For those of you who do play Fighters, what would you do with the current 0.10e ruleset to make Fighters (or Rogues) viable?
Remove the meditate requirements from Spell Parry and Powerful Blow. Spell Parry no longer being tied to Parry was a great change, especially since there were no other viable spell defenses, this change kills any type of defense. If the worry is of overuse, then, hell, tie back to Parry. The way the skill structure is now, people will likely have more parries anyway.
The cost ramp up for Weapon Proficiency is extremely cost prohibitive. If you want to spend a huge load of xp to swing for 10, you can, but you're gimping everything else. With Body increase and Armor going up to the max of 62 (124 with the temporary armor), even at 10 you're rather ineffective as someone who's supposed to bring out the big damage.
There were two proposals to help with that, one was to start the cost of weapon profs at 3 crits (9 xp for fighters, all my math is from the fighter side, sorry rogues and scouts) and move up from there. This effectively saves you 48 xp to get to that 10 damage swing (156 xp vs 204 xp). This is also very helpful to new players. This stabilizes the early purchases, still increasing the cost but allowing you to improve (basically the first 5 weapon profs average out to 15 xp each and then the next one jumps to 24 xp). To me this sounds like an easy solution that actually works for both sides. This keeps (most, some will still be crazy and go for high numbers) players from going crazy on weapon profs, but still allows for a decent damage swing to be achieved.
The other proposal is certainly way harder to implement, and that was to get rid of weapon profs all together, and just increase static damage as more skills are purchased, like wands. That's probably a more elegant solution, but that will take way more work to re-balance the skills effected.
Mettle is a neat idea in design, but the 10 seconds requirement make it fairly useless, and you shouldn't have to spend 2 of a skill meant to be useful for combat to actually be useful in combat. Someone said that it's too cheap at 2 xp er use, while I don't agree with that at all (cause at 10 sec it's useless), 3 xp per use wouldn't be bad, while 4 would make it not desirable. But 3 xp per, and 3 seconds per use, makes it a much better skill, and worth purchasing.
Hearty at 5 xp per 5 (or more or less) is rather mediocre. I know this one has gone through changes, but it didn't end on the good side of "useful".
And personally, I think making Slays and Eviscerates single swing use is horrible.