am i missing something?

[zauriel56]

if you need a a light spell of equal or higher level to get rid of deeper darkness, why do ppl always talk about a heightened continual flame? wouldnt this just get rid of it once? how do u deal with a creature that has it multiple times a day? wouldnt you need a continual flame heightened to a 4th level spell to overcome and suppress any future deeper darkness?

[Scrapper]

Light, Daylight, Continual Flame can all be Heightened with the metamagic feat, their lvl is equal to the spell slot lvl assigned to the castings, a 10th lvl sorcerer using up a 5th lvl spell slot can cast any of those as a 5th lvl spell, and unless Deeper Darkness is Heightened as well, should over come it.

[Claxon]

Heightened Continual Flame (assuming it's heightened to 4th level, and assuming the Deeper Darkness is only 3rd) means that the continual flame continues to shed light as a torch (20 ft radius normal, 40ft dim). Which means that the darkness is effectively defeated.

I think the part you're confusing is the bit about dispel, you coulld cast a heightened light spell to dispel or counterspell a darkness spell. But if you're spell is heightened, your better off just casting it and causing the darkness spell not to function at all.

You might want to brush up on how counterspell and dispelling work, because I think that's your confusion. No one is suggesting doing either with continual flame. They're suggesting by having an object with heightened (4th level) already cast that deeper darkness just doesn't work at all around it because the light spell overrides it.

Edit: Higher level light/darkness spell automatically suppress a lower level version if their areas of effect overlap. That's an important piece of the puzzle.