jerichothebard said:I almost hit bard, but then I thought about what happens when you play a game set in the court of a king, and need someone to schmooze with the nobility...
Your high-society rogue (who also has the Bluff/Diplomacy/Sense Motive readily available, along with some of the necessary knowledge skills) will evade the evil vizier's fireball, dodge the assassin's knife, and wonder what became of the remains of the bard. (Bards are amusing, but I've yet to see one survive as well as pretty much any other character class. If they had evasion, they could survive more magical assaults; if they had UCD, they could survive more assassins; if they had Divine Grace, their saves would be more likely to survive either/both; if they had "add INT to Initiative", they'd be able to get the heck out of the way.)
The only one to die faster is the sorceror, whose nice quantity of spells per day is cut short when they lose the intiative roll to the evil wizard's empowered fireball -- sorceror being a level behind in spellcasting and all -- or can't see the assassin because they didn't use their latest spell to learn See Invisibility. (I'm trying a variant sorceror where they can specialize like a wizard to learn one more spell from a specific school at each spell level by dropping two other schools from their spell list. It's pretty powerful. Doesn't keep them any more alive against a huge earth elemental, but it's not supposed to.)
Most of the other classes are mostly balanced with clerics (self-buff spells), druids (animal growth) and monks (oodles of class features) coming into balance with the other classes at higher levels.
::Kaze (thinks Psions make standard Sorcerors utterly pointless)