Frostmarrow said:
Having that out of the system: are there any no-brainers when it comes to class-abilities/feats?
One potential abuse is the "Dragonslayer" cheese. Since favoured enemy is a feat that can be taken multiple times, a human warrior could by 20th level take "favoured enemy:dragon" 19 times, always adding the +2 bonus to dragon, and thus do an extra 38 points of damage with every hit vs. dragons, and an extra 2 points of damage vs. almost everything else. But this is pretty much a one trick pony. Of course, you can replace "Dragon" with your favourite enemy type.
Other than that, it depends on what other rules you use. With the injury rules and generic classes, it is a no-brainer to make the good save (or in the case of the expert, one of the two good saves) the fort save, since that effectively replaces hit points. And if one uses injury rules, then Toughness, as a feat becomes powerful (from shafted to uber with the stroke of a pen!), and should be prohibited from being taken more than once, imho. Personally, if you make the reflex save the good save, then I would go for evasion as quickly as possible. Sneak attack is nice. Even a warrior should consider the first feat version of it (2d6 for 4 ranks in hide and move silently), even if he has to use cross-class skill points to make the prereqs.
If the injury rules are not used, then in my opinion the expert seems a bit too weak compared to the others. Some of the feats have skill prereqs that are low enough that a dedicated fighter could get most of the cool ones, and this leaves less room for the expert to shine, especially in a large party where, for instance, one warrior could be the "traps" guy, another the "spot/listen" guy, etc. I would bump up the expert skill points/level to 8, but that is just me.
It seems that (at least by default, since nothing specifically is mentioned), while divine and arcane spellcasters are almost identical, the arcane spellcasters still have a penalty for somatic component spells cast while in armour. The divine spellcasters don't, although they do not start with any armour feats. If you think that this is unfair, you can either add the armour penalty to the divines or strip it from the arcanes, or split the difference for both (eg. ok in light armour, not in medium or heavy armour or with shields).
Other notes: As written, the warrior's feats can be taken from elsewhere than the fighter feat list, and the spellcaster feats can be taken from elsewhere than the very limited wizard feat list. But, as written, none of the generics can take weapon specialization, unless one changes the prerequisite, (since there are no fighters, there can be no 4th level fighters). Spell mastery, of course, is inapplicable in a world of nothing but spontaneous spellcasters.
Since both arcane and divine spellcasters use spontaneous magic, it is likely that they have the same "spell replacement" ability for their spells known as do 3.5 sorcerors (at least, this spell replacement ability has been mentioned wherever spontaneous casters have been mentioned in wotc 3.5, as far as I know).
I would recommend either banning multiclassing or putting in some controls, to stop "Feat cheese", since all the generics get a feat at their 1st class level, and the expert and warrior also get a feat at their 2nd class level. Potentially, a human could have 10 feats by 6th level (2nd level warrior/2nd level expert/1st level spellcaster (arcane)/1st level spellcaster (divine)). Admittedly, this is also a problem in regular 3.5 with prestige classes that are front-loaded with a feat. Hmm...my dragon slayer cheese just got a little worse...assuming that from 7th level on one goes with warrior, at 20th level, 21 feats means +42 damage vs. dragons (or whatever)
