiler: Beastmastery

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Monster Breaker: Mount any creature big enough to be your mount and start forcing Will saves vs "be my mount" every round. Dinosaur? Yup. Dragon? Yup. Tarrasque? Yup. Get the save high enough, and this is functionally a spammable Dominate Monster.

Spoiler: Berserker

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Rift Strike: Get so angry that you can tear a hole in spacetime. This is functionally 1/hour Teleport, with the option to use it more frequently at the risk of failure and Con damage.

Spell Sunder: Nothing complicated, just taking that Rage Power idea and making it a talent. Anti magic mechanics can be powerful.

Spoiler: Boxing

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Intense Conditioning: When you reaction-punch somebody, force a Will save. If they fail, then for the next minute, trying to do the thing that got them reaction-punched again requires them to succeed on a Will save to avoid losing the action entirely. How broken this is depends on how broadly you interpret "attempts the action which triggered your counter punch". Like, if you punched them for casting Meteor Swarm, the trigger could be "casting Meteor Swarm", but it could also be "casting", and "Will save to avoid losing your action any time you try to cast a spell for the next minute" can be pretty powerful.

Spoiler: Brute

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Thunderous Clap: Burst effect with radius "Close Range length" or Cone effect with length "Medium Range length" for some pretty good damage and side effects? I feel like I've already talked a lot about something like this...ah well.

Spoiler: Dual-Wielding

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Cyclone Cut: Damage as two attacks, and much smaller radius than the other bursts I've talked about. The big difference here is that it's a standard action that doesn't cost your martial focus, making it more spammable than the others. The area is much much smaller though, so it's not quite the same level of absurdity as Cone Of Death.

Spoiler: Duelist

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Bleed Air: Fort save vs starting to suffocate. Fail that one, and you're making Fort saves basically every round to stave off death, until somebody uses significant magic/nonmagic healing on you. At its worst, this is "4 fort saves vs death in 3 rounds", so it's not quite as potent as your typical SoD, but it's still imposing some hefty conditions even if you're resisting, so...yeah.

Bloody Hell: Force a Will save vs getting dropped off in another plane of existence. Costs two martial focuses, so very much not spammable, but still useful in-combat.

Disarm Natural Ferocity: Use the Disarm maneuver on natural weapons. Uh, not like that, it's more like their arms or jaws or tentacles or whatever are too bruised to use for combat until they recover. Maybe not gamebreaking in the way a lot of these are, but it's a pretty unique capability.

Jugular Cut: Making a handful of Fort saves to avoid dying in three rounds? Having to keep making Fort saves to stave off death until healed? I feel like I've already discussed this.

Sever: If your reaction to that up there was "Disarming natural weapons? You mean like...oh, no, that's disappointing" then I have good news for you. This is potentially game-breaking because cutting off hands has effects beyond reducing their weapon caapbilities - it can impact casting as well, and anti-magic mechanics are hella good.

Vacuum Cut/Vacuum Slice: Attacking every creature in a Cone of length "Close range length" again.

Spoiler: Fencing

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Master Of Deception: Your feints now also induce the Confused condition for a round. No additional action or focus expenditure, just...they can waste people's actions now. Goes great when combined with all the things this sphere does to make feinting better and easier to spam.

Parry Anything: Lets you counter attack spells with attacks of your own - comparable to some 3.5 low-epic abilities, coming online at lvl 5.

Shadow Strike: Incorporeality is no longer a hard barrier for noncasters, and you can induce fatigue in corporeal creatures spammably. This isn't restricted to typical Fencing attacks, and doesn't require anything other than the base sphere, not even a BAB prereq - you could pick this up with just 2 talents at lvl 1, if Legendary stuff is on the table.

Soul Strike: Your attacks give a penalty to all saves for multiple rounds. The penalty is stuck at -2 forever, but there's no SR or save to resist it, and it's untyped, so that's some pretty dependable debuffing. And again, it doesn't have any prereqs other than the base sphere ability, so this is something you could be busting out every round from lvl 1 onward. How broken this will be depends on how much synergy it has with your party - if basically nobody is forcing saves, it's not useful, but if there's someone else stacking penalties, and somebody else forcing all kinds of saves...

