Balance of Classes in the Game

In fairness, it hasn't really become easier. Plenty of players don't use half their skills, or pick a subclass just to start with a skill instead of having to branch it, even if that subclass gives no new skills to your main class. You'll have your share of false positives if you try to guild-sniff. What has changed is the fact that whereas magickers once had to live by the spell due to a lack of other skills, they can now just pretend that they simply aren't magickers 99.9% of the time, and only cast spells when it's strictly necessary or when they can be pretty sure nobody's around. It used to be that if you suspected someone was a gick, you could spy on them for a few hours and usually catch them doing something that outed them. While that could still happen, it's a lot less reliable now because a gick is also a full-fledged mundane without any need to actually rely on their spells. The magick just sits there undetectable in the back pocket until one day they need to use their ulti. Skillset-sniffing is pretty much the only way, now. It's not particularly effective, but catching someone casting is next to impossible when all gicks have a full mundane skillset and know that 50% of the playerbase is a miscreant so they're not gonna be careless about it.

There's a level of gamesmanship in both scenarios, but the new way is the one that's most boring and leads to the least conflict. You no longer have enclaves of rogue mages acting out the role of gamewide villains, you no longer have notorious defilers roaming the land, you no longer have the C.A.M or any of that shit. Magick is just this thing you know exists but probably never encounter unless you're playing a templar, Sun Runner or Guild member. There's a 1% chance that one of your PC's friends turns out to be a gick and reveals it to you in the course of roleplay, but for my anecdotal part, that simply hasn't happened even once since the class revamp. It happened to me quite a few times before then, when being a gick was a way of life instead of a trump card you pull out when it wins you the game and completely ignore anytime it doesn't. The dynamic between magick and mundane is an important part of Zalanthas that has completely gone missing these days.

The way they should have done it is the way sorcs and psis used to work: they had a unique selection of subguilds that were just less powerful versions of the mundane guilds. You'd pick sorcerer/ranger and get the ranger skillset up to middling levels, for instance. The skills were high enough to succesfully skin an animal or go into hiding, but not so high that they competed with mundanes. Staff should just have done the same for elementalists. The problem was that elementalists had no mundane skills whatsoever, so it was easy to sniff them out unless the player was experienced enough to know how to fake being a given guild without having the skills. This issue could be solved wholesale by grafting the sorc/psi subguild system onto elementalists, and adapting it to the new classes. Instead we got gicks that are full-fledged rangers and warriors and assassins (their modern counterparts, anyway) except with spells on top and no disadvantages whatsoever.

While elementalists have far fewer spells now than they used to, the spells themselves are, for the most part, just as strong as they were; and the old elementalists' spell lists were mostly filler anyway, you had a handful of powerful spells that you relied on and a bunch of situational crap that you probably only ever cast to branch the good stuff. There's now a Rukkian subclass that gets the entire lineup of Ruk buffs. That's like 80% of what the old Rukkian guild was about, the rest was a few occasionally useful ones like Burrow, Paralyze and Wall of Sand and then a bunch of garbage. Strength, Godspeed, Fury, Stoneskin and Armor were the key spells for Rukkians, and there's a subclass that gives all of those. Graft those onto a combat class and you break the game completely; but you're not gonna be a wizard in a robe, you're gonna be completely indistinguishable from any other raider until you feel like pushing your godmode button.

'Abusing' = 'Taking intense advantage of', simply worded in a more flippant and indifferent fashion.

More specifically, I just dislike the evolution of the game's class system in general.

Before all of the tinkering, mundane and magick classes had pretty specific challenges and play styles. You could be Karma 0, but still make a great character with a ranger or a warrior if you were willing to put in the work. As some have already touched on, magickers and mundanes also had a lot of mutual use for each other. Like foraging slate for a krathi, or providing a bodyguard, etc. It felt like a very defined system with its own culture.

Even after the initial changes, mundanes needed to have the extra karma to sink into subguilds, and you were more likely to have to live with a shitty stat roll. It was just more work. If you did have a ~karma 3 subguild, then playing a mundane wasn't even worth it anymore, and there was a limit to how many of those you could roll. 

Before that, it felt like people could make cases for different classes being the best under certain conditions. After that, everyone knew what the best thing to be was.

Not that a certain degree of tankmaginess wasn't always possible before, but they were a LOT of work. Or else you were a warrior PC that was given sorcerer powers in some bullshit valley plot. It was the exception rather than the rule. I had much more fun working on a viv, ruk or krathi's off/def and relying on their magick to do the rest than the later system. And yes, I also enjoyed playing a mundane and then taking it to the next level with rings or magic weapons (until those were nerfed).

The current system doesn't even seem remotely interesting to me, for a lot of reasons lechuck detailed. It's probably what has made it easiest for me to never play again.

This summarizes my feelings on this subject better than anything else I could write:

You seem to think the game can still be saved.

If you (general you) are having fun playing the game like the hack-and-slash it's designed to be, more power to you. My primary criticism of present-day Armageddon is that it bills itself as an RPI when it really isn't. It's false advertising. My other criticisms of the game (such as poor design choices and bureaucratic functions) are secondary to that. The new class system is one of those poor design choices, but if we're being real then it's maybe 1% bad compared to the fact that it advertises itself as a collaborative storytelling game when that absolutely, definitely does not happen on a large scale in this game.

Edit to summarize part of post that got eaten: The classes definitely aren't balanced. They never have been. The staff justified the lack of balance at one point as intentional. Now the classes are even more imbalanced. We either take away that this design decision is still intentional, or it's unintentional. If it's intentional, to what end was it intended? It's a well known fact that Brokkr is very heavily mechanics-focused, and would be what many players pooh-pooh as a "twink" when he plays mortal characters. So even a charitable examination of the class system yields evidence of self-enrichment.

"McDonalds of RPIs" is a good way to describe Arm.

I agree that they probably came up with the city/wilderness, heavy/light focus framework before actually coming up with the ideas that would fit within that framework. The new class system is such an unforced error, that's all that could really explain that particular disaster. I think the staff set up the classes they wanted to play. It wasn't so much a focus on removing certain play styles from the game, but adding incredibly broken play styles that staff members could inhabit within their own characters. But there probably also was some playstyle-removal as well; one obvious example of such is how they cut mastercrafting from many classes that would be capable of it, and turned it into a subclass-exclusive feature, before returning it to certain classes (Artisan?). We can only speculate on whatever else staff were salty about, but the staff expressed their sheer contempt for mastercrafting for years.

I think Armageddon players need to take a good, hard look at the design direction of the game over the past decade or so. It offers several rich examples of poor game design decisions. The staff really don't know what they're doing. If Armageddon was an MMO with ten times the number of players, there would be essays written by people who study game design on its failures, and what similar games can do better. Maybe former staff will post articles on Gamasutra once Morgenes gets tired of paying for the server and players suddenly find that they can't log in. Until then, unfortunately, all Armageddon has by way of critique is a handful of people here that it never really pays full attention to.

i've said from the beginning that i just don't understand why they picked 15 classes. even neglecting the fact that there's so many subclasses -- 50+, there are 50+ subclasses i just counted them -- it's a nightmare to sit there and figure out what exactly separates them except going skill by skill. the 'general' classes seem pointless. and do there really need to be 'light mercantile' classes? how many classes can you transform into another one just by taking a subclass -- e.g., couldn't you just make a 'light mercantile' class by making a full mercantile and adding subguilds to it?

what a completely unnecessary clusterfuck.