Maw of Chaos isn't broken.
I don't personally consider it broken, but it shows up on a lot of lists of broken spells on BG and GitP, so I threw it in there.
Arcane Fusion is very strong, but not broken.
It's broken more for its abusability factor; combining it with Sanctum Spell or Arcane Thesis or other metamagic tricks can result in very easy infinite spell loops.
Dance of Ruin (BoVD): The damage and area are obscene.
Hmm. While it's quite powerful, I wouldn't call it broken--it deals typeless damage in a wide area, so you're unlikely to avoid affecting your allies, and PCs are rarely demons. Have a party of one caster plus all Ref-focused Evasion-using characters or a party polymorphed into demons and it'd be broken, but without that sort of effort the TK factor is too high to call it truly broken, I think.
True, but of course also consider for people that have no idea of what they are doing, Clerics and Druids are overwhelming. Picking through the entire spell list and memorizing the right spell is definitely for experienced players. Sorcerers on the other hand - you pick your one-trick pony and stick with it.
Other way around, I'd say. A completely-overwhelmed cleric decides to memorize
inflict light wounds one day, and if he finds he's too squishy to make use of touch spells, he can memorize something different the next day. A completely-overwhelmed sorcerer decides to learn
shocking grasp, and if he finds he's too squishy to make use of touch spells...oh well, he's stuck for at least two levels. Divine casters can figure out good spell allotments by trial and error--most spells are still adequate if not amazing, so they're unlikely to be completely useless on any given day--and if all else fails they can fall back on spontaneous healing or spontaneous summoning, which a sorcerer can't.
Well, all those "feats" are the Fighter's bread and butter. For the Caster classes its the spells. So I'd argue a fighter with poorly chosen feats is probably in the same boat as a Druid with poorly chosen spells on any given day. : ) Can the Druid learn from their mistakes and change their spells the next day? Sure. Can a DM allow a new player to learn from their mistakes and change their Feats - absolutely. Yeah, I realize it doesn't say in the rules "Fighters can change feats every x levels", but any DM that doesn't let a completely inexperienced player change up some really poor feat choices which makes their character worthless probably shouldn't be running a game.
That's exactly the point: the rules give divine casters the opportunity to swap out their spells every day, while they don't give the fighter the opportunity to swap out feats
ever unless PHB2 retraining is in play. Yes, a good DM can compensate for any number of bad rules, but (A) that's invoking the invalid "I can fix it, so it isn't broken" argument and (B) balancing a system around an excellent DM rather than a merely average one doesn't work.
Yeah...odd how I don't think I ever said most of the broken "spells" were outside the core, but suddenly that has become the focus. Probably its easier to pick apart that way? Anyway, my contention was the majority of the broken "stuff" was outside the SRD. Its getting way outside the subject of the thread and I don't expect people to start enumerating lists and I'm sure (even though I am new here) that the topic has been thoroughly beaten to death elsewhere.
You'll note I mentioned PrCs as well, only using spells because we already had a list of spells from core. The fact of the matter is that spells are going to be the major source of brokenness--broken monsters can be summoned, called, or transformed into with core spells, planar shepherds are going to be using core wild shape and summoning spells to abuse their PrC abilities, and so forth.
The other major area of brokenness is feats, and the kinds of feats that are broken are...metamagic feats and their reducers, which modify said broken spells. Really, the broken feats are few and far between--Persistent Spell only when combined with metamagic reducers, Arcane Thesis, Divine Metamagic, and similar--and none of them are broken on their own, they require spells to modify. There might be a few others that one could consider broken (but that I don't) such as Dragonwrought minus the early Epic feats cheese, Alternate Source Spell and other early-entry stuff, and so on, but again, those are few and far between compared to spells.
Just saying.
