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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Cheiromancer" data-source="post: 3107053" data-attributes="member: 141">The goetic magician loses two levels of spells known and spells/day; that puts her a full spell level behind other casters.  So she'd be 17th level and the generalist wizard would be able to cast a real gate.  While I'm OK with a generalist being better with the transport function of gate, the calling of outsiders should be the goetic magician's schtick.  This special 8th level spell allows her to retain parity. With the summon monster spells she is a little bit ahead... as long as she summons fiends.The goetic magician has a lot of tools at her disposal.  The goetic code of conduct allows her to get willing service from fiends; she can use planar ally spells and there is no penalty for an alignment discrepancy.  Or she could go the planar binding route and take a hard line bargaining with them.  So she could be the good cop or the bad cop, at her choice.The classic take on this is that part of the punishment of the fallen angels is that they are made lower than humans; a human can, invoking the divine order, boss them around.  But by submitting to the divine will the fiends can actually experience some mitigation of their infernal torment; so it's not a completely bad deal from their point of view.  A different approach might be to say that goetic magicians operate outside the good vs. evil paradigm that says that celestials are always on our side and the fiends are always on the other.  The trick is to convince fiends of this; they need to regard goetic magicians in a kind of ambivalent way; kind of like how some humans regard infernal nobility as "fierce protectors" or "trickster deities" or whatever.  Although they could take play it in a Faustian way too.However you approach it, I kinda think that planar ally might require an infernal patron of some kind; our discussion has indicated that the variability of the response is essential to its balance.  It could still use some tinkering, but maybe a separate thread would be the best place to talk about it. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" />Remember that epic wizards get bonus spells at levels 23, 26, 29, 32, 35 and 38.  So what you are describing is what a 30th level character could do.  Or a 40th level character who has spent only half his feats on ISC.  Unless this is not a wizard bonus feat- but it seems extremely wizardly.I think that you are folding the benefit of IM into the benefit of Improved Spell Capacity.  It's just you are treating a spell level as a level of metamagic.  Instead of adding a +1 spell level spontaneously 1/round, you are allowing 1st level spells to be cast spontaneously and 1/round.The spell pool is yet another benefit, though a smaller one.Still, I think you are giving a fair bit more with ISC than you can get with IM.  And IM is pretty powerful; I would hesitate for another feat to be more powerful still.</blockquote>

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