As my 3.5 campaign gets into the mid to high levels, I can feel our gaming sessions collapsing under the system's weight. Ultimately, if the game isn't fun to play while at the table, it doesn't matter how many classes there are to choose from, how many spells can be chosen from, or how many feats there are. Our combat turns take forever! At one point, we were using Fantasy Grounds on laptops just to handle the dice rolling. Here are some of the lowlights from a 13th-level combat from my last game: 26d6 disintegrate, a scout doing 10-14 die of damage each round, the warblade does 12-14 die of damage every other round. The 5 or 6 enemies had 6 attacks each! That can mean counting literally hundreds of dice over the span of a long combat. Counting dice is not fun. Not hard, just not fun.
In another campaign, half our party was neutered because of spell resistance, and immunities. Players were reduced to 'aid another' actions for round after round to help the one or two PCs that were actually useful. No fun.
I was excited to here about Pathfinder RPG, because I was really happy with Paizo's Dungeon and Dragon magazines, and their Pathfinder adventure paths (still angry with WotC about that!). But then when I read it I found it doesn't fix the core problems: Iterative attacks, attack and AC scaling, multiclassing, full-caster supremacy, and all the dice counting! It is simply someone's published house rules, and because they want to claim backwards compatibility they can't go far enough to fix what is really wrong with 3.5. It is just too cumbersome to actually have fun with at the table outside the 'sweet spot'.
I'll miss some of the options from 3.5, like the druid (patience!), but I won't miss the glut of feats, spells, and prestige classes that I had to wade through to find the optimal choice for my characters. Nor will I miss the agony of stating out monsters and NPCs when I DM. In fact, glut became such a problem that maybe my 4e games will be 'core only' (defined by our group, not WotC's 'everything is core').
So I will certainly, without a second thought, be switching to 4e. The thing I'll miss most about 3.5 will be Paizo's adventures, but conversion is still a possibility.
