The best part about SA though is that fans defend multiple applications by for example Hellfire Ray to the death, regardless how you try to explain that this breaks the game and makes these spells far superior to any other. It does not help that every instance of developers of the P&P game explained that SA is ever only applied once per spell. Meanwhile these retards are like "but u maek tre attackz zo tre snaek attackz DEEEERRRRRPPPPPP!!!!!!"
Edit: Let's make a comparison between Hellfire Ray and Disintegrate. Both do essentially the same thing, dealing high single target damage, both ignore resistances either fully or partial, both are RTA and both are single target. Yet currently Hellfire Ray gets triple the amount of SA so there is no real reason to use Disintegrate over Hellfire Ray.
I mean a theoretical AT with 10d6 SA would get 30d6! extra damage on HR compared to Disintegrate. Full damage 75d6 vs 50d6 a whopping 50% damage difference. HR is already ahead of Disintegrate in terms of damage output against anything but fire immune enemies. What is more that you make 3 ranged attacks means that it is not nearly as binary. You will rarely deal no damage at all compared to Disintegrate though you will slightly less often get full damage. In essence the base spell deals somewhat higher damage and has more stable damage output due to it being less binary. Even if you miss one you still the same damage, 50d6. Only if you miss two which on any well build AT will be exceedingly rare will you deal less damage and missing all 3 is probably as likely to happen as winning the lottery.
Edit 2: Scorching Ray would be another great example to show how utterly broken it would be to apply 3 instances of SA. The base spell does 6d6 damage. Adding 30d6 would give you 36d6 in other words six times the damage of the original spell. This is utterly insane there are no level 3,4 or 5 spells which deal that much damage inherently. Add empower metamagic feat and 36d6 effectively becomes 54d6, more than fucking Disintegrate as a level 4 spell.
How anyone can defend this nonsense is beyond me.