I missed this game series when it came out, and I just ran across it recently and played through KotOR and TSL light, then TSLRCM light/dark then K1R light/dark. So I played both games pretty much back-to-back, and it seemed to me like class choice in KotOR had a higher impact on gameplay than in TSL, even though TSL had prestige classes that branched by alignment. They're both so easy it doesn't really matter in the end (even though my custom autobalance.2da has multipliers like 3x vit and 1.5x attack), but from my outside perspective I thought the prestige classes lacked the definition they could have had. I wrote myself a few force power scripts for specific classes that I'm testing out, and I am thinking about putting together a full mod (I've got lots of partially coded ideas), but I want to know what people who've played more think. My general impression of classes:
GUA: Mostly useless for PC except for HP; force jump rarely works (and both NPC guardians are trying to be unarmed specialists anyway ><)
SEN: Nifty immunities, skill points
CON: Overpowered class feat and force forms
WPM/MAR: EZ-mode tank. Since you have effectively infinite FP these make great facerollers. Fury seems way cooler than deflect, and who cares about blaster bolts anyway? (though I played WPM, not MAR, so I might just be used to never getting hit)
WTC/SAS: Burst damage. Stun/fear stuff and squash it.
MST/SLD: Went sentinel/master my first play-through, and I had already chosen force regen feat before 15. Influence power seems pointless. I never really used the master buff, and nothing seems to get resisted enough for me to think I'd care to use the debuff as a sith lord, especially if I had a consular parent class and/or force mastery active. Force points and force powers are ostensibly the defining characteristics of these classes, but since you get 100 force powers and 1000 force points in this game, both branches of this tree seem to fall short.
So basically they seem pretty unbalanced to me, and I have a few ideas on how to mitigate that imbalance via force powers (and a few other ideas if I can get them to work, like restoring a BAB scale and maybe revising force power gain...), but I want to know what you more experienced folks think about each base/prestige class and their distinctive varieties of gameplay (or lack thereof). Like, What do you all think defines each one, or what are some areas that make it stand out (for better or worse)? and/or What is your idea for a class-specific force power?
tl;dr: pick a prestige class and reply with some words about it