I have a series of changes I made to the Shifter (PNP) class that, in my opinion, make it smoother to play, without changing it substantially. I think all of the changes are compatible with PnP and with the original goals of the PRC implementation. I'd like to test some last-minute improvements a little more before uploading a patch, but it would be great (if the changes prove acceptable, of course) if they could make it into the 3.3g release so other people can try them out. Let me know if this is at all likely and I'll try to upload the patch sooner.
First of all, I hope I'm not going about this the wrong way or stepping on the toes of anyone who "owns" this class by making these changes; if I am, I apologize.
The changes are:
1) I added a workaround so that abilities, bonuses, etc. are not lost after sleeping, leveling up, etc. [technical details: I add the item properties to a creature weapon rather than to the creature hide, which is scrubbed too often; if the form I'm shifting into doesn't have a creature weapon, I create and equip a dummy one that holds the properties but is never used to attack with].
2) Wildshape now heals just before shifting instead of just after to prevent the Shifter from dying due to loss of HP when temporarily shifting back to true form. You can still die if you just shift back to your true form because that isn't suppose to heal you.
3) I changed the Wildshape healing amount so that the Shifter is healed all of the way instead of only most of the way. Perhaps the amount should actually be conditional on the PRC variable that controls how much healing a full sleep should cause (I think I saw one), since that's the amount of healing Wildshape is supposed to do. For now, though, it heals completely.
4) I re-enabled Wildshape to use the feats of the form you shift to. This had been removed with the comment "@todo Re-enable once it is known whether this is the cause of the lag"; as best I can tell, the lag (which I well remember from an older version of the PRC) is gone, so it makes sense to add back the feature.
5) I unlinked temporary HP from other effects to that the other effects aren't removed when the temporary HP is used up (I posted a patch for this previously).
6) When shifting into a form, information about what you gain is dumped to the log window (STR, DEX, CON, immunities, bonuses, penalties, feats, skills, etc.). It seems to me that if you can turn into it, you should be able to know what it does.