Honestly, I'm completely uninterested in 3.x these days. I really hate 3.x in many ways and hope that 4.0 stays relatively streamlined; as a former GM, I vew the expansiveness of 3.x as a double edged sword at best. 3.x was a class based system trying to create characters who could foreseeably fit about any mold you came up with via buckets of prestige classes. Good intentions, bad execution. I hold that class systems work best when you're vague rather than specific. Ironically, the more options they brought in, the more restricted I felt, since it seemed every time I built a character who was supposed to be fit a specific role in their place of origin's society, they'd go and throw in specific rules and a specific class for how those guys work. Often, these rules would suck or require some god awful confluence of munchkiny templates in order to be worth a damn. No thanks. That kind of crap is exactly why I prefer skill based systems to class based systems for games that don't often revolve around combat.
This ties in well with a rant i made in another thread about how I feel that Fighters and Barbarians should never have been seperated in 3.x. I still do not believe that barbarians as a class should be introduced to 4th. A fighter is an extremely generic term for a reason, and frankly, I think it's something that should be embraced rather than denigrated. As it stands, Fighters start with medium-to-heavy armor (chainmail and perhaps a big shield) and can specialize in wielding 2 handers and using powers with macho sounding names like Reaping, Cleave, Brute Strike and Unstoppable. Pick Athletics, Endurance and Intimidate as your class skills and bam, your character can easily pass as a barbarian; the only obstacle is people being sticklers about the name on your character sheet. Regardless, as a roleplayer, I feel that the class name on your sheet is the role your character fits in a fight, not their full story; after all, I can totally see how a powerful warrior from a tribe of barbarians could function as a Fighter OR a Warlord depending on his particular talents. As such, I'd much rather see WotC spend their time on sourcebooks and bestiaries then introducing a thousand-and-one new classes and role altering feats. A class should fit a common D&D archetype that is poorly represented under the current rules before it recieves serious consideration. For example, I could see how a druid or bard might be worthwhile additions since they don't really have obvious parallels with existing classes.