Spoiler: Gladiator

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Creatures that get too close to you must save vs being one step more fearful. Has huge synergy with anything else boosting your Intimidate, like Unchained, or the rest of the Gladiator sphere. Inducing panicked (or cowering, although this can't do that I think) is solid debuffing, although fear immunity isn't too uncommon.

Burn The Chaff: Against weak enemies that are suffering a fear effect, your hits becomes crits and force a Fort save vs death. Strong synergy with the Cleave feats granting attacks upon killing a foe, strong synergy with anything inducing fear.

Nightmare Stalker: Move action/martial focus to do a teleport effect with range "line of sight" to a creature you've demoralized. With extended senses like Unchained Perception, stuff from the scout tree, or scrying sensors you can use, this can get nasty.

Spoiler: Guardian

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I Will Hear/I Will Come: With the first one, you become aware that you're needed for defense from absurd ranges - measured in miles at first, but eventually unlimited distance and piercing the planar barrier. The second one comes online at lvl 10, and lets you use a full round action to appear at their side when called. This isn't quite as good as real Teleport or Plane Shift, since the person you're 'porting to needed to get their on their own, it's a solid way to be there if an important NPC finds themself in trouble while you're adventuring, or if an ally gets teleported/planeshifted into danger during a fight, and you can maintain quite a few bonds at once. Probably closest comparison is Teleportation Circle, then.

Spoiler: Lancer

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Dimensional Pierce: People you're impaling are auto-dimension-locked. Anti magic mechanics are always fantastic.

Soul Pierce: Inflict a negative level per round while impaling someone. Strong debuffing, since there's no save to resist, although they aren't likely to last long enough to be permanent. But then, if you're attacking, they shouldn't survive that long anyway.

Spoiler: Open Hand

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Air Cannon: Cone of length "Close Range", dealing damage equal to double your attack...yeah we've seen this before.

Final Judgement: *stares* Okay so...at level 20, when you kill a creature, it's soul is trapped in your fists for up to one week. During that time, you can shift its alignment two steps, Will save to resist. At any point during that week, you can choose to resurrect it with two temporary negative levels. I'm not even really sure what to compare this to. Obviously this is meant for converting enemies, but this is also a way to save money on rezzing an ally if you can't save them from death? You can't do this to the same creature more than once a year, though, so saving allies will be used less than converting fallen enemies.

God Hand: Your attacks can suppress fast healing and regeneration, and count as disintegration for killing people/attacking objects. Disintegration effects are great, suppressing regeneration without any difficulty is fantastic.

Spoiler: Scoundrel

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Steal Heart: "Charm Monster" via godlike pickpocketing. Difficult to really describe how great this can be in the right situation.

Steal Spells: Transfers an ongoing spell effect from them to you, via godlike pickpocketing. Can steal spells that only target "self", even. Endless possibilities here, serious buffing/debuffing.

Steal Skills: Transfers all their ranks in one skill to you for a few rounds/minutes. Only as broken as any skill is on your end, but removing the target's ability to use the skill effectively (or at all, in the case of trained only skills) can be some absurd debuffing. In particular, because it steals ranks rather than just giving the target a penalty, this is a serious debuff if used on somebody who's also using Spheres Of Might. But there's options beyond just removing an enemy's access to whole spheres. This is a hard counter to Abuse Magic Device. This is a hard counter to Intimidate cheese. This is a hard counter to Bardic Performance (assuming you read it as requiring at least 1 Perform rank to work). This is a hard counter to Sacred Geometry.

Steal Talent: Building on the above, you can steal feats/talents instead of skills. Stealing the base talent of a sphere can ruin their day (although it's much harder), and there's lots of feats that are vital to builds even if they're not the foundation of 90% of their class features (imagine stealing Rapid Reload from a gunslinger, or Sacred Geometry from a caster, or Raging Vitality from a barbarian).

