| Spuddly |
To the OP:
That would be a very bad decision, unless everyone who played a caster in your group unanimously agreed not to abuse it. Which would be very difficult to do.
Free maximize & empower & quicken means two enervates will drain roughly 10 HD a round. Unless your DM is throwing only undead & construct at you, you're going to pretty much kill everything in two rounds. If you have trouble making the ranged touch attack, a quickened true strike means you'll pretty much never miss.
Or what about a quickened, empowered, maximized disintegrate?
And what about heighten? A heightened fireball isn't that big a deal, but a heightened grease, glitterdust, slow, or flesh to stone? Nothing is going to make their save, unless the monster is so high level, it will cream the rest of the party.
Outside of the players handbook, when you get persistent spell (makes a spell last 24 hours on yourself), twin spell, repeat spell, and a whole host of others, the problem becomes even worse. Combine that with the Orb line of spells from the school of conjuration, which, unlike most evocation spells, have no save, you just have to make a ranged touch attack. You will be doing hundreds of damage, without a save, from hundreds of feet away. If your party is ok with feeling useless, then go for it.
Now, if you stick only to player handbook metamagic feats & spells for your wizard, and only evocation spells at that, it may not be *that* bad, since you will only be doing damage. A fighter with a greatsword and power attack, or a two weapon fighting rogue, will be doing similar damage, but only if they get access to feats & classes outside of the PHB.
Free quicken, alone, is INCREDIBLY powerful. Getting to cast two spells a round, for free, is just insane. The one limiting factor on a wizard, who has a spell for everything, is that he doesn't get to cast them all at once (at least, not until higher levels, and/or with lots of splat books). Especially when, rather than use damage dealing spells, you use spells that force a save, or kill outright, or make the enemy so useless your other party members have no problem killing them.
Metamagic feats are largely for higher level wizards, who have low level slots they aren't doing much with. Filling a 5th level slot with a quickened true strike at level 15 is definitely worth it if you're fighting something like pixie monk blackguards with near-impossible to beat saves and stratospheric touch AC. Now you can land those empowered enervates.
Extend spell is great when you get past level 10, if you ever get downtime. The spells that last 10 hours now last 20 hours. Cast them on your party before you go to sleep, then 9 hours later, they still have 11 hours left, and you also have your spell slots back.
Heighten spell is good for sorcerers who want to keep their low level spells relevant. It's best when combined with the player's handbook II variant where you trade your familiar for the ability to use metamagic without increasing casting time. Otherwise, spending a full round casting is a bummer.
What a great idea! Whereas I usually DM, I am actually playing an evoker, and have intentionally foregone metamagic feats because of the reasons Karanidia mentioned above.
Here's a few thoughts to try and bring some balance to this...
1) Do not allow people to stack metamagic feats together...
2) Only allow the free use of metamagic feats on spell levels obtained below the character level of which they obtained the feat. For instance, if a caster gets still magic at first level, they can only cast first level spells using still magic. If they took it as their third level feat, then they could only do it on spells level three or lower, etc.
3) If the caster is a specialist (such as my character is) only allow the character to be able to use the metamagic feats on the spells from their specialized college of magic "sorry, as we are specialists, we only know how to teach you to apply maximized to evocation spells"...
1) Outside of the player's handbook, when you get feats to reduce the cost of metamagic feats, this would be a good house rule (on its own). It would pretty much nerf some of the most overpowered, optimized wizard builds. Still letting wizards spontaneously use metamagic without increasing the spell slot cost is nuts.
2) This would still make the wizard too powerful. They get feats at levels 1, 3, 5, 6, 9, 10, 12, 15, 15, 18, and 20. As you can, see, those are mostly levels when the wizard is also getting a new level of spell. At any given time, the wizard is going to be able to use the feat freely on their highest level spells. Which, IMO, is still giving the wizard too much. I would pick up empower & maximize early, to use on things like ray of clumsiness (dex penalty) or ray of enfeeblement (str penalty). Further on I'd get twin, split, and repeat. Quicken would be the last feat I picked up.
Oddly, it would be about the same in terms of what metamagic feats most people pick up, limit to you to about the same spells that people use their metamagic feats on, but not burn through higher level slots.
3) This just discourages people from playing specialists. By the way, evocation for wizard isn't terrific. If played "right" (ie, with waaaaaay too many splatbooks), you can feel competent. But I know a lot of old 2e players who spent 3e throwing fireballs and cones of cold around, and just feel underpowered. You can nuke a bunch of stuff a handful of times per day, and then you shoot stuff with your crossbow. Weee.... It's especially pronounced at low levels, after you run out of magic missiles. 1d4+1 damage just doesn't feel that good, compared to the 2d6+str the fighter does, or the sneak attack the rogue does, all day. I recommend you check out the focused specialist variant in complete mage or complete arcane. You have to prohibit another school, and also lose one slot/day to prepare non specialist wizard spells. You do, however, get two more specialist spells per level, per day. Only if you aren't using one school a whole lot, though.
In my opinion, wizards get more bang for the buck casting transmutation, conjuration, enchantment, and necro. Transmutation, I think, has the best all around spells. You can haste your party, slow the enemy, enlarge the fighter, shrink the rogue, disintegrate, turn mud to rock and back again, or flesh to stone, and let's not forget- everyone gets to fly! Then, of course, there's the utter ridiculousness of turning the party monk into a monster with more natural attacks than the rest of the party combined with polymorph. Conjuration gets some really great stuff like solid fog, web, cloudkill, and grease. My wizards tend to either a) buff his party- a hasted rogue, fighter, and cleric do more damage than a fireball, b) debuff/control the enemy- web, grease, and solid fog gives your party time to organize, buff, retreat, move into position, etc, while slow, enervate, and glitterdust make them less dangerous to your party, and c) tell pesky enemies to die with something that forces them to make a save. If fighting giants, target their will. If fighting aberrations, target fort. Most monsters will have a weak save, and if you target it, you can shut them down. Be warned, though, that this can lead to DM ire if you end the boss fight in two rounds by spamming flesh to stone. I've had DMs arbitrarily bump the saves on all monsters up so I could only lock them down 45% of the time.