Bottom Worst Spells of 3.5 by level

[St Fan]

I remember seeing some speculation that Jade Phoenix Mage (PrC) could be used to get around the death from Transcend Mortality.

Oh yeah, that could do the trick too... if you time it correctly. You cannot die from transcend mortality if you're already dead.

Another open question is whether you can use death throes alongside transcend mortality to explode when you die instead of turning to dust...

Oh yeah, speaking of spells you wouldn't want to use without a pact of return... death throes (for clerics and wizards) or righteous aura (for paladins) rank fairly high. If you die, you go boom. Great, right? So indispensable... to make resurrection harder.

Mind you, once again those can be exploited with the proper combo. Especially in tandem with magic jar.

In fact, a lot of those "worse spells" already mentioned synergize very well with magic jar... like Tenser's transformation or, again, transcend mortality.

[Anthrowhale]

Did you just say the benefits of a spell was bad because they can be replicated by Shapechange of all things? The spell so absolutely broken in every possible and conceivable way that WotC themselves errataed every single monster in the game to remove any mention of its lesser version and invented a whole new subschool of magic to replace it because there was absolutely no way to balance it in any meaningful way? If "you'd better cast Shapechange" makes you a contender for this list‚ then literally 99.9% of the spells (and 95% of the 9th level spells) in the game are the worst spells in the game. Neither Polymorph nor Shapechange should appear in that kind of conversation because they just make basically all spells redundant. (Hells‚ if Polymorph was level 9 and we didn't have D.Polymorph‚ T.Polymorph or Shapechange‚ people would still be using it and saying it's a pretty good spell.)

And even then Shapechange can hardly reproduce all the benefits of Transcend Mortality (insane SR without being a golem‚ DR30). It's a bit disingenuous to say that those benefits are marginal. They're really good‚ they're just not worth the hassle of preparing a contingent resurrection beforehand.

I'm not claiming that TM is necessarily a 'worst' spell, just that it's not anywhere near must have. If you want to avoid Shapechange, then replace the top one with L7 Statue or L8 Iron Body and the bottom one with Polymorph.