Spoiler: Scout

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Eye Spy: 1 mile per Perception rank, you can see through the senses of a scouted creature. Combos great with any "line of sight" effects.

True Sight: Explicitly "extraordinary" permanent True Seeing/See In Darkness.

Vanish: HiPS with no restrictions.

Spoiler: Shield

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Perfect Redirection: Anti magic mechanics are always powerful.

Spoiler: Sniper

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Eviscerating Shot: Your sniping targets touch AC.

Phasic Shot: Shoot through solid objects. This isn't specific to sniping, just...all your ranged attacks now shoot through objects. No cover for you! You still need to discern their location somehow, if you can't see them, but...yeah.

Star Scraper: Base range increment becomes 1 mile. You still need to discern their location somehow, if you can't see them, but...yeah.

Spoiler: Trap

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All Part Of The Plan: Now you can set up traps as immediate actions, from range, under the right circumstances. Depending on the kinds of traps available, at this point they're barely even "traps" anymore and you're just using a very weird ranged combat style. Attack actions outside of your turn is action economy shenanigans for a style that has serious action economy issues, so that's a solid upgrade.

Temporal Snare: You can set a trap that freezes the target in time for all purposes. Mechanics messing around with time have the potential for shenanigans.

Thaumic Sink: Dart traps can now carry an AMF effect. Getting AMF cast on an enemy is great, doing it from range is great. Anti magic mechanics are always powerful.

Spoiler: Warleader

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Armies Of The Dead: Can use Diplomacy on undead. Mindless can be made to follow your orders. Any undead made friendly enough will benefit from your MA buffs despite their immunity.

Darkland's Cry: AoE dealing multiple temporary negative levels. Serious debuffing potential here, especially with all the other things you can do to buff your shouts.

Phantom Operatives: Grant a bunch of allies HiPS. Solid buff, particularly if your party isn't usually able to stealth everywhere...well, now they can.

Recall Spirit: Breath of Life as a combat talent, more or less. Rez mechanics are great.

Unending Loyalty: Temporarily rezzes target with decent HP, but after the fight they'll still need a real rez ability to actually come back.

Spoiler: Wrestling

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Limb Ripper: Exactly what it says on the tin. Just as with Sever from the Duelist sphere, removing limbs can be great for debuffing casters who weren't expecting to need Still Spell on everything today.

Magic Killing Grip: Your grapples come with a Dispelling attached. Can un-summon Summoned Creatures, can strip debuffs from a grappled mage, can suppress magic items...anti magic mechanics are great.

There's serious buffing, debuffing, AoE, teleportation, super-movement, scrying, healing, and anti-magic mechanics scattered throughout the legendary talents. I don't think the existence of this stuff makes SoM characters as good as sorcerer, but then sorcerer is a high T2. This stuff...it at least lets SoM PCs knock on the door for low T2, I think.

EDIT: For an idea of how things can look without legendary talents, a Conscript or Commander or Scholar focusing Warleader and the support aspects of Alchemy will be pretty comparable to a bard.

[stack]

In addition to the analysis above, Leadership sphere opens up planar-ally-like fun to SoM users via legendary talent.

[AvatarVecna]

In addition to the analysis above, Leadership sphere opens up planar-ally-like fun to SoM users via legendary talent.

Honestly I wasn't familiar enough with the Leadership tree to speak confidently on what it could offer (it'd be a lot more reading before I knew what it was really capable of), but tbh basically all one needs to know is that the base sphere ability is the only talent that's weaker than it's associated feat. And even though you only get a cohort or followers at first, and even though they're weaker than default Leadership cohorts/followers, it's still absurdly good because extra bodies is powerful. And further talents can, I imagine, expand on both of those massively. I'm pretty sure one of the legendary talents I saw while skimming through let you have magic cohorts, which...yeah.

