Pax said:
If an Empowered Magic Missile is considered to be comparable in power to, say, a Fireball (both require 3d level spell slots to prepare and cast
Well, it's kind of off on a tangent, but I'll have to debate this one. It's always seemed to me that metamagicked spells are somewhat less powerful than spells of their 'new' level. You're gaining the flexibility of applying the feat to any spell you know, and the choice to NOT metamagic if you don't want to, so the power of the spell suffers a bit. Metamagic increases the flexibility of low-level spells, but it should never remove the need for high-level spells.
Look at some examples:
Fireball caps at 10d6 = 35 points. DB Fireball caps at 15d8 = 67.5 points. Double damage = two Empowers = +4 levels, so an Empowered Empowered Fireball does the same damage as a Delayed-Blast Fireball.
But, the DBFB also has that never-used "delay" feature, and has a +4 DC on the saving throw. It also bypasses Globes of Invulnerability just fine. So, it's clearly better than the metamagicked Fireball in terms of power; however, no matter what you do to it you can't put it into a 3rd-level spell slot.
Alternatively, I could Heighten that Fireball four levels to get the save DC equal to the DBFB, but it'd have half the damage. To get a spell of equal effectiveness, I'd have to both empower it twice AND Heighten it x4, and even then I'd miss out on the 'delay' feature.
If metamagicked spells were the equals of the other spells of those levels, there'd be no reason to take the higher-level spells in the first place. If you look at the examples in the books, the trend seems to be that having a metamagic effect built into a spell costs half as much as the Feat. So, Chain Lightning might be Chain Spell + Heighten on a Lightning Bolt, Dimension Strike (5) is Quickened Dimension Door (3), and so on. Or, look at it in reverse: the metamagic Feats cost twice as much as they would if you actually wanted the final product to be balanced for its new level.
I mean, let's say I made a spell called "Purify", that acted as a Dispel Magic, except uses no components at all (so it works when you're silenced, held, whatever), and casts as a Quickened Spell. Would that be worthy of a 9th-level spell, especially since it still caps at caster level 10? I wouldn't put it beyond level 6; if it had used Greater Dispelling as a base, then maybe it could be a level 9 spell.
IMC we actually created this spell, except it could only target the caster and attempted to strip off all enchantments, good or bad. We called it a 4th-level spell and it seemed to balance pretty well (maybe a bit strong for the level, so it might get bumped up to 5).
