Is the Psion class balanced?

[Thanee]

The wizard also gets the familiar for free, whereas the psion has to expend yet another feat.

Just a little nitpick... psions get an extra bonus feat instead of the summon familiar ability, which they can spend on a psicrystal or on something else, as required; there's absolutely no advantage for the wizard here, rather a pretty big one for the psion (along the lines of how good *choice* is, as often enough demonstrated with the human racial ability).

The wizard does have Scribe Scroll over the psion, tho, but the psion is definitely not two feats behind at 1st level.

Bye
Thanee

 

[Nail]

Wow. Way to change the tone of this thread.....excellent.


I'm currently playing a Clr 19 in a group of ~5 other players (+1 DM, obviously). We've played since 4 level. We have a Wiz, a Sor, a Drd, and a Psi. (Not to mention a most excellent Rog and a stalwart and steady Ftr-type!) We get to compare magic-using classes all the time -- you'll note that all the main spell-casting (or power manifesting! ) classes are represented in the mix of our group.

We use precious few house rules.

It is the general opinion of our group that the Psion is very powerful...and probably has some balance problems. But Truth-in-advertising: The psion's player is truely a cunning fellow. He's sought out the powers and psionic feats that present the most...ahem....difficulties in containing.

 

[KarinsDad]

Very interesting character, and thanks for posting her!

I have a couple questions:
1) Would you say that she actually brought down her fair share, or more than her fair share, or less than her fair share, of the enemy?
2) How often did your party get ambushed, and how effective was she in an ambush compared to the others?
3) How many fights on average did your party have in a day?

1) She brought down her fair share of enemies. At low level, she was very good at taking out high DR monsters that other PCs could barely touch. She was doing 4D6+3 with a non-magical Greatsword and Psionic Weapon then. At 2nd to 4th level, 17 average points of damage (34 on a critical) is very respectable. The main difference was that she could not recover her Psionic Focus every round in the early days. On the other hand, her to hit and attacks per round were much closer to that of the Fighter types back then as well and even on the rounds without Psionic Focus, she averaged 10 points of damage per successful attack.

Her claim to fame was staying alive and conscious (Vigor was very helpful at low level, less helpful later on), even though she was often in the midst of it.

And, her Entangling Ectoplasm was extremely useful at all levels. Facing an enemy medium sized creature of any type, typically no problem. 1 PP and a below average or better roll, and it is -2 to hit, -4 to Dex, and is at half move. Limiting an opponent's movement and fighting capacity for 1 PP is very nice.

In straight up melee, she did less damage than the Fighters overall (since they tended to attack every round with better to hits). She did less spell damage than the casters overall (but often more with a single manifestation versus a single spell). But, she was always (except once) able to swing a battle that we were losing. She was always able to manifest on round x and then step between some powerful creature on round x+1 and hold it off while others healed or ran or fought the rest of the NPCs first.

She was also able to "solo" when necessary which is something that many of the PCs could not do effectively. In a large battle with many NPCs scattered across the map, she could run over to the biggest baddest NPC and distract him for many rounds while the rest of the PCs tended to stay grouped near each other for safety (and healing). If she got tagged for a lot of damage, a high point Vigor would get her right back into it. If the Fighter types soloed and got tagged hard, they had fewer healing options.


2) She did fine in ambushes. She never once got taken out in an ambush. She had Inertial Armor up most of the time (except real low level), so she had a decent AC most of the time, even when not prepared for battle.

I suddenly remembered. She went "down" twice (unconscious once, paralyzed once). She was in a room of a bath house all by herself (the other PCs were nearby getting baths) and was getting a massage by a female assassin who stabbed her with a poisoned blade which paralyzed her.

What can I say? She was naked in a bath house with no powers up, so she was easy to hit that time. The DM ruled that although Resilience stopped the hit point damage, it did not stop her from "getting damaged" and hence poisoned.

Course, it didn't stop her from kicking the assassin's butt all over the place even though she couldn't move and the assassin was trying coup de graces against her (and had shoved her into a tub full of water to drown her). The Sonic Energy Ray also brought the other PCs running (eventually, those slow duds). Another note: Paralyzation doesn't typically do squat against a Psion with PP to spare. It's deadly against most other PCs.

I'm still ticked that some of those PCs saw her naked.

Actually, the annoying thing about that campaign was that we could almost never ambush enemies, no matter how well we planned. But, they could ambush us practically at will. It got to the point that we didn't make plans at all a few times because we got pre-conditioned by the DM that the plans would fail.


3) As mentioned in the previous post, about 2 to 5 combats per day for "combative days".

She only ran out of PP a handful of times and even then, I would often save 1 PP so that she could use Psionic Weapon if nothing else. Dimension Door was especially costly because there are a lot of situations where it is easy to be the power of first choice. But, if you do that a lot (and not just in the super critical situations), you end up running through your PP like water.

 

[Nail]

Course, it didn't stop her from kicking the assassin's butt all over the place even though she couldn't move and the assassin was trying coup de graces against her (and had shoved her into a tub full of water to drown her). The Sonic Energy Ray also brought the other PCs running (eventually, those slow duds). Another note: Paralyzation doesn't typically do squat against a Psion with PP to spare. It's deadly against most other PCs.

No other magic using class could do this (without contrived set-ups).

Yoowsa.

 

[KarinsDad]

No other magic using class could do this (without contrived set-ups).

A Sorcerer or Warmage or Favored Soul or Spirit Shaman with Still Spell and Silent Spell and Eschew Materials (which one of my Sorcerers once had) could.

It depends on how paranoid the spell caster is.

 

[KarinsDad]

I'm not familiar with the Inspired Slayer PrCl.

It's the Slayer from the SRD (i.e. Illithid Slayer from XPH), just has Inspired as the enemy (Inspired are the super psions in the Eberron campaign setting).


We had two higher level Inspired come at us about a half dozen times where the best we could do is drive them away (seems they didn't like other psions and they had a way to detect us no matter where we went if we used our powers). The one charmed / dominated / paid(?) other evil NPCs to fight us while the other one just blasted us. We eventually killed them both, but it took a lot of tries. We killed the Kineticist because he made a tactical mistake that got him too close to the party and I single handedly killed the Monk/Telepath a few encounters later (i.e. a few with her, but many in the campaign). I had to Dimension Door her unconscious body into the ocean, just so that the approaching city guard could not prevent me from killing her.

She was just plain nasty with powers like Ectoplasmic Cocoon (she must have used Expanded Knowledge to get it), Schism (watching her fire off two powers a round got old ), Ego Whip (which nailed our Barbarian more times than I can remember), Dimension Door, Empathic Transfer Hostile, and Domination (you also do not want to fight your own party Barbarian if possible). It was better when he was comatose via Ego Whip. As our party says "Fine time to take a nap!". That was said a lot in that campaign.

She also went around charming other NPCs who had a lot of money, so she tended to live in style and often had an abundance of wealth and magical items that she swiped from them.

 

[Scion]

Ok.

Here was my psion at 9th level.

So what exactly is overly powerful about this guy aside from the usual suspects that all casters seem to have? The ac is nice but most any character could get the same or similar, especially caster types.

I will agree that polymorph type abilities do tend to be poorly balanced though, which seems to be where this build gets almost all of its 'problem' from. The rest of it takes 3 extra rounds of setup time, give a caster that sort of setup time and you likely wont have a chance.

Of course the psion could be taken out pretty readily by a single fireball spell at this point. Poor reflex save, no protection vs fire, low hp. He buffs up and gets a good AC but has other problems.


I guess your greatsword is doing 6d6 via a combination of two feats that require expending focus to use, which means yet another feat and a check to use effectively.. it is nice, but if the people with multiple attacks in a round are jealous something is a bit skewed

I also note that you fail the check to regain focus 25% of the time at that point so it isnt completely reliable. A 3 feat chain for a 75% chance after spending a move action to potentially deal an extra 4d6 on an attack (if the attack misses you still have expended your focus after all).

If you are doing 6d6+5 (avg 26) with an attack bonus of +9 vs a fighter type doing 2d6+10 (avg 17) or so with an attack bonus of +18/+13 or so and are doing 'more' damage per round even with the 25% chance of failure to regain focus that is interesting..

Being able to do more damage per hit is nice, but in overall damage the fighter type should've been pretty far ahead. Especially if a prayer or something similar was cast.

So here we have a character who only once went unconscious in 9 levels (at 3rd level), had one single measly defensive magic item, could fight better or as well as the party fighters when necessarily, who could heal herself, who could heal others, who could manifest damaging powers better than the arcane spell caster could cast damaging spells, and rarely took serious damage (Vigor, Intellect Fortress, Resilience, Resistance). Arcane spell casters cannot come close to being able to do this. For that matter, neither can most divine spell casters.

Ahh.. and now we come down to it.

The unconscious part is odd, but not unheard of. Sometimes some characters are just lucky like that. Being an elen helps this at the cost of being able to be useful during the day (massive pp expenditure).

The fighting better or as well as the fighters seems to only happen when metamorphed.. but of course other casters have the same issue with polymorph. When just swinging away and using the feats the damage is nice, but unlikely to come near the fighter types (as I showed above, using roughly the same guidelines as you used before)

Psionic healing is horribly inefficient. If this is dont much it'll eat through pp like candy. 5 pp for 1d12 hp or 7 pp for 2d12 hp is incredibly underwhelming. healing others requires spending more pp to transfer the damage to himself first and then healing them. While it is better than a wizards healing generally it isnt even a blip on the clerics radar.

