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The biggest piece of feedback we received was that the rogue came across as a lame fighter. This was a key test to see how much tolerance people have for varied combat strength across classes. There's some give, but it looks like people want to avoid dramatic differences.

That is interesting. Putting rules they know probably won't work into the packet to see how far they can push things and see what people like/dislike. This shows that they are really thinking about what they put in the packets and are listening to the results.

The plan right now is to give rogues expertise dice equivalent to the fighter's progression. In addition, our new approach to skills uses bonus dice in place of a static modifier. A rogue can essentially use weaponized ability checks in combat. A rogue might lure an enemy into charging forward, dart into the shadows and disappear in the blink of an eye, distract a creature's attention away from the wizard as he or she prepares to cast a spell, and so forth.

Sounds like a workable idea, though I would guess the exact mechanics are going to take some work to balance out.

Dialing down the damage also allows us to be more liberal in giving you the chance to activate it.

Sounds like they are pushing the rogue further in the direction of a skirmisher rather then a straight striker. Which is fine but it means we are going to need a proper assassin class at some point.

We're making a few changes to spellcasting. First and foremost, casters will receive more slots than the number we were giving in the last packet. In addition, at-will spells will scale in damage and effect to remain relevant at all levels. It's likely that these changes push the signature spell out of the picture, since we don't really need it to pick up the slack anymore.

Sounds like they where listening to what people disliked about the last set of rules and are going in the right direction.

Finally, we will add rules for casting spells while in armor. The rule will simply be that if you are proficient with a type of armor, you can cast spells while wearing it. Otherwise, the armor interferes with your ability to cast.

That might be too good. If armored casting is trivial then wizards are going to be pushed into at least light armor simply because the advantage is too big.

Turn undead will be significantly simplified and will be tied to a pool of healing that a cleric can tap into.

If there are different channeling options by deity then that sounds good. I would like to see deity replaced with just religion or faith, even if the default options are all specific gods, to make adapting to religions that don't follow a specific god more obvious.

The biggest change for wizards is that we are going to separate spell preparation and spellcasting. You can prepare a number of spells, let's say three, for each level you can cast. When you cast a spell, you pick any spell you have prepared and spend the corresponding spell slot to cast it. This mechanic mirrors the flexibility we gave to clerics.

That I don't much like, but if they are going to leave the number of spells cut down I can see why they think it is necessary to give wizards enough options.

The fighter is in good shape. We're likely going to give the fighter a special parry mechanic that doesn't use expertise dice but works much the same way. If anything, the fighter might be a little too good. The feedback pegs the fighter as the most powerful class. The other classes will mostly catch up, but we might reduce expertise dice a little bit at higher levels to keep the game moving quickly.

The fighter specific class ability needs to be more flexible then just Parry or there needs to be a choice of options. Also, if your going to give the fighter Parry for free, the class is going to need whacked back somewhere else because it is already crushingly powerful.

There aren't any huge changes here, but I anticipate that we will soon begin to break up the core rules into basic, standard, and advanced sections so you can begin to get a sense of how we look at the rules and the game's core complexity.

Basic, standard and advanced? I'll be curious to see what is actually going on there.