Psion's role in the group

Question

Psions are listed as controllers. My daughter's 2nd level Psion seems to act more as a striker, doing a bunch of damage to one opponent and not having the ability to control the field as much as when we were running an equivalent wizard.

1. Is this a function of the level?
2. Did we just choose very striker like powers?
3. Are we doing something wrong?
4. Or is this just a way the class works?

Answer 1

She may have chosen very striker-like powers -- I'd have to see the powers to be sure. However, the psion's a different flavor of controller than the wizard in any case. The wizard tends to have a lot of area damage and terrain-style control: zones of fiery doom, walls, and so on. The psion, particularly the telepathic psion, has more single target control. The at-wills are great for making it hard for a monster to do anything. Dishearten can render monsters unable to hit, and Mind Thrust sets the monster up to take a lot of damage pretty quickly.

I think it's slightly harder to control with a lower level psion because you haven't built up a lot of power points to augment the powers yet, and so much of a psion's control lies in the augmented at-wills. But the feel is always going to be different.

Something else to watch out for: psion can, for some people, get pretty dull because of the at-will structure of the class. When a wizard or a druid or an invoker gets to the point where she's choosing from four encounter powers, rather than mostly relying on at-wills... the psion will still be relying on at-wills.

Answer 2

It certainly sounds like a power selection problem. Sadly, the Psion just doesn't have a quarter of the power choices that a wizard does, which is made worse by the fact that wills and encounters are lumped together. At the moment, this means that a psion player will often have to take a less than ideal power to properly cover their controller role. In general, Psion's have some pretty weak multi target options but some very strong single target ones. This means that if a player just takes the most powerful powers, they won't fill the controller role very well. This gets a lot easier as the player levels up and has more options available to them but can certainly cause issues at low level. Since most of the single target Psion powers have great debuffs to them, a good DM should be able to adjust the parties encounters to include less minions and more elites and the game should run just fine.