The Wibble's page

From my experience playing through the adventure paths, I think part of the problem is that spells are going against the same saves that skill actions use, and any character can have a much higher proficiency in a skill than casters can have in casting spells (until high levels), plus you can get weapon enhancements and some class feats to boost those skill rolls even more, which you can't do with spells.

This means that monster saves have to be high enough that a character can't just use trip, grapple, intimidate
and other skill actions make encounters trivial, but by doing this spells struggle to get through and you end up with casters having a disappointing feal.

Getting a failure with a spell even if it does something doesn't feel fun, and realising that you will basically never get the cool critical effect that you picked the spell for is even more disappointing.

I think the worse bit is there is also nothing stopping critical hits from AoO from disrupting their spells unless they take steady spellcasting, which is a bit poor. A DC15 flat check to stop a spell being disrupted and takes a class feat slot, no thanks.

Maybe they could improve steady spellcasting for all classes as currently why would you take it?

The wording of the rules to heighten banishment would appear to back up that the heightened version of this spell(status) still has to target living and willing creatures. As banishment has to target a creature not on its home plane otherwise the spell doesn't make any sense.

I would argue that they could have used better language to make this more clear, something like 'increase the number of targets to up to 10' which would follow the wording of a lot of other spells and keeps it a lot clear all other restrictions apply.

(Banishment heightening :

Heightened (9th) You can target up to 10 creatures. The extra material component affects targets to which it is anathema.

)