Epic spells are BROKEN. Period.
Epic skills are broken too. Turning the King or Emperor into your personal slave by spending a round talking to him with epic diplomacy. Or walking across clouds or mist as if it were solid ground... which was epic balance if I remember correctly.
Actually I have less issue with the epic skill uses. Diplomacy inherited more then a bit of BS, but when the is seed corrupt the tree will be corrupt. At least Paizo capped it to 1d4 hours (give or take GM Fait).
Cloud or mist walking is very in keeping with higher level fantasy and mythology. Training that gets to the point of being magical. I hope Ultimate Combat will dish out some options for this.
The gulf between the damage Epic Spells do to the game and Epic Skills is no where near (except epic diplomacy) the same.
I'm one of those people who doesn't shout broken very often but Epic Spells make my exceptions list. They are the Redeemers (Unreal Tournament weapon) of the Rocket Tag 3.0 Epic tends toward.
I'm one of those people who doesn't shout broken very often but Epic Spells make my exceptions list. They are the Redeemers (Unreal Tournament weapon) of the Rocket Tag 3.0 Epic tends toward.
Agreed. That's why epic spells only show up in three places in my campaign:
1. On existing epic monsters that have them as abilities.
2. As artifact-level magic items (stone tablets with epic spells). These are not gimmmies from the ELH - they are custom spells needed for the plot of the campaign.
3. Mythals. I love being able to create a magic area based on a rule system rather than based on GM fiat. It allows for a lot more consistency, and to make it cool, they can be anchored or have a capstone and thus be either already affected by external events or affectable by PCs.