missing a guiding thread

The wiki needs some updates that's true, however the very first post that announced the project contains this phrasing: Using Patch 1.65 as a basis for our development, we have already implemented some changes and a big chunk of QoL’s and we are discussing many more internally.

We have no plans to completely change classes or lines, that's still the 1.65 basis, we also have no plans to implement master levels, artifacts or anything of that note. While many may consider NNF RAs to be a big departure of 1.65 almost everyone recognizes that many RAs in 1.65 were just garbage and some were just over the top, sure we could have tried just rebalancing those but just as a couple examples, how do you rebalance the garbage RA styles in a way that they are worth the points while not oneshotting? What should you do with Shadow Run? It's the same for many many abilities, some are by design just completely useless and once you're done with this, how much "1.65 of ras" is actually still left?. Then you have the "issue" of not having the portal ceremony and hence faster time to action, are 30 minute cooldowns still appropriate, are those long cooldowns factored into the balance of those abilities. If people agree that long cooldowns should mean the abilities have huge impact should there even be long cooldowns? And so the decision was made to adopt NNF RAs, they obviously aren't perfect and would also require some changes but the required changes there are basically just numbers and backfilling some passives while it solves a whole load of other issues and opens up a lot more viable playstyles.

From the start of the alpha we said we are focusing on making it a playable thing with most class and balancing changes happening in the i50. We are now in the i50 and so some class changes happened / are happening (hybrid stuff) and balancing changes are happening / happened (RAs, heals).

What people were testing since the alpha is just the normal gameplay. New RAs, Old RAs, even the character skills don't matter much in any of that and is just a tiny fraction of the work required / stuff that has / had to be tested. To give a sense of perspective, NNF RA implementation started on the 2nd and was mostly done by the 4th, sure there were / are still some bugs but that's how little stuff like that matters compared to all the things that had to be redone, tested and fixed that have nothing to do with skills or ras but are still part of daoc / a daoc server.

We will ofc try to limit the impact of changes that happen once the server is live, I wouldn't expect anything "exciting" when it comes to class changes for a rather long time after it goes live as people want and need a sense of stability but there also should not necessarily be a complete stagnation. Metas shift and such shifts can make problems visible that never occurred throughout the beta and might or might not require some changes, however I'd expect those changes be number related and not adding or removing abilities, that's what the i50 phase is for.