Loyalty is the Key? Nice pun. (ED)

Today's release in EpicDuel actually has me excited.  But first things first (yeah, I have a habit of saying that)-
Drumroll, please-
I have changed my Level 33 Mercenary to a Level 33 Tactical Mercenary.  Why?  Not exactly the same reasons for me turning my Tech Mage to a Blood Mage.  Because Intimidate was a bit of a useless debuff, I didn't exactly count the Mercenary class as a class with a debuff (unless you were facing some hard-hitting enemies).  In the beginning, when Tactical Mercenary was released (along with Cyber Hunter and Blood Mage), I had way more motivation to become one with the TLM.  Why?
In case if it isn't obvious yet, back then, Tactical Mercenary had Smoke Screen.  Couple that with Hybrid Armor (remember, it used to be a +12 to either defense or resistance but started on defense), and in some cases, Artillery Strike, and TLMs were considered the most dangerous of classes at the beginning of Delta.  (Remember, the era of the Cyber Hunter did not emerge yet, as CHs did not have Plasma Armor- it happened when the Mercenary's Hybrid Armor was split in two and TLMs gained Mineral Armor).
But I happened to be running low on Varium (actually, had never touched it yet on my Mercenary), and 50,000 credits was a hefty (and unaffordable) sum to pay.  And besides, the plain old Mercenary was still a great class.
Then came the Frysteland War, which had the worst outcome ever- not only did Exile lose, but Mercenaries lost in their own personal way (I think I've ranted to you guys enough about this).  From then on, I was like "Go to TLM or bust!".
Why not Cyber Hunter?  That would have been nice, considering the benefits CHs are currently enjoying now.  But
1) I was loyal to the Mercenary (and all general Mercenary classes) class.
2) I did not have any mutating weapons at the moment (although my BM TM had the Frost Destroyer).
So there.
When I changed class, I was first shocked to learn that my hairstyle was reset (there goes 25 Varium), but then remembered that the same thing had happened to my Tech Mage when he went Blood Mage.  (I think it's because there are class-specific hairstyles.)  I decided to use the widely-copied build of Toxic Grenade  for starters, because at the moment I was still adapting to the Tactical Mercenary skill tree.  And I just to happened to beat Snork (for the first mission in the chain for the last Blueprint Scrap) with that build 7 times.  Tried and true.

But for those of you guys who are getting drowsy over my change to TLM and were drooling over the release hours earlier, I shall now talk about the release, because it is worth talking about.
The change that probably impacted almost everyone was the faction overhaul.  The devs drastically changed almost everything in a typical faction.
They removed the faction cannons, for example.  The devs had been planning to do this for weeks (Rabblefroth in the EpicDuel General Discussion made a thread about it).  I really didn't have a hand in the whole faction cannon business, but I do know it cost hundreds, probably thousands, for the people at the top of the all-time war kill leaderboard (firewawa, dragonwawa, 2046808).  And really, seeing it all wiped away in one update- big slap to the face.  Their goes their claim to fame.  And now the Warlord Achievement is rare.
The devs changed the interface of your faction, which had me guessing for a while how to get to faction headquarters.  They replaced wins with influence (more on that later), squished the alignment wins, faction leaderboards, flag captures, and things like that to the left.  Personally, I don't mind the change to Influence from Wins because it's nicer seeing my about 22,000 Influence than my 2,000 Wins.
Now for Influence.  It's running the faction now, and even a chunk of your profile and stats.  There is now personal influence, which is (obviously) the amount of influence that your character alone has.  You gain only earn personal influence by winning battles- which brings me to this: 1vs1 victories will stay at 5 Influence, however 2vs2 will be 15 (Yes
And now for the new shops.  You have to have four Blueprint Scraps and go to either Silas or The Lawman, if you are Legion or Exile, respectively.  They have a "The Big Picture" mission, where you turn in your Blueprint Scraps for either a Legion or Exile Locker Key.  The Key unlocks their shops.  The shops contain different weapons depending on your alignment.  They only differ in looks, not stats or requirements.  But really, the rapier weapons (non-varium along with the Death Flame Sword and the Crystal Laser Sword) are very good for non-varium ones.  +35 Damage and 26 stat modifiers.  Really.  They are useful.
~ReconnaisX