We ran a one-off playtest two nights back with an oracle (Stone) and a witch in the party. Both seemed to be well balanced. The oracle's deafness curse was circumvented partially by the character learning a sign language equivalent, this lead to some pretty neat roleplaying situations with the party members who didn't know how to sign.
The player decided that the character was deaf as they could hear nothing but the deities constantly chattering at them, which sounded cool at the time but we needed to fuzzy up the communication a bit to keep they from having a commune spell equivalent open at all times (basically we ruled that some of the voices might come from evil or unreliable sources)
One big issue we came across was the earth glide ability, there was some confusion as to weather the character could charge, double move, or run while earth gliding, I searched around for a ruling from the burrow rules but couldn't find much, seems kinda powerful to permit a creature to move through 60-120 ft. of stone per round. I guess a similar challenge would present on the analogous sorcerer abilities.
Ended up running another yesterday at a new years party
For a Stone oracle Type of damage for shard explosion needs to be defined (we used bludgeoning/piercing)
I like the sign language idea, very cool.
The character could indeed run, charge, double move, 5ft step, etc. through earth and stone. Note that it won't allow movement through worked stone or metal, so no stepping through stone walls and doors. Also note that running and charging have to be in straight lines, so charging most foes will be difficult (he couldn't dip underground then back up to attack a foe on the ground unless the terrain was perfectly set up for that.) He couldn't charge through a small hill either, unless he could see his foe on the other side, which would probably require magic of some sort, or he had his 15th lvl termorsense ability and the foe was within range of it. Its best use is for escaping bad situations safely, or dipping down into the earth to buff up and pop up somewhere else.
How did you all play the activation of this ability? Did he have to spend a standard action to turn it on, or did he simply choose to start and stop it?
It might have been an active decision for the shard explosion to be untyped, so that it isn't susceptible to energy resistance or damage reduction. I don't know if that was the intent of course. Bludgeoning/Peircing seems appropriate though.