What LA should Widen Spell be?

[Kerrick]

I had a long discussion with UK on the Grimoire thread about this (look down near the bottom of the page). I proposed a system for epic spells wherein using the same metamagic feat more than once results in a reduced cost for all instances of that feat (e.g., Empower x4 is +4, not +8). I was using Widen and Admixture as the basis of this theory (see below), and UK proved to me that they are the only ones that need to be reduced - not everything else.

Let's take hellball as an example... we can all agree that it's around a 15th level spell, right?
First, the normal version:

Fireball (L3); admixture x3 (+12); widen (+4) = L18. Way too high for this spell.

Reduced version:

Fireball (L3); admixture x3 (+9); widen (+2) = L14th. Probably a bit low, but a lot better than L18.

The thread has a detailed discussion of this, including why Widen should be +2, not +3.

 

[WhatGravitas]

Maybe +2 would be better, but +3 is not wrong IMHO. The area is more than doubled, and the standard level increase for a metamagic feat that sort-of doubles a spell (Twin Spell, 2x Empower Spell, Energy Admixture) has always been +4.

So +3 is quite ok for a potentially doubled spell, which realistically is going to be less than doubled.

+4 for doubled is ok... but these spells double the impact (i.e. damage), which is faaaaar more important than the coverage... and looking at the damage cap-guidelines in the DMG, multi-target spells are usually only 1 level behind the single-target spells damage-wise... and we're talking 'bout multi-target spell to "even more multi-target" spell.

Considering the multiplicative scaling, I think +1 level is a little bit too good, but +2 is certainly ok-ish.

 

[CRGreathouse]

War Spell is much fun, especially combined with Rapid Spell.

What does Rapid Spell do there?