Psionic Bias?

[DiscipleofBob]

A bunch of stuff.

To make things clearer...

I believe the ability was called Death Urge, and it basically made the target coup-de-gras itself. We were either level 6 or 7 (according to some of the people here it's a 4th level power, so I guess 7). I'll admit this game was a while ago, and I have since pushed the details out of my mind, but I will not forget how broken the psion in the party was.

We were obeying the Power Points rules, ie. not spending more than your manifester level, etc. The DC was still at least 25 while the wizard, sorcerer, and cleric were occasionally able to break 20. I should point out that NO ONE at the table was optimized, not even the Psion himself (at least to the level that people on this board seem to think is normal) This wasn't due to any obscure combination of feats, this was all in the text of ONE power and the Psion's given class features.

The only houserules we had were unrelated to the spellcasting or psionic mechanics (The changeling had a feat that let him gain stuff like the ability to shapeshift into a small creature or to get natural armor from turning into a lizardfolk, etc.)

I wouldn't be able to tell you if the classes balanced each other out at higher levels, because said game never got higher than 10th level.

The player did not cheat, as I subbed in for his character at one point, and read the ability out of the book. We had no houserules related to psionics or casting, and we were well aware of the cap power points you could spend on a power.

Even though I really didn't know how to play Psionics at the time, there were three other people at the table, including the DM, who knew Psionics well.

And while this was definitely the worst case in my experience, this wasn't the only experience of a psionic breaking the game. My first game in my area, the person playing the psion didn't really understand the character, but when the basics were pointed out to her, she was outclassing everyone in terms of damage and one-shotting whatever we went up against (granted, there wasn't an arcane caster except for the bard in that party.) There was the crit-tastic Soulknife who could change the shape of his weapon or something I still don't know how to explain. Oh, and the pyromaniac Wilder who would explode NPC's because they stole a couple of gold pieces from him.

Yeah, at the risk of flaming, I have to laugh when people on this board claim that 3.5 Psionics "aren't that bad" when I've been in at least 5 separate games that prove otherwise. I've given Psionics more than enough chances in games, and each time they never fail to outclass all the players and anything the DM can throw at them.

I will admit, however, that 4e Psionics look promising and I can't wait to try one out.

EDIT: Also, they were different DM's and different players each time, ranging from complete newbie to experienced but new to psionics to seasoned veteran since second edition, and each time one of these classes would get ridiculously powerful (all the time) the rest of us would look up the rules and try to find something that they were doing wrong. They weren't.