[Endless Rain]

(As for Sage and Troubadour - you know they're both actually sort of high-casters, right? So I'd say tier 3 minimum.)

Sage is definitely T3 at the very least, but I was mainly wondering if high-casting plus its combat talent progression and its large amount of bonus talents would push it up to T2.

As for Troubador, I also know it's T3 minimum, but the ability to take multiple Hero/Master Personas to give you ridiculous amounts of talents might push it up to borderline T1? Especially with the ability to respec all a Persona's quirks over a five day period for no cost.

[TheTeaMustFlow]

Sage is definitely T3 at the very least, but I was mainly wondering if high-casting plus its combat talent progression and its large amount of bonus talents would push it up to T2.

Not in and of itself - as is often the case with Spheres of Power/Might, it depends on what abilities you take. A Sage who invests in some of the more campaign-defining SoP abilities like Call Planar Creature is definitely T2, one who goes for more straightforward things like blasting and combat buffs probably isn't.

As for Troubadour, I also know it's T3 minimum, but the ability to take multiple Hero/Master Personas to give you ridiculous amounts of talents might push it up to borderline T1? Especially with the ability to respec all a Persona's quirks over a five day period for no cost.

I'd still say T2 at most - bare in mind that respecing talents on the fly is a lot harder for them than for, say, a sphere arcanist. They need to spend the full days recrafting a persona (i.e. probably not while on the move or adventuring), and then assumed they respeced for a specific purpose, they need to respec back to their default setup, doubling the effective time to 10 days (or 4 with Improvisation).

So in practice, unless they have a lot of downtime a Troubadour is restricted to their standing persona choices - and the number of talents on those isn't overwhelmingly impressive: It's only at level 10 by my maths that the max possible talents a Troubadour can have over all their personas overtakes what a Conscript or Incanter can have all the time. The big advantage that a Troubadour has is that they can be both a High-BAB and a High-Caster class, and from 7th level both at the same time, which lets them pull of some nasty combinations no one else can. And, of course, outside of combat they're excellent skillmonkeys with all those Actor Trainings, and given sufficient prep time can indeed set up the ideal talent combo to deal with a problem. But nowhere near as well as a wizard could.

[Batcathat]

Not in and of itself - as is often the case with Spheres of Power/Might, it depends on what abilities you take. A Sage who invests in some of the more campaign-defining SoP abilities like Call Planar Creature is definitely T2, one who goes for more straightforward things like blasting and combat buffs probably isn't.

Isn't that the case with most classes though? A wizard can choose some pretty sucky spells, after all, but that doesn't change their tier.

[NigelWalmsley]

Isn't that the case with most classes though? A wizard can choose some pretty sucky spells, after all, but that doesn't change their tier.

It is generally acknowledged that if you have abilities that allow you to build T2, you belong in T2. With some exceptions for classes like the Healer or Truenamer that only get those abilities at the tail end of the game and are generally kinda medium before that. So I would expect that the Sage is likely T2 if it has the local Planar Binding-equivalents, though it depends what else the class can do while getting those abilities. I would consider, for example, Fighter + Planar Binding to still not be T2, though I value "you get a game-breaking ability" less than some people.

[TheTeaMustFlow]

Isn't that the case with most classes though? A wizard can choose some pretty sucky spells, after all, but that doesn't change their tier.

Actually, I'd argue that build choices do affect a character's effective tier, though obviously not that of the class as a whole. I admit that's basically arguing definitions though - if you include optimal talent choices, then assuming advanced talents are allowed then any spheres High-Caster is tier 2 by definition - my meaning was more that the 'built-in' abilities of a Sage excluding talent choices are tier 3.


The comparison to wizards is one you want to be careful with, however - a Wizard can always learn more spells, whereas most spherecasters are stuck with their choices absent retraining. The Troubadour is something of an exception to this, but even for it replacing personas is very time consuming and doesn't actually allow you to respect that many talents, since quirk progression is only [Level/2 - 1, rounded up].