Used: Contingency spell

Contingency spell seems to work fine (except for the cancel wand thing, i dunno if that got fixed), but as I feared, that blasted spell failure effect intermittently ruins my buff spell routine... and when I lose an important buff spell that I only memorize one of, it is extremely annoying and inconvenient... sure, I *could* quaff a potion of magic renewal (12k+ gold) and try again, but if I lose another important spell that potion and the money I spent on it are wasted. And this is all *before* I get into combat and risk having a spell sequencer or other critical spellcast fail on me... kind of counterproductive to have an insurance policy that can get me killed... and even when it doesnt, its so annoying to watch that spell failure icon flash in the corner of my screen that I dont bother using the spell.

Can we *please* find some other way to balance the spell?

Sure. For now (well, after the next reset), we'll see how it goes without the spell failure.

I am all for balance, I totally understand wanting the spell to have a drawback because it is undispellable (thank goodness) and offers things the PnP version cannot. I think part of the drawback is being an 8th level spell as opposed to 6th (this is a good thing).

A minor XP cost, either a flat amount per casting, or variable depending on the value of insurance option selected would be fine with me as long as the cost isn't too high (if it costs more XP than it will help me gain on average). That could be one way of handling it... or perhaps some options that carry XP debt cost, and others that incur gold cost (for common arcane materials, etc), and still others that require very rare components (like dragons blood).

Leaving the spell failure de-activated for now. Enjoy.