Editing Erudite (section)

==The Drawbacks==
Some of you may be saying to yourself, "Holy swizzle-dick, Batman!  What in the world would NOT be to love about this class, especially with spell-to-power meaning I can learn literally every power and arcane spell in the game?!"

Well... hold up a second there, Bucky, it's not all cupcakes and rainbows out of a unicorn's fart-box here.  There's some things to discuss first.

First up is that the RAW version of erudite, as of the end of 3.5, only allows you to manifest a very, very, very few powers each day.  Take a look in Complete Psionic on table 6-6 which lists the erudite class stuff.  See that column that says "Unique Powers/Day"?  That's right: you can only choose that many powers in your repertoire to manifest each day.

So, for example, if you're a 5th-level erudite, and you have 12 1st-level powers, 7 2nd-level powers, and 4 3rd-level powers, you get to pick just 3 of any of those powers to manifest all day long.  That's 3 out of a possible 23 powers.  Look at that 20th-level row for erudite.  You can only ever manifest a total of 11 powers, and even with funky epic progression, you'll always be boxed into a relatively smaller number of powers than your repertoire would indicate you can use.

Even after all these years, a lot of people on various forums debate this issue.  Some think this is a perfectly acceptable price to pay for phenomenal cosmic power: you can only ever tap into some of that power at a time.  Others fall back on the original erudite rules in Dragon #319 (pg. 46), which was written to say you can manifest unique powers of each power level, on par with a wizard (for example, in the magazine version, a 5th-level erudite can manifest a single 3rd-level power, two different 2nd-level powers, and three different 1st-level powers).  There are others who say that both of these extremes are somewhat undesirable, so they houserule it somewhere in between (double the number of unique powers allowed by Complete Psionic, allowing a number of unique powers equal to an ardent's powers known earlier in that same book, or other crazy parity schemes).

But RAW?  Erudites are fucking boned when it comes to trying to toss off a dozen powers.  Sure, they can... but only a dozen of the SAME power.  Note, however, they can still use psionic items with powers to make up the difference; because they can learn all the things, they can also activate all the things, which means you don't have to manifest it yourself if you got your local psionic artificer to make it for you.

Second disadvantage here is XP.  Oh, I know some asshats will chant "XP is a river", like the properly brainwashed fuckwits they are.  Yeah, tell you what, chief, you find a DM who allows you to totally break the fucking game by earning 1,000 XP more than the rest of the players do, and I'll one-up you with an artificer with that same amount of XP to build things (since only the really smart powergamers know that XP isn't the river, '''money''' is in an infinite multiverse with interplanar markets to tap into).  Hell, forget that for a moment and realize that buying all the powers in the game still means you'll never get to the 9th-level badassery of stuff like ''gate'' (which gives you access to ''wish'' and ''miracle'' cheaper, usually also with something that can hurl so many SLAs and actual spellcasting that the DM is now having to fight back against his own Monster Manual), ''shapechange'' (all the brokenness of ''polymorph'', plus all the special abilities that made not having them marginally less-broken for ''polymorph''), or even ''wish'' (which is the least effective spell at that level for what it costs you, but hey it's still a possible IWIN button in a pinch, plus you need several of them to boost your inherent bonuses to +5, something a single efreeti can't really accomplish on their own).

The point here is that XP isn't a river, it's a fucking faucet and everyone gets to drink from it, not just your erudite.  That does '''not''' mean you shouldn't learn more stuff; it means you actually need to think a moment before picking up some new power.  Do you really need it?  Can it do all the things?  If not, what is so useful about that power/spell?

Which brings us to the third disadvantage that nobody thinks is a real thing until the DM says so: you can't actually take every spell as a power.  You learn spells as if they were powers not on the main psion/wilder list, meaning you can only ever learn something one level lower than your top power level available (thus, no 9th-level spells as powers without epic manifesting).

But more than that is the cooked-in limitation of not being able to learn any spell that allows you to recall/recast another spell.  Due to technicalities, this takes away ''limited wish'', ''energy transformation field'', and anything funky that recalls spells (like ''Rary's mnemonic enhancer'', for those of you trying to use powers to make your wizard side uber).  Other spells suck because they count against unique powers per day AND require you to "cast" addition uniques to fire off, such as the ''arcane fusion'' and ''spell matrix'' spells.

However, not all is lost.  The various ''shadow conjuration''/''evocation'' spells are just perfectly legit for you to take, because they emulate other spells; each casting of a shadow-based spell allows you to pick the emulated spell at the time of casting.  Oh, and ''arcane spellsurge'', which reduces casting times on future spells, that's kosher (because it only changes the effects on casting other spells, it doesn't actually recall/recast anything on its own).

Other stuff may be DM fiat.  Transparency rules mean a ''mental pinnacle''/''dweomer of transference'' loop may not work as intended, but if your DM is cool with it, go for it.  (Protip: if you're a DM, shit-can ''mental pinnacle'' and close the loop.  If you allow this, you may as well allow efreeti wish-looping at around 12th level and admit you're going to have to restructure your game around the new "normal" of power.)

TL;DR  Erudites are pretty fucking powerful, but they're still not as god-mode as clerics, druids, and/or wizards usually are.  So pick good spells as powers.  The polymorph, shadow, and other "multi-tool" spells are your friends.