So what was the point of the class change?

I think there were a few goals with the class update.

Number one was to decrease the grind time where people feel like their characters are viable. But this is completely misguided. People are still going to grind as much as they did before. They will move the goalposts forward and accept a higher standard for viability.

Number two was to make things easier for casual players. But this doesn't address that problem at all. Yes, casual players don't have to grind as much to get to a decent skill level. But it makes no difference to what really matters in Armageddon, which is plot involvement. As long as casual players can't get involved in the same things the hardcore players can get involved in, they're going to be perpetually left out.

Number three was to give the game a fresh coat of paint for the veterans. In this, they basically succeeded. But it's a short-term benefit. People will figure out everything there is to know about these classes, and bitch and moan as they usually do when staff make balance adjustments and other changes to the classes. The new car smell will eventually wear off, and the class situation will go back to where it was, with people demanding the return full-mage guilds, Nilazis, Elkrosians, and all of that stuff, alongside demanding the return of full rangers and merchants.

Number four, arguably, was to clamp down on master crafting. Now that a custom craft subguild unlocks custom crafting, making a new item for Armageddon is more difficult than ever. This serves the staff's purpose of doing minimal work to run the game, but makes things even more stagnant than usual.

Easier to play a merchant / logistics team member in a military clan.

Much easier to have a one to three shot killing machine under 10 days played.

Compressed use of hunting areas. No one will hunt skeet or shik now. More will be forced into spiders, stilt lizards and turaal sooner. Only the same three builds will be successful skilling on rantarri. This means more pvp and griefing, as it is easier to find people to target. This probably means more people forced into the Byn and the Garrison, but with the frequency that staff butchers almost everyone in those clans, those pcs still wont be 'competitive'.

Less likely law enforcement pcs will ever impact a sneaky pc. If anyone thought this was a problem to be solved...

The hilarious thing about the guild changes, is that they basically brought the guild's main skill focus up to about where MOST people, with a reasonable capacity to learn or engage with the setting (i.e, anyone with the ability to figure out how emoting symbols work) are quite easily able to advance their characters within a day or two of playing time.

Where people REALLY have trouble, and where they really plateau, is right around the mid journeyman mark, where especially for all combat clans, you have to 'trick' the system in an outrageous fashion to manage any learning at all. It is impossible to raise combat skills to mastery without either A) twinking the system, or B) being religiously, continually trained by someone who did. Or, the favorite method of some people, C) turning in enough RP logs of jerking themselves off or being a staff alt, and having their skills raised as a gratuity.

In the old days, before there was the skill level indicators to clue people in, and make them more desperate to seek out either twinky sparring partners or stilt lizards, it wasn't uncommon for clan/militia warriors with 40 days+ playing time to get absolutely wrecked by characters that knew how to skill up.

The mitigating factor to this, is people who stuck around and survived long enough in a semi-combatty role, would eventually hook up with a mentor, who would finally remove the cauls from their eyes, as to the asinine chores they really needed to perform to become deadly.

What they should have done was embrace a classless system, and allowed, depending on karma, for people to choose higher skills in some areas (via subguild), and the random possibility if they choose the right subguild, of developing some elemental affinity.

I’ve seen a few full merchants that were pretty decent in a real fight. They definitely weren’t pushovers.

I don’t think it will sort out the balance problem. If you want to play a beater you’re going to go for the top tier fighting classes. The top tier fighting classes are predictably going to beat the shit out of everyone else. It’s only going to matter late game, which...yeah is going to be easier to get to. The problem is going to be people hyper focused on how to progress from where they are now. Like Meh said...they just moved the goal post. If they make mobs tougher, since they aren’t a challenge anymore, we’re back to where we were before the class change.

I'd agree that they need some story action, but I like the new classes. At least the ones I've tried. They offer me a decent mix of the things I like to do. I'm an excellent twinker so I can usually skill up pretty fast anyway, but I'm happy enough to have semi-reliable skills now from chargen.

I don't know what Brokkr's actual skillset is. He's the guy that did the code work for this, isn't he? Maybe he's just not a creative type but rather a hard skills coder. So he did what he can do. I can't fault his work because there's not a lot of stuff going on that may or may not be in his wheelhouse anyway.

I'm happy enough with change. I have more options on the table in front of me, except for this karma regen which I really do not like. But the classes themselves have a lot of variety in them to experiment with. I may be bitching about them in a year when I've tried them all, but for now ... I got something new to play around with.

So lyse ... I only ever saw one merchant who could put up a decent fight. Ran into him in a "push-in" job where I went for the apartment kill. He managed to grab some weapons up out of somewhere in the room he fled into and for a long moment there I was starting to get a little worried thinking I was dealing with something other than a merchant. I was just a wimpy little pickpocket, after all, and not great in a straight fight. He'd been around awhile. Maybe he'd been skilling up somewhere. (And later I really regretted killing him.) But every other merchant I ever had a fight with folded up like wet cardboard after a sap and a hit or two. I tried to get a few merchants of my own up in combat skills, but I never figured out the secret. I suppose you've got merchants who are serious about their hidden offense/defense skills and their survival, and tressy-tress froo-froo types who just want to craft themselves some bling and flirt in Red's.

The way guilds were before was pretty stupid. 1 heavy combat class that started out woefully incompetent and was useless outside of combat, 1 outdoors class that could do literally everything except straight up fight twinked warriors, 1 mercantile class that craft literally everything, and 3 stealth classes with a bizarre, illogical division between who gets what skills at what skill levels.

I have some quibbles with some of the design choices for the new system and we'll see how good/bad it is in the long run, but the only people I expected to be saying the previous system wasn't broken or shouldn't have been changed are Lizzie and Armaddict. 

The old guild system wasn't great but there was at least a sense of class identity. There's no class identity here, and there's a major overlap between the classes that makes it confusing to figure out where and when these classes shine. I think it's going to be more off-putting to new players than anything as they have to suss over lists of skills to figure out what differences there actually are.