How to Rend Fiends and Immolate People: A Guide to Sorcery

[SharkForce]

I agree, and if you can think of specific examples in which a metamagic significantly alters the spell's usefulness, I would be happy to include it. I think I'll include Careful with Web, anyways.

well stinking cloud and sleet storm, for the same reasons as web. also earthquake and reverse gravity. sadly sorcerers don't get magic jar, as careful would be an amazing option for that spell :) good to remember for multiclass though i suppose.

hypnotic pattern, fear, and confusion. they don't create zones, but any time you want to use them after enemies have closed the distance to your party, there is a world of difference between careful and non-careful.

basically you're just looking for spells that have an AoE save effect that is not *half* effect on a successful save, but rather no effect. i agree that careful fireball isn't that amazing (unless everyone has evasion or equivalent). and if the only thing your sorcerer could do was fireball, careful wouldn't be that great. but careful lets you use some very powerful offensive debuffs safely and it is definitely worth it to consider adding one or two of those spells to your selections purely on the strength of careful spell.

as to suggestion, nothing about the spell says the verbal component is the suggestion itself. which implies you still need to spout mystic gibberish to make the spell work. after all, you can't very well have a specific combination of sounds, pitch, resonance, etc, as is required for the verbal component of a spell to work, if you are saying something different every time you cast the spell. that said, if subtle removes the vocal component and the vocal component is the suggestion, that means you can now cast suggestion without having anyone react to the fact that you just suggested something and the target suddenly spontaneously agreed to do something out of character. subtle still makes a fairly significant difference in how the spell works.

mold earth is valuable because it is far easier to get a couple of minutes to prepare for a fight than it is to get a few hours to prepare for a fight. also because it can turn solid rock to difficult terrain; good luck doing that with a shovel.

mage hand, well, i've already listed a variety of situations where it would be useful. seriously, try and come up with uses for it while playing sometime. you may be surprised at how often it can come up. i still remember a 2nd edition game where i found a spell called gauntlet... one of the most useful features of the spell was the fact that it made your hand completely invulnerable. i mean, sure, it also gave you a melee attack that counted as magical and dealt better damage than a dagger, but even though that was the original reason i was interested in the spell it wasn't the part that was most useful in the end. this is at-will and can be used from a distance rather than being on the end of my arm? yes please!