JustKim said:
You can't possibly assert that. I, for one, would not be having fun if another member of the party could put anything into a coma with a standard action and nobody else among us could hope to contribute. Don't insinuate that I'm a bad DM when you're sanctifying a pet PC who tears through the game making every other player so much tinsel, just because you think you can "deal with them" through ability circumvention.
But you overlook many, many things about ego whip.
First and foremost, it doesn't come into its own until mid-to-high levels (mid levels for the wilder). Before you can augment it high enough, it's mostly for show, since charisma damage which is less than enough to knock someone out means absolutely nothing to most enemies. Being able to just damage someone is much more important at low levels.
Second, ego whip only affects one target, so extremely common situations like fighting many enemies (goblin patrol, Meepo's posse, etc.) will make ego whip a poor choice of offensive power.
Then you must recognize that a good degree of common foes (undead, oozes, constructs, plants) are immune to mind-affecting abilities. At high levels, everyone who's worth ego whipping is mind blanked.
This isn't ability circumvention: there's still plenty of encounters where you can mind-rape people. But there are also plenty where ego whip isn't the end-all-be-all of ending encounters.
In most situations, wilders I've seen ego whipping people into comas are about as effective as rage-aholic barbarians: they hit someone, and that someone drops. But you're only doing it once a turn. Against a brutal single foe, it can be powerful, but against groups, or against foes immune to mind-affecting abilities, or at low levels, it's more style than substance.
There are some end-all-be-alls to D&D. Pun-pun is the prime example, and I'd be hard-pressed to allow that in any game other than the silliest of games. Ego whipping and spiked chaining aren't even in the same ballpark as real bustedness.