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Well, best of the thief class i have seen was in carrion fields. There are some some thief points which u get buy donating gold to the bandit king in each city and by ranking. And you can buy skills by this points from some thief paths - you have general thief skills like stealing, hiding or whatever and some special from arcane path for example - which gives you ability to use wands, read scrolls and better dodge and parry vs magical weapons like flaring or autocasting. Or if you choose the path of swashbuckler - you got some things which can help you in a robery - like you can cut arteries, blackjack person using mace or even fight using some dirty things and trickeries lke autodirt in combat or attack then enemy is on the ground. Or you could choose the path of poisoner to make some kind of potent potions or trapper who can focus on creating deadly traps. In CF not all paths are good for play but this kind of options give a little more interest for playing.

permanency probably should be revised. don't know how many spells could be applied with it (seems that not many), but at least when you do it with enlarge - it then could be removed after shapeshift. And you end up with endless useless permanency effect without possibility to recast it without dying

Each form has its own stats - str, dex, con, hr/dr, resistances, number of attacks(hidden), dodge (hidden).
Int and wis are -2 from your true form. In general you dont want to gain level in forms, because their con is somewhat low.

Your hp, saves, hp/mv/mana regen,  +vs race damage and +af are retained when shapeshifted. Autocasts, item skills - dont work.
Resistances are overwriten by the form. So true form resists have no effect. Same with shrink/enlarge - this spell gets stripped when you shift (bug?).
Elven sneak works (bug?), other racial skills - do not.

You lose 20 mana each tick to maintain the form. So you dont regen mana naturally when shapeshifted.

In short you want a race with the highest con (for hp) and int (for mana and faster mastering) - gnome or human. Or with sneak (h-elf) for pvp.
Forms from the books are restricted to your align, so it is a consideration as well.

You can pick offense or defense as your 'focus' at lvl 16. This only determines which form will be granted first. So if you picked offense, you get jackal/fox at 16 and hare/turtle around 20.
As an alter you get your first major form at 26-28 and second at 31-33.

Hey!
I was thinking of playing around with a few classes i never tried, and I've never played a transmuter.

I wanted to ask things which will be relevant in chosing race in regards to interactions with forms.
When a Alterer transforms, does he retain original HP (should i worry about having a good Con score if i want to fight with a alterer)?  Or maybe they gain new HP based on spellcasting? Does spellcasting ability affect the form's fighting in any way (translate to hit/dam or something)?

What about resistances, do we keep our original?

I imagine racial specifics are lost (like a draconian regeneration)?

Do any item effects maintain when transformed? I imagine auto-cast items wont proc, but any that give buffs continue to work? (enlarge, regeneration, etc?)

Thanks!

Just thought of another interesting mechanic for that swashbuckler concept i wrote up on above:

In my head these fighters are more "duelists" then battleground fighters, so they could have a skill that helps express that.

"en garde" skill: Improves parry/dodge against target enemy, but greatly reduces them against any other (maybe even taking a hit from someone other than the victim breaks this stance-like skill). Could be interesting by making the class strong on a 1v1, but not great in 2v2's or even fighting enemies with pets/mercenaries (so there are counters).

I think make tackle like Bash.  This way you don't Have to wait to reuse

I like those ideas.  Cool way to think about it.. I think maybe give them a stance would be nice.

Although I'm not much of a thief player myself ill try to give potentially helpful ideas,

To me the process of coming up with interesting mechanics starts with defining a clear identity/concept for the class.

Thief in a D&D/RPG context is vague.
It sometimes is a actual burglar, sometimes a type of "swashbuckler" (agile fighter), sometimes a kind of scout.

In this though exercise I will define a concept I personally find more interesting and go in depth with that one in specific,
but the same process could be done for any interpretation of Thief. They could even be used to create sub-classes for them.

I will be going with a swashbuckler, which is a combat oriented interpretation of the concept (I never liked the entire stealing
 tems mechanic, and scout has some overlap with rangers).

--------------Swashbuckler thief concept -----------------------------------------
In our imagination a swachbuckler is a agile, lightly armored warrior which duels with a light weapon like a rapier
using footwork, feint, and sword skill rather than armor, brute force.

To express this, i would add a mechanic which improves the swashbuckler's fighting ability based of his load (as in weight),
the lighter the load, the bigger the bonus.

This will incentivize players to pick armor with low weight and really embody the concept. I'm not sure what is balanced so
I will give a  arbitrary example here to illustrate:
say this "swashbuckling" skill gives a maximum bonus (aka naked theif) of
-300 armor
+20 hit + 20 dex + 20 reflex save
And some nice chance to proc a extra "swashbuclker's flourish" attack (say 30%).

As nice bonuses as these are, it will never be worth not wearing anything.
And for every (say 20lb) of weight the player carries, he takes a say 2% reduction on these values (armor, hit, dam, chance to proc extra attack, etc).
So in effect, these thieves will wear armor but weigh in the bonus from the pieces with what they lose from their swashbuckling to try to retain as much as possible.
In the end they might realistically end up with a much more modest bonus of something in the -100ac, +8 hit/dmg/reflex, for example.

For this type of thief it would make sense to have  dodge, parry, dual wield, feint. But not shield block. Weapons i think swords, daggers, hand to hand and whip proficiencies make sense, but would skip the heavy ones like maces and axes.

I see them having both sword and dagger skills (swashbucklers typically would have a rapier and a main-guache, so it would be a sword + dagger combo), and perhaps a few
custom skills for this specific weapon combination. Perhaps a blinding strike done with the tip of the blade, improved disarming ability, perhaps some sort of "armor piercing lunge" which ignores/reduces targets resistance.

I could see them even having a species of "craft" skill similar to "craftharpoon" from spear spec fighters to make rapiers out of swords they find and have these skills work only with these rapiers. It could make the swords much lighter (perhaps a fixed 3lb or something), but not count as swords for other sword skills (so other classes would not want them).

Once you have this sort of theme, it is easy to think of fun and flavorful skills which really give a class a "soul", even if mechanically irrelevant. I could totally see these swashbucklers have a "swashbucklers mark" ability where they brand a enemy with their initial (Z for ZORRO style), which sure could do some damage, but the fun part would be to give the target some sort of "tattoo" (visible by looking) which has your initial,

Another possible very unique mechanic which fits the concept is losing resistances. In my imagination swashbucklers are agile and skilled but total featherweights - can't really take a hit. So the swashbuckler class might reflect this by losing all resistances and gaining a AC bonus based off the resistances lost (or maybe bonus to dodge/parry), The idea would be to make them very elusive, but when hit get hurt bad.

Perhaps some sort of "active" feint skill;  skill which lags you (say 2 turns), but deflects the next active skill/attack made against you (so there could be some strategy to it in the sense that it will be strong against something with higher lag time, but bad against something with lower). Or if that is too powerful, it could dampen the damage from the next active skill when used. Thinking something like this would probably be important to compensate the resistance loss above.

I'm just throwing ideas which fit this swashbuckler concept in particular, if there is interest we can brainstorm more and try to refine the specifics in a way which is balanced (im just making up the numbers off the top of my head). But to prevent this post from being gigantic, ill stop here as i think i illustrated the concept and process i would take in creating a class.

Just ideas I think they need work.  Assasins fighters got huge amps. I think some other classes could use some as well. Thieves by nature are solo. They shouldn't be support I don't think. Could remove restrictions on what spells they can learn like the old days ...