After having seen the wonders Paizo has produced in the past, I couldn't wait to get a glimpse at what the new classes had in store for me. After reading the pdf over and comparing them to what appeared in the CRB and APG, I finally compiled my thoughts on the new stuff.
Paizo does an excellent job at bringing about not only historical but fantasy aspects to the classes they make, making them seem more like real people thrown into a fantasy story, which I'm always happy with and makes for much better interaction and story telling. Despite that, I was thrown off balance at what was represented here.
The ninja, samurai, and gunslinger feel more like APG variants to the rogue, cavalier, and Inquisitor/Ranger respectively (as a testment to how good the core classes and APG variants were). The ninja looks and feels too over powered, getting abilities that cause them to far surpass the rogue. While getting away from Naruto or some such nonsense would seem like the most appropriate action, it feels like you'd like to see the ninja find his own niche by giving him 4 levels of elementalist wizard spells (just 1 or 2 elements tho) and taking away his armor and dumbing down his sneak attack damage but some how keep him sneaky (idk its a suggestion).
The samurai feels like it's not enough of it's own class with it's own mechanics, just a heavily Oriental Adventures version of a knight or cavalier. It would be interesting to see him as more of a fighter/LN paladin-type where his divine bond was a mount or an ancestral weapon (like the Thundercutter, why not?) and would be a force on the battle field, not for goodness but for his lord and the battle itself (once again suggestion).
The gunslinger, while bringing a whole new aspect to the game, seems to be the hardest to place, as gaining abilities with a gun (as a modern point-and-click weapon in the real world) seems less about what level you are then how high your Intelligence score would need to be to figure out how to do said abilities. (the boards have more on these topics I'm sure).
That being said, this is the first round, and I am confident in Paizo's and the play-tester's abilities to come up with something balanced and enjoyable by all. Keep up the good work!
