I haven't played very long on Ultima. I like the speed of leveling and finding items, don't have time now days for long grinds, I think if it was vanilla I would have got bored already.
Main thing I dislike is the items that are beyond what vanilla had. I agree with adding in some/most of the unreleased, event only, etc items that vanilla didn't have. But there seems to be a lot of stuff that was balanced to be better than everything else, or really not balanced at all. Some of it was released on here as once off event items as a justification for the strength of the item but it still seems silly have invincible players and 10 second bosses etc. It would be unfair to remove or overly nerf that stuff on the players who own it though. What would be much more creative and interesting is if any new stuff that is added, it is balanced to be within the vanilla item set i.e. someone might use say a Double Cannon or BKB or some new custom item, but it would be a choice they make on preference, not because one is clearly better or because the custom item is a once in a lifetime event item with stats to match.
On class balance, I think it is fine and sure maybe rangers have an easy job of everything by nature, but situations of them just walking over content with little fuss are probably more related to the itemization rather than any class balance issues.
One thing I would really like to see is variable stat Armor/Shield drops from quests, barely anyone does non quest runs and it is making a portion of decent items unused/unhunted by players because it is less painful just to find a fixed stat item than hunt a max stat one.
I think it is in the works but the drop tables some attention. I'm not talking about fixing the issues on the website list, or the incorrect drop rates on certain popular items. More importantly I think is to review items that have very low drop rates but on another ID drop from a rare monster, making them quite easy to obtain. What is the point in having the very low drop rates? If it ever drops no one will care, no one will hunt it when they just get it for 1 PD each in trades or join a game and find some. I think these could be changed to other items, maybe add things like MKB, SJS, PW to other ID's, if the drop rate is similar to the original ID it's not like it will drastically increase the amount found, at the moment it feels like whenever I see some of those items they are just from donations or BPD etc, more people might try hunting if their ID can obtain more. Or even just some average 9 star items that drop often in their place. There are also a few items you just don't see at all because they got forgotten with low drop rates when other better or similar items were made more accessible, maybe bring some of the drop rates on them back into line with what else is out there now, at the very least people can find and use it until they get their top tier item.
I'm not sure on this one, but I did do some Ep4 on Ultimate, mostly craters. The exp numbers I was seeing were in line with the forest in Ep1, is this correct or am I mistaken? I think Ep4 should be a cut above the rest, if anything just to get more people interested in playing it. Nevermind
Overall I think my view is to add more variety by lessening the extent of overused custom/special/better than all the rest items, increasing availability of good underutilized vanilla items and anything in between I think is fine.