Hy everybody.
I'm Mattia from Italy, I've played and DMed 3.x from its first days. The system is GREAT on its own, but your updates are definitely water in the desert for me.
I'd like to help you by writing all my ideas about it and my personal suggestions (no, I don't mean that broken CORE spell :D)
Point by point:
-Races are LOVELY. really. Now you should just complete the circle. You could for every race introduce examples of races variants (e.g. grey elves, drows) and their powers. then you could put in the feat chapter a list of decent racial feats for further exploration of their flavour. I've always screwed racial substitution levels, but racial feats are great!
-Classes: I LOVE them all! I suggest for every class to introduce one or two variants (unearthed arcana style), to make them more customizable. For example, rogue without sneak attack, paladin of an evil deity, battle sorcerer/wizards UA style, etc. please keep the enemy bonus for the rangere unaltered, or at least let him keep growing bonuses against all his enemies, like 3.5 system. You should also give all classes an epic progression (forget about it if you plan to rewrite epic levels rules, wich I greatly recommend...)
-CORE prestige classes. They should be rewritten, to reflect changes in the core classes. Please change arcane archer and dragon disciple to give them some caster levels, for example.
-Combat: Great ideas, your CMB is sweeeeet! But executing maneuvers is very hard. I suggest to reduce the difficult of checks to 10+target CMB. OR improve the feat bonus to +4, like it was in 3.5. I suggest also rules for class bonus to armor class and armor that give less AC bonus but also damage reduction to their wearer.
-You've fixed sneak attack. I suggest to fix also critical hits in the same fashion.
- skills: great job. Maybe fly isn't so useful...
-Feats: Uhm... I don't really like the new expertise and power attack. Please rethink them... experise is the worst. and deadly aim is a great idea, but it suffers of the same issues. Wether it's possible, you should make feats that scale with level, or at least that keep their power unaltered at every level (unless you plan to introduce retraining mechanics). Overland chop and cleave for example are jokes... Ah, please remove the "one combat feat for round" limit. Fighting classen don't need nerfing. ah, please make the "fighter dex based" a viable option also for damage (ex. "deadly aim" feat for dexterity-based melee warriors).
-You could also rethink feats useful for multiclass PC, such as practiced spellcaster, daring outlaw and similar. You could give for examples a TOBbish flavour to their class powers. ex a multiclass fighter/wizard caster level for purposes of spell effect only improves by 1 for 2 noncaster levels he has.
-Spells: great job with polimorph and others world-breaking spells. But you could do better. Please nerf some other divinations (a.k.a. no secrets for priests) and enchantment school, from the firs levels. With a careful use of charme person you could conquer the world...or become the world's richest PC...etc. Suggestion, dominate xxx etc are often worse than save or dies... save or die later and make some other pc die too!! ps. The 2nd level ability of magic domain is unuseful with the "0 level spells at will" feature.
-Check spells that give bonus to ability checks. (ex glibness, but also jump, etc :P). Skills are important, don't make skillful characters feel unuseful against casters...
-check damage spells: they're ridicolous at lower levels and enormous at higer ones... consider the impact of metamagic feats and of feats like "easy metamagic" and "arcane thesis"... BOAMMMM!
-I've read you won't KILL jack vance and his spell style, so I won't ask you to introduce spell points... But I use and really apreciate them. My players too!
-Please check magic objects and their cost. You're already doing it, it was mandatory... good job!
-Monsters: Great job with CR handling, but you know, they're grossly flawed... you should retink them and create a comparative table of CR an level adjustments of the various critters on MM. LEP +8 for vampires? Whaaaat? I'd love a section full of savage progressions for the most famous powerful races, such as half-dragons, drows, etc.
THE END! Thanks for your attention, you guys are great!
Hi golem! I'm from Turin, and you?
have you ever been on gdritalia.it forum? I'm Hayden also there! :)
See you soon in this amazing place!