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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Jackelope King" data-source="post: 2269741" data-attributes="member: 31454">I'd be happy to.Abjuration magicks are probably the closest for a long while between the two types of casting (arcane and psionic), but the presence of absolutely monstrous spells like the high-end prismatics hand the title to traditional casters. And of course, the end-all-be-all of abjuration, disjunction, does not even exist for psionic characters.Calling spells don't even exist for psions. Advantage traditional casters by a long shot. And this is a big advantage. Gate wins games, and a psionic character can never manifest anything with the brokenness of gate.Creation spells and powers are pretty much dead even. The shaper gets nearly nothing unique here (save a few attack powers on-par with conjuration attack spells), and suffers for a long while from a lack of good wall and creature-comfort spells (like magnificent mansion and secure shelter and the like), but the shaper evens it out at high levels with genesis. And note that only a specialist psion (the shaper) can keep up here. Otherwise the title goes to traditional casters.Healing spells are completely dominated by divine spellcasters. Psions are decent, but they are awful at healing other characters. They enjoy an advantage over arcanists but are nothing compared to divine casters.Summoning is close. Psions have a highly-customizable astral construct power. It has the advantage of being durable and easily customizable. But traditional casters have creatures which bring magical abilities with them and the list of creatures they can summon grows with every monster suppliment. I'll be generous and call this one another tie, but the inability to ever cast any spells or manifest any powers. Traditional casters have elementals for durable beatsticks. Psions don't have anything to conjure up for magical support.Teleportation pretty strongly favors traditional spellcasters. Most of the good teleportation powers exist only on the list of a single psion specialist (the nomad) so for anyone other than the nomad to use them, they must spend feats on them. No arcanist needs to spend a feat to learn spells like teleport. 5 out of 6 psions do.Divination is fairly close, but psionic characters have to pay XP to scry (remote view) an opponent. Note that psionic characters also lack great powers like true strike (breaking magic item creation since 2001). They have a greater number of utility powers, but the added XP cost of many powers evens it out.Enchantment is close. Telepaths have a great variety of ways to mess with someone's mind, but many of them are redundant. Strong enchantments (like the power words, irresistable dance, and the sort) aren't available to psions while the various subtle mind-messing powers aren't available to non-manifesters. Psions also lack large-scale buffing enchantments at low levels, and they rely on enchantments for their invisibility powers (which means a high-level character who will be mind blanked is immune to cloud mind, the psionic version of invisibility).Illusions go hands-down to the traditional spellcasters. The versatility of the shadow spells alone would take the cake, but psions cannot match things like invisibility. Figments are also hard to come up with. Most of the psion's strength here lies in the telepathy discipline, and these can all be mind blanked out, while most traditional illusions cannot.Necromancy is miles ahead for traditional spellcasters. No-brainer here. Arcanists are miles ahead of psionic characters in dealing with undead, and divine characters are lightyears ahead.Buffing transmutations are close. Psions are good at taking care of themselves, but are terrible at buffing others. Further, the crown jewel of transmutation (shapechange) comes with a fairly hefty XP cost. Some of the higher-level buffs are good, but they mirror what traditional casters can do anyway.So call psions the kings of direct damage if you want and say they completely outstrip evocation specialists (despite what the numbers actually say in practice), but then remember that direct damage is one of the weakest options at levels 9 and up (when save-or-dies are much more effective). Even if psions are the best blasters in the game, they still fall short in terms of save or die spells, effective party-wide buffs, transportation, and utility powers. They have their advantage in Black Mage Syndrome, but as has already been pointed out, this advantage comes at a price. They have some truly unique powers at their disposal, but they also lack some key traditional spells. In short, trade-offs which have proven to make the class fairly elegantly balanced.</blockquote>

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