@AsianPotato I am glad that you are passionate enough about the subject to actually go out of your way and search for what has been said in the past about this topic, and I do believe that you have a valid point. But I also think your point is pretty cynical.... Your entire argument against a vocation change is that you (or someone else) might find a strong combination of vocations and that everyone will follow suit. You don't want them to be able to do that because you want to keep it for yourself and a vocation change allows them to just copy you at the drop of a hat.
To that I ask you, what happens when you find a strong combo and you take it all the way to level 50k. I do a run through on balance and find your combo to be way too strong and I am forced to re-balance it. After the re-balance, you no longer like the vocation you are playing because it doesn't feel the same. Do you want to put in another 1,000 hours into re-rolling another character, or would you rather farm up some CC, trade for RT, grab a voc swap, and re-train your skills? If you have the time to dump into re-rolling another character and you would rather do that, good for you. I am betting most people do not.
I am asking A LOT from people by trying to make this era for manual play. Most people do not have infinite time to dump into a video game. Your selfish desire to be the only one with a specific vocation combo that you think is lolomgwtfop and unique to you is of no interest to me as an argument against something that I believe to be almost critical for what we are trying to achieve here. We are closing in on 35 vocations and while OTC users will receive 5x exp/loot, we are still looking at an extremely long road to 2nd rebirth. Expecting people to make that grind more than once would be insanely optimistic, no, ignorant and oblivious to reality.
I would be in full agreement with you if the voc change was as simple as pressing a button and having 2-3 new vocations but the reality is not that simple. Having all of your skills reset to 0 is a HUGE penalty whether you believe it to be or not, especially if we are talking 3 vocations worth of training. If this was a server where you just play for a week, get level 300, and pvp all day I would also agree with you, but it isn't. Deathzot is an extremely time consuming server because it was designed with bots in mind. Even with everything I have done for this era in an attempt to make it less of a shit grind, it still will not be enough to make 2nd rebirth realistic for the majority of players and if you don't believe me, just ask anyone who has actually reached 50k how long it took their bot running 24/7. After you do that, go ask Beil how long it takes to level once you do actually get your 3rd vocation.
This is only the beginning of the changes that are going to be required to make Deathzot even remotely fun to play manual. It is going to take some serious time and thought to counter the years of balancing around bots.