When would this spell be useful?

[moritheil]

The Kineticist PrCl has a prereq of "Must have a power point reserve of at least 1 power point. "

If you no longer meet a PrCls prereqs, you can't use its abilities- reduced to zero PP, the Kineticists fizzle.

There are two places where that argument is suspect. The first is in the interpretation of whether or not "power point reserve" refers to current power points. If I am a 20th level sorcerer/eldritch knight and I use up all my 3rd level spells, do I suddenly lose the benefit of Eldritch Knight and thus no longer have any 4th level spells, because at that moment I am not capable of casting any more 3rd level spells for the day? Or to turn the question around, even if I do use up all 3rd and higher spells, do I suddenly not count as a 20th level spellcaster, and revert to whatever level I was before entering the prestige class? (We will assume I had Practiced Spellcaster to bump me up to 20th.)

The other part of the debate goes to the "cascade failure" premise which was introduced with C. War - as you'll recall, it was then and is still now hotly debated, thanks to apotheosis-style classes such as the Dragon Disciple and Elemental Savant.

Similarly, some PrCls simply have slow PP progressions, so a couple of shots from this spell could cripple them quickly.

Well, that's a good find. I do take slight issue with the term "cripple." Inconvenience, surely - but do they all necessarily rely on their manifestations? And will that be enough to make up for the all the damage that your mage wasn't doing?

As I recall, some from CompPsi or 3P sources like Hyperconscious are also powerful but with minimal PP.

I don't use Hyperconscious but if you have other classes from official WOTC products that are unambiguously affected by this, I'd like to hear about them.

 

[irdeggman]

You might argue that the spell is far more useful at low levels, but there again you would be wrong: at level 4 you can do a whopping 3 PP worth of damage, whereas they have over 21 PP. Congratulations; you used a precious turn in combat to deplete 1/7 of the enemy's daily resources. Basically, you have only succeeded in drawing their wrath. IME, combats against full manifesters are desperate affairs that generally only last about 3-5 rounds before they or the party are dead, so this just isn't making any real difference.
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What you have essentially done is to strip away a spell slot of the highest level the character can use. A psionic character can't use more pp than his manifester level on a power so a 4th level psion can put 4 pp into a single power (even though he can only manifest 2nd level powers).

I think that removing a spell slot is about right for a 2nd level spell in power.

 

[roguerouge]

Sure it's useless if one person uses it. But if a half a dozen 3rd level sorcerers start spamming this spell, they become a group of mooks to pay attention to, even though they would be paired with much higher level allies.

 

[starwed]

[FONT=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]Use this spell with the Psionics Handbook![/FONT]

I think that spell was designed for use with the 3.0 rules, rather than 3.5. There were a lot of feats that required you to have X pp left to use them in 3.0.

Also, the 3.5 XPH classes have almost twice the number of power points as their 3.0 counterparts. So doubling the damage this spell does seems necessary.

 

[moritheil]

What you have essentially done is to strip away a spell slot of the highest level the character can use.

I did get a feeling that might have been what they were trying for. The thing is, at low levels, almost; at high levels, not even close. (8 pp vs. 20 . . . 7 PP would equal a single 4th level spell, which is virtually never worth an action to deal with at 20th level.) So if this is true:

I think that removing a spell slot is about right for a 2nd level spell in power.

Then it's more like 40-60% of what is about right for a 2nd level spell. I get that not every spell can be still useful at high levels like False Life, or scale upwards nicely like Scorching Ray, but still . . . at no level is it useful in anything resembling a typical combat scenario.

Heck, when was the last time you cast Symbol of Spell Loss, for that matter? I don't think I've ever used it in a campaign as a PC. It just doesn't accomplish anything useful for the resources you expend.

I think that spell was designed for use with the 3.0 rules, rather than 3.5. There were a lot of feats that required you to have X pp left to use them in 3.0.

Also, the 3.5 XPH classes have almost twice the number of power points as their 3.0 counterparts. So doubling the damage this spell does seems necessary.

That is a very good catch; I had forgotten about the rescaling of PP, as I never really used 3.0 psionics. Thanks!

This adjustment would make it much closer to what irdeggman suggeested was the intent of the spell.