[Syveril]

I think a lot of the burst-type classes have suffered in favor of the long-term classes, with the advent of increased hp and glacious stones. Remember how awesome stances were? They're still cool, but everyone does the same thing; sit them out. It's not like you could flee anyway, cause you're probably battle locked, and fleeing takes so many rounds now that you're going to eat a stance if you don't have withdraw.

SM used to be an occasional equalizer for classes that were good at drawing things out (it even shows up on the class descriptions you see on the website), but it really hurts not to have sustained oomphf. Having a ton of kung fu attacks used to be pretty cool, but now it doesn't really mean anything unless your kung fu attacks have vanishingly short prevention times.

I'm not saying that the natural progression is wrong, but I'd like to see some of the natural imbalance being addressed. For example, a class's base hit/dam is largely irrelevant now (warlocks have one of the lowest base hit/dam, I believe) -- but it used to factor into footpads being accurate hitters. Where does that stand now? Perhaps footpads should derive more +hit from their dexterity than other classes. Barbarians could scale more strongly with +str (although their str gains have appeared to be balanced around the current system, so I don't know how it should be adjusted).

Anyway, I wanted to make a non-incendiary suggestion in the spirit of usefulness. =P I do end up with tons of ideas about Nodeka, and what keeps me playing more than anything is the sense that I can sometimes contribute to its improvement. Thanks for listening.