Quote Originally Posted by Cruiser1 View Post
If this Prestige Class didn't have "Learn Sphere Spell" (which is a pretty minimal benefit for a Wizard too) it wouldn't seem biased against Sorcerers. To ensure balance, I tried to avoid changing fundamental aspects of classes, such as the limited spell selection of spontaneous casters.

Note most players these days won't even think of taking a PrC that skips a casting level. (See Logic Ninja's #1 rule of prestige classing: "thou shalt not lose caster levels".) A Sorcerer might take your modified version, but then a Wizard would never take it. (Lose a casting level and 2 bonus feats, in exchange for 3 metamagic feats that can only be applied to sphere spells?)

Many PrC's, some with much greater abilities than Sphere Scholar, have full casting progression, such as Archmage, Loremaster, and Thaumaturgist. I intentionally tried to make this a PrC with no casting level loss (which is why its abilities are fairly simple) and even then I was concerned people would think it's underpowered compared to others.
Ahh, but: those PrC's all have much higher prerequisites. Loremaster requring at least 7th level and the other two more than that, so they're entitled to more abilites. As for the loss of spellcasting: that's what's fundamentally wrong with so many caster PrC's. When you take a prestige class, you should be giving something up, and for casters the only thing they have to give up is spellcasting, so they should normally lose a level or two of spellcasting to get in. If you look at newer PrC's (aside from Complete Mage, that book contradicts itself alot though), they almost always lose a level of spellcasting at 1st, 10th, or on a level with a powerful ability. As your PrC has no major abilities, a CL loss at 1st level to pay for the abilities later on makes sense.

Finally, as for making it favor the sorcerer: I can't help it, I like sorcerers, and there are few PrC's out there that are good for them. Whenever I see bonus spell known *oh, for everyone except sorcerers*, I get annoyed.

Now, other abilites you could consider that a wizard doesn't get are: spell power with sphere spells (bonus CL for effects), bonus spell DC with sphere spells, resistance to sphere spells, etc. The Argent Savant and Elemental Savant in Complete Arcane have abilities that would be great to combine for a sphere mage. You could even make it a simple variant of the elemental savant, slowly turning the character into some kind of sphere-like being. Or it could just be a variant of the Argent Savant, gaining bonuses to hit and damage with sphere spells, extending them and dispelling them. Also note that both of theses example PrC's I've mentioned lose spellcasting, the Argent Savant loses one at 1st and the Elemental at 5th and 10th.