My experiences with psionics:
- We've had no problems whatsoever with time stop or temporal aceleration and its ilk. Since you can't actually hurt someone else while time is stopped, I've found that these are primarily useful for buffing or healing. That's okay for me. Zimbel, are you playing that other creatures are affected by your spells when you're time stopped?
- I agree that the problem with Metamorphosis is in the feat, not the power. It hasn't come up in my game as a must-have, though, so I haven't had to make a decision about house ruling it.
- Fission hasn't proven to be a problem for its level. Schism either, for that matter.
- Timeless Body has come across as fairly weak. With only a one round duration, it's basically a purely defensive "Auggh! I don't want to die!" power that has to be activated every round as a standard action.
- My psi warrior has Empathic Transfer, Hostile. It's a fun power to have that hasn't turned out to be unbalancing; the fact that you have to get hurt to be useful has led to some interesting decisions in balancing armor and combat healing amidst the group. There's some odd augmentation weirdness, though, relating to how many hit points you get back when you use it in a 20' radius. Also note that the augmented burst affects allies, too.
- Control Flames is a non-issue for us; requiring concentration prohibits other fun actions.
- Energy Missile - In my opinion, this is simply too powerful even unaugmented. We reduced the number of missiles from 5 to 3, and adjusted the augmentation DC to be consistent with other powers. It seems balanced with these changes.
- Affinity Field hasn't proven useful enough to us to make a difference one way or another.
- The xp cost from Psychic Chirugery has dissuaded anyone from transferring powers. It falls under the category of "powers that are cool, but not useful enough to actually select."
ADDITIONAL CHANGES WE'VE MADE
- We have also changed dispel magic to have a "normal" effect on par with the arcane and divine spells.
- Anywhere that they made the "+1pp = +1 to DC" typo, we've changed that to "+2pp = +1 DC."
- We make sure that people track whether or not they have psionic focus. This can be incredibly important.
- We've toned down the feats power penetration and greater power penetration so that they're on par with arcane equivalents.
- There is a psionic item that causes all powers to cost -1 pp. This isn't really an issue, except that it affects what powers can be successfully altered with metapsionic feats! We've agreed that this item won't let the psion use a meta-psionic feat on a power earlier than their level would normally allow.
- Astral constructs haven't proven to be too strong for us, but it's very important to note that unlike summoned creatures, these guys aren't hedged out by prot. evil spells. That's a big change.
- I agree that ego whip can be very powerful when augmented. On the other hand, that isn't really a problem; augmented, it seems no more powerful to me than any other power of its equivalent level.
- I require that if psychic reformation is used, it can't be one of the powers changed. That means that if it is used to qualify for a prestige class, it becomes less useful thereafter. Truth be told, I haven't had any problerms with it either way.
