In lieu of our regular game, this week we rolled up one of each of the new alternate classes to playtest them. I ran Carrion Hill, or as much as I could in about 4 hours time. 20 point buy for stat generation. We had a dwarf gunslinger (musket), gnome samurai (riding dog mount), and a human ninja.
We only made it through three fights.
Spoilers for Carrion Hill!
Fight 1 was against 3 dark creepers. Monsters had time to hide in a darkened room, but lacked ranged weapons (other than throwing their daggers, which would have left them without melee weapons), so the surprise round was used just to engage the party in melee.
The Ninja was the star of this fight. She made the perception check to spot the creepers when everyone else in the party failed, so she got to act on the surprise round. She then beat the creepers at initiative. Invisibility to position for a sneak attack attack-of-opportunity when one creeper moved one-hit killed a creeper, then moving to flank one-hit killed a second. The gunslinger scored a critical hit with his rifle against the third and dealt 77 points of damage against the last creeper. The samurai felt... unproductive.
Second fight was against a ghoul rouge 6. Again, the monster heard the party coming and hid. This time, nobody made the perception check, so it got a surprise round to actually attack. It hit the gunslinger for a good chunk of damage, and the gunslinger failed the fortitude save and became paralysed. The ghoul won initiative, took a second bite out of the gunslinger (who then failed his save against ghoul fever) and dove into a nearby murky pool to hide. The gunslinger is below half hp at this point, paralysed for 4 rounds, and in (eventual) need of a remove disease. Loss of a good fort. was definitely felt. Samurai and ninja
rushed to the water's edge to attack the ghoul when it reemerged. When it did, it targeted the samurai and missed (really high AC), and was quickly dispatched by the ninja, samurai and the samurai's mount.
The last fight we got to was against some asylum orderlies (4 human warrior 3's). This almost didn't count as a fight. R1-Gunslinger almost dropped one of the orderlies with one shot, samurai and dog combined dropped an orderly, ninja alone dropped an orderly. The orderlies attempted to trip the two melee party members, succesfully tripping the ninja but failing to trip the samurai.R2- Gunslinger reloads, samurai and pet kill their orderly, ninja attacks from prone and kills her orderly (the one the gunslinger had wounded on R1).
The gunslinger never used any grit (foolishly, but he's a new player). The ninja was never hit despite having the lowest AC (getting tripped doesn't count, she never took any actual HP damage). The samurai never used his challenge (only usable 2x per day meant he was always waiting for a tougher foe). The consensus seemed to be that the ninja by far was the most powerful of the three classes we played with. The gunslinger seemed "swingy," either ending encounters very quickly with a lucky crit or not meaningfully contributing at all (paralysed by ghoul, reloading every other round otherwise). The samurai played like the variant cavalier he is.
The samurai player did lament being forced to select a mount. Melee classes tend to do better the bigger they are, and he felt compelled to play a small race so that he could take his mount into a dungeon. Otherwise he would have been "wasting a class feature." He would have preferred to play a medium race and have some other option he could have selected in place of the mount. So, perhaps not all samurai have to be mounted?