According to immortal comments under Nanorab's post they are thinking of tweaking the damage output to htoh specs. They probably already did.
One disadvantage of htoh warriors is they lose out on weap stats and weap varieties. All they have is a punching. No wrath, no elem, no defiles, no poison. No plus 6 dam plus 6 hit.
Stone skin is the most widely available prep in game. Vuln blunt is gnomes and svirfs, and of them svirfs get inherent stoneskin.
Htoh is limited application when fighting giants. They already have resist physical so your dam output is half. Put on stone skin and there you go. I used it primarily for vital, stun and a crushing blow at the ending stages on giants
Now, here we have something where dam reduction takes out the hitting of htoh specs. Consider a standard giant with axe or mace. Bone plus whirl plus heavy dam reduction = fairly useless spec. Or an assassin who goes the standard kote and kansetsuwaza and there goes your htoh guy.
Htoh is like a save your ass spec. No matter what your maledictions, you can bet you will be hitting pretty hard if you are covering a vuln with wrath/poison/elem and what not.
The original reason why htoh were upgraded with little bonuses was because the spec was not comparing favorably with the other specs. It became a lot more deadly after those changes precisely because you could drop weapons and continue fighting hard.
So to curb this rant a bit, my point is htoh guys are the guys who do not need weapons to fight. They get messed up, they punch away to glory. That is the little bonus they get for sacrificing weapon stats and the other things. If you remove that hitting power I think the spec loses some colour.
Valguarnera is right. Players think changes which negatively affect them are bad for the game I love htoh.
I am not bitching here. The only real forseeable outcome of such a change is I will have to *gasp* gear for str/dex as a htoh guy now, which was one of the big advantages of the spec. Not having to gear for str.
Anyway, continue the good work

>According to immortal comments under Nanorab's post they are
>thinking of tweaking the damage output to htoh specs. They
>probably already did.

If you read all of that post, I said what I changed.

>Stone skin is the most widely available prep in game.

How is this relevant?

>Htoh is limited application when fighting giants. They already
>have resist physical so your dam output is half.

Not half, no.

>If you remove
>that hitting power I think the spec loses some colour.

They're still the best game in town when it comes to hardness to parry. They're just not still that with 3 str and 3 dex -- they're normal.

They're still much, much better off than anyone else is with that kind of stat loss. Even if you were to assume every sword spec warrior could get two nodisarm swords, hand would still generally be better with stats that bad.

>I am not bitching here. The only real forseeable outcome of
>such a change is I will have to *gasp* gear for str/dex as a
>htoh guy now, which was one of the big advantages of the spec.

Yup. At least if you want to keep throwing the same kind of offense while down a ton of stat points. You still do as much damage. You still have all the defense the spec gave you in that case. You're just easier to parry, and by easier, I mean no longer much much better than everyone else (or as much better, depending on how far down you really are.)

>They're still the best game in town when it comes to hardness
>to parry. They're just not still that with 3 str and 3 dex --
>they're normal.

Is this penalty based on your stats relative to your max or their absolute value? Does a healthy gnome hand spec (str + dex = 38) fare worse than a poisoned arial (44 - 5 = 39 combined)? Generally, does this change mean that low str/dex races are now easier to parry than high str/dex races? E.G. is a svirf more easily parried than a duergar if both are healthy?

Also, are they weighted equally? Are elves and fire giants on even ground (because str + dex = 41 in both cases) or is one better than the other (from the parrying perspective... obviously the giant will hit harder in the general case)?

>Is this penalty based on your stats relative to your max or
>their absolute value?

Absolute value sinking beyond a certain threshold. (Which I don't remember offhand.)

>Does a healthy gnome hand spec (str +
>dex = 38) fare worse than a poisoned arial (44 - 5 = 39
>combined)?

Without doing the math, probably neither suffers.

>Generally, does this change mean that low str/dex
>races are now easier to parry than high str/dex races? E.G. is
>a svirf more easily parried than a duergar if both are
>healthy?

Nope.

>Also, are they weighted equally? Are elves and fire giants on
>even ground (because str + dex = 41 in both cases) or is one
>better than the other (from the parrying perspective...
>obviously the giant will hit harder in the general case)?

I want to say strength is a little more important but I don't remember how that shook out. People tend to gear for strength more than dexterity as is so that mostly seems ok to me.