Ok then, lets have a look at what this new system has got for me. About time they stopped listening to that damn dwarven lobby group- movement not effected by armor! Being slow was their only weakness in 1st 2nd and 3.0 then suddenly in 3.5 all the dwarves can keep up with me when I put on chainmail, and they got a free exotic weapon proficeincy- totally bogus. My kind almost died out in 3.5, but I can feel it is time to make a comeback---Hello Pathfinder!
Hmmmm let me see......
WTF! +2 Wisdom for Dwarves, great so now the will save weakness gets eaten away (not that it effected them with their save bonus againts spells anyway!) and they get a favoured class hit point per level-- NO WAY DUDE!
Ok so now people like me more? huh? I still get that lame -2 to con, yeah right because elves are so sickly, +2 to int...man I should just give up and become a frickin wizard.
So let me get this right with the con difference- I get 3 HIT POINTS A LEVEL LESS than that freaky dwarven fighter, and if i wear any armor other than light he moves just as fast as me-- screw this I am gonna check out 4th edition- what is your problem with the Elven Fighter!
I tend to agree with Elven Fighter. It's clear that dwarven racial abilities favor slow-moving heavy infantry and clerics. I like to view racial abilities en masse affecting their armies and civilizations.
How did the elves survive for so long? My opinion is with archers and magic, but what about melee? Against both humans and dwarves, elves are down on hit points; have the same mobility in heavy armor; and have a weaker attack like humans compared to the dwarven waraxe (d10).
With the +2 Stat to anything and an additional weapon proficiency that could be the bastard sword, humans can cover all bases: magic, archers, heavy infantry, etc.
Again what about elves? One of the house rules that I've seen is to enable elves to apply Weapon Finesse on longswords to advantage their dexterity bonus. Another idea to advantage their link to magic would be for elves to receive a reduction in arcane spell failure for armors & shields to advantage their fighters combining magic.
In addition ever since the debut of the sorceror, I have always preferred elves to replace the +2 Int with +2 Cha. I see elves as inherently magical and not very focused on research, so the Sorceror would be a better fit than Wizard. Besides, the +2 Cha works well with the perception that elves are more beautiful.
I may be a bit byass because I usually have a dwarf fighter as my character but I've played the elf and the half version as well. And yes it seems odd that an 'Elder' race has a negative to the CON. Just odd that a long lived race has a health problem seems they would have trouble with the STR because of frail bodies but I guess it just doesn't work out that way.
But as far as the armor problem go I don't see a problem. The elves have all kinds of light armor that is strong and then high DEX capabilites so they nearly match the defense of a dwarf if they wanted too.