Heavy Artillery: Psion vs. Wizard

[Sorren]

I reiterate, focusing solely on the ability of a Kineticist to dish out blatty death, and calling it broken on that basis DOES NOT make for a fair analysis.

Especially when the sorcerer can very well do as much or more damage.
If you call the psion broken, you have to call the sorcerer broken too.

 

[Thanee]

It might be hard to even convince me of this. The psion will be able to deal more damage in that first encounter, but the sorcerer will haste his party, break the enchantment of the cleric who go turned to stone, cast fly on everyone, etc. His spells may go further in winning the encounter than damage alone.

As for party buffs, the sorcerer has the better options, but please take a look at the total number of spells the sorcerer knows. That's extremely few (especially in the highly important high level range)!

An average psion (of whatever discipline) will have a wider variation of powers than a sorcerer can only dream of.

Bye
Thanee

 

[Majere]

Bleah
I cant stat out a proper exampe character psi as the SRD doesnt seem to contain any of the spells people are using Or infact much of anything. What a waste of HDD space.

But we need properly statted out charaters. A 10th level psi will have a torc, and the sorcerer may well have gimmiks.
You also need to actually put the damage up against a CR10 creature.
Most CR10 creatures will have elemental resistances which will nerf the sorcerers damage output considerably.

The exercise of statting our real character will also give a better appreciation of how restrictive a real selection of psi powers is. At the moment energy ball seems to cover 2-3 spells: Fireball, Delayed blast fireball, Cone of cold. Unless people actually make the characters its impossible to really see how expeansive a psi can be compare to a sorcerer.

Majere

 

[Droid101]

Bleah
I cant stat out a proper exampe character psi as the SRD doesnt seem to contain any of the spells people are using Or infact much of anything. What a waste of HDD space.

http://www.systemreferencedocuments.org/35/sovelior_sage/psionicPowers.html
Try this one, it has all the psionic powers already corrected for errata.

 

[Sorren]

As for party buffs, the sorcerer has the better options, but please take a look at the total number of spells the sorcerer knows. That's extremely few (especially in the highly important high level range)!

An average psion (of whatever discipline) will have a wider variation of powers than a sorcerer can only dream of.

Bye
Thanee

How so? A 10th level sorcerer gets 3 more spells than a psion gets powers and the psion is forced to specialize.

 

[Sorren]

Bleah
I cant stat out a proper exampe character psi as the SRD doesnt seem to contain any of the spells people are using Or infact much of anything. What a waste of HDD space.

But we need properly statted out charaters. A 10th level psi will have a torc, and the sorcerer may well have gimmiks.
You also need to actually put the damage up against a CR10 creature.
Most CR10 creatures will have elemental resistances which will nerf the sorcerers damage output considerably.

The exercise of statting our real character will also give a better appreciation of how restrictive a real selection of psi powers is. At the moment energy ball seems to cover 2-3 spells: Fireball, Delayed blast fireball, Cone of cold. Unless people actually make the characters its impossible to really see how expeansive a psi can be compare to a sorcerer.

Majere

This can't work.

If you give them gear, the argument can become "The torc/wand/staff/pearl is too powerful!" or whatever. The problem (or perceived problem) could be the gear, not the class. The only way to compare them is without gear.

You also can't pit them against a creature. At that point dice have to enter the picture and you can't depend on dice to give you an accurate portrayal. If the dice are rolling in his favor, a 3rd level fighter can take down a 10th level fighter.

If you use averages, certain things will always hit or miss, and that isn't realistic either.

You can stat up the character to get a good idea of what he will look like, but there is no way to test them without extensive play. For what it's worth, I've been playing a psion for the past few months and they don't seem over powered to me.

 

[Thanee]

Damage is the Only Common Ground.

To compare the two, the only true real basis for analysis is damage output. The usefulness of other powers and spells is too dependent on other factors such as the DM's style, the environment, etc, and therefore can’t be taken into consideration here.

It's one way to compare, but certainly not the only one and surely (IMHO) not the best one (especially not, if the numbers are flawed, which easily happens, not to blame you there, just the system ). I believe the best way is to simply compare spell/power levels at the same scaling/augmentation level, as I have tried on page 3.

Why? Because it doesn't focus on single spells/powers, which by themselves could (and most certainly will) not be fully balanced among each other, or single hypothetical situations only; it focuses on the potential, which can be brought to bear, be it damage, utility or whatnot. It's more generic and includes many more situations than simple damage dealing ever could. Still it is accurate, since spell levels and caster/manifester levels are the base for the whole system and very much compareable.

The crux of this comparison is the following:

An x-th level spell of y-th caster level (but not higher than the cap) has about the same effect as an x-th level power augmented to y-th manifester level.

The powers are often more flexible by themselves (especially when looking at the kineticist powers, of course), but the actual effect will be and should be roughly the same. The flexibility itself is not covered here, however. The power also costs more effectively, because "scaling" has to be paid for, but this cost is obviously included already, if you compare the augmented power and look how many of those can be manifested compared to scaled-up spells. But do not forget here, that quite a few powers are available also, which have their full effect at minimum augmentation level (in fact do not even have any augmentation in most cases, Fly or Metamorphosis are two of those), so it is not needed to fully augment every power (duration and range do scale for free for psions in the same way as they do for the sorcerer).

With this in mind, the number of spellcastings/manifestations per day is being compared.

I believe, that in this comparison, the sorcerer and psion come out about even... so far. The sorcerer will win in the endurance department (additional low-level effects), obviously, while the psion clearly wins in the raw power department (more powerful effects in a short time). I consider the latter to be more important (which the "Mystic Theurge problem" effectively demonstrates, who suffers greatly from the lack of high level effects, which is not fully compensated by the huge amount of low level effects they have until they reach very high levels (and by then have much, much more additional low level effects than the sorcerer has over the psion)), but that's just an opinion like any other. All in all, I think it's ok up to this point and neither class is at a considerable advantage yet.

Now, if they are about even up to this point, if you look at what is left, because the above is not the whole picture yet, the psion has such a clear advantage there, that it's not even funny.

+ usually higher save DCs on augmented powers (further increased by psionatrix)
+ faster access to higher power levels
+ more "effective spells" known (one power includes more than one spell in most cases), much more high level spells/powers among those (and on top of that the ability to swap all powers, skills and feats out completely at an XP cost)
+ much higher flexibility and the ability to manifest more high level powers or a huge amount of low level powers
+ many powers have built-in flexibility, which similar spells lack usually
+ no need for many metamagic feats (Heighten, Still, Silent, Energy Affinity mostly)
+ Quicken Power
+ Swift and immediate action powers
+ no verbal, somatic, material components (grapple, silence)
+ bonus feats
+ better feat choices
+ better skills (more effective skill points and better class skill list)
+ armor
- lack of good party buffs, often powers are personal only
- weaker base to pick powers from, there simply are more spells out there
- more restricted by discipline lists (tho, since they have plenty more feats (bonus feats and non-dependancy on metamagic feats), this can be circumvented with Expanded Knowledge to a degree)
- psionic focus issues (tho the feats (Psionic Endowment/Penetration most importantly) are better in comparison and the focus issues can be circumvented to a degree)

If I have missed something important here, please point it out, I'll gladly add it to the list.

Bye
Thanee

 

[Thanee]

How so? A 10th level sorcerer gets 3 more spells than a psion gets powers and the psion is forced to specialize.

Yeah, if you simply add up spells known (including the almighty 0th level spells, which make up a considerable amount there (over 1/3 of the total) ) and compare them one-by-one to powers known... but this comparison is highly flawed.

1) Because of the already mentioned 0th level spells, which can be ignored pretty much. Except for Detect Magic mostly, which the psion has to waste a single 1st level power on.
2) Because a single power known is "worth" a lot more than a single spell known in most cases, since all the lesser and greater, or I, II, III, etc versions are already included. To be fair, this is partially (but not even close to fully) compensated by the sorcerers ability to swap out single spells every other level.
3) Because a 10th level sorcerer knows exactly one 5th level spell, while a psion knows four (real) 5th level powers, plus all the lower level ones, which include higher level versions via augmentation, which will add another 8-10 to the tally for sure.

Spell/Power Level | Sorcerer Spells Known | Psion Powers Known

0th | 9 | - (1 - Detect Psionics)
1st | 5 | 5 (4)
2nd | 4 | 4+
3rd | 3 | 4++
4th | 2 | 4+++
5th | 1 | 4++++

That's how.

Bye
Thanee

 

[Thanee]

If you give them gear, the argument can become "The torc/wand/staff/pearl is too powerful!" or whatever. The problem (or perceived problem) could be the gear, not the class. The only way to compare them is without gear.

Yeah, tho I wouldn't go that far. Give them both reasonable stat boosters (+4 Int/Cha at 10th level), but nothing else. Those are the same for both classes and 99% of the characters out there will have them.

Bye
Thanee

 

[Scion]

the save dc's are mostly exactly the same, and generally for less damage. The few that have higher dc's (I believe there are 2 powers that fit this description, only 2, so 'usually' is a bit faudulant).

Several of your pluses are actually exactly the same thing but rephrased.

You ignored no scaling.

You completely underplay how incredibly bad having to use focus is.

A regular caster can get spell penetration, spell focus, and a metamagic and use them all at the same time. The psion must choose which one he wants and without further feats he only gets to do this once per battle (or spend a whole round doing nothing in an attempt to get focus back). Without a huge feat expenditure he cant even use two of them at the same time. Want to use a metamagic and power penetration? sorry, you will need a list of feats and you cant do it every round, period.

There are some very massive downsides there which you seem to just ignore, these need to be added in for any kind of comparison to be made.