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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Eldritch_Lord" data-source="post: 5388252" data-attributes="member: 52073">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.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.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.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.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.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.</blockquote>

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