The damage dealing powers of a psion I went over earlier, but to reiterate they are simply more versitile to actually make them useful later on against monster types.

Vigor is a poor, poor immitator to false life While false life tends to have less total temp hp it lasts for hours per level. While in combat it is usually better to use other powers which might actually end the battle vs this one and before it means that you need yet another prep round.

I like intellect fortress, it is a fun power, and it likely saved this character a few times given his lack of damage taking. Of course if you do then you cant absorb damage nor give yourself the save boost. Unfortunately it only lasts for one round at this point

Granted, she could not cast damaging powers as often as an arcane spell caster. But, she was not designed (like the other psion in the group who was a Kineticist) to do that.

And of course you didnt have much for energy powers anyway


Overall it looks like a fun character though. Looks like it'd be incredibly easy to run out of pp very quickly however.

Start the day with 76 pp, pop up a 7 point inertial armor and be on your way. Down to 69.

First battle comes along, pop up some defensive power for 5 pp, then pop up a metamorphosis for 7 pp and move into the battle. Using only feats and such for the rest of the battle to conserve. Down to 57.

During the battle hit an intellect fortress to stave off some area of effect damaging spell for 7 points. Down to 50 points.

After the battle fix up a little damage of your own for 7pp. Down to 43.

One battle of the day down and nearly half of the pp for the day gone. Better hope you dont hit 3 battles or more today!


Your character didnt have much chance to abuse the slayer prc, but within a few levels the abuse of that would likely start kicking in. Overall it is a prc that should have slightly higher requirements to get in.

While I definately see that some of the claims have merit they seem to mostly revolve around metamorph. If that wasnt there that kills a large amount of the potential AC and damage dealing capability. Even though metamorph does interfere somewhat with the elan racials.



This post was again pretty long, but I was trying to look at each point as it was made.

In brief though:
-Lots of prep time and a lot of pp to get the impressive AC
-Metamorph has the same problems as the polymorph spells
-Outdamaging fighter types with melee seems unlikely, given the limitations inherant
-Psionic healing sucks
-Direct damage powers are much more useful than other magics in general but not in an unbalanced way because of the proliferation of saves/SR/resistances/immunities/massiveHP/and other factors which make high level direct damage dealing problematic at best, if one looks at the numbers of expected damage and cost vs other efficient ways of doing damage it tends to fall in the right ballpark
-Doing all of the things that are possible makes the pp run out incredibly fast and then you are little more than a glorified commoner


I suppose there will be some counterpoints, I look forward to them

 

[Scion]

It's a bit more complex than that (keywords: augmentation and scaling), but overall, in a typical campaign, which is not specifically build to ensure balance (i.e. keep psionics in check), they can very easily become overpowered (not so much at low levels, more at mid to high levels). Magic, of course, has the same potential, but not to the same extent. Psionics are just more extreme in most directions. But there are many factors to consider, among them the personal playing style of the group, how the DM handles encounters, how the players play their characters (i.e. make them as powerful as possible, or try to not step into other characters' territory too much, etc).

Since big and bad magical effects tend to be more common and easier to abuse than psionics I would have to say that the magic system is the one to worry about.

It is easier to go nova and magic users have more resources to spend than psions do.

Also, limited resource vs unlimited resource is a very important balance point whether or not psionics is the game. Psionics do not accentuate it anymore than other caster types.

Magic, both arcane and divine, have a huge amount of abuse points, especially once you toss some suppliments in. As is shown by various optimization boards.

Speaking of which, if they are any sort of benchmark the number of builds that use a significant amount of psionics are virtually nil and are always much less impressive than other types of builds.

Since people are talking about the ease of breaking them vs others I think that the people who do this sort of thing all of the time ignore psionics because of the sheer difficulty and lack of bang for the buck is an important point. If it was so easy they would use them, but instead they use everything else. Interesting isnt it.

 

[Scion]

...there's absolutely no advantage for the wizard here ...


The wizard does have Scribe Scroll over the psion,...

those two comments seem to be at odds.

Familiar + Scribe Scroll vs bonus feat chosen from psionic feat, metapsionic feat, or psionic item creatrion feat.

More vs choice. Depending on how you want to look at it one could easily be seen as being better than the other.

personally, I prefer the choice. But then that is because I think the mechanics for familiar need to be redone and I have never scribed a scroll.. ever.

But that is just me. I know some people who love their familiars to death and scribe enough scrolls to always have a dozen or more spells handy.

 

[helium3]

I leave every now and then because of that as well.. it seems like some here purposefully go out of their way to be insulting.. although most are fine.

I find that it helps imensely to pretend that the person being catty is the same guy that runs "The Android's Dungeon" in the Simpsons.