I'm sure this has been debated back and forth before (so if anybody can point me to that thread i'd be grateful as I can't find it) but now that the Words of Power system has been out for a while what are the pros and cons of it compared to regular casting?
From what I can see it does offer a reasonable amount of versatility, especially for spontanious blaster casters in that they can adapt their magic to a greater degree to suit what they're facing, facing cold immune mobs? just swap out the cold word for an acid word, prepared casters can do the same but only to th extent that they can read their GMs mind and guess what they're likely to face.
But they seem to offer a significant number of disadvantages to the caster, all the targetting words have greatly reduced ranges if you don't use the boost word which bumps the spell level up dramatically, I believe the standard example is fireball vs 'burst fire blast' where without boosting the wordspell has a close range and a 10ft radius instead of a long range and a 20ft radius, an exact match isnt possible but to get the 20ft radius you have to boost the spell by 2 levels to spell level 5 and to get the long range (and a 40ft burst) you have to boost by 4 levels to spell level 7 (which is a fairly steep cost to do 10d6 of damage at 13th/14th level)
Some word spells lose damage but gain versatility, the word spark only does 1d4 damage compared to the nominally similar shocking grasp which does 1d6 but can be used as a ranged touch attack not just a melee one on the other hand it doesn't get the +3 hit bonus for touching metal armour.
Or vice versa, the word force bolt (the closest equivalent to magic missile) begins life one level higher than MM at level 2 does more damage at first as it reaches its maximum of 5d4 dmg at caster level 5 while MM does (effectively) 3d4+3, evens out in overall damage by level 7 and loses ground by level 9 and loses the ability to target multiple creatures (the word only says that it acts like MM for the purposes of spells that negate or absorb force effects)
Not to mention the fact that there are just no words that duplicate or even come close to duplicating certain spells.
TL:DR version
What are the pros and cons of Words of Power, as far as I can see
Pros:
More versatile with regards to damage type (especially for the spontanious casters)
Cons
Short ranges and smaller AoEs unless they are boosted which puts up the spell level significantly
Similar effects are generally weaker for the same spell level
There are some spells that just cant be duplicated by words of power.
Some words start out at a higher level than their closest spell equivalents
Either/Or
Some spells gain versatility but lose damage
Some spells lose versatility but gain damage
