Sorry to step into the little debacle that’s going on, just thought I’d give my recollection of events.
The way I remember it Assault and Recon were the names devs used when first going public with this stuff, although a lot of closed alpha players still reverted to Soldier and Covert Ops because that’s what they are used to from previous games. It also didn’t help that the config files also refer to them as Soldier and Covert Ops…
Much in the same way Canary Wharf in config is Underground in-game, Victoria in config is Terminal in-game, White Chapel in config is Chapel in-game, etc.
However after the initial classes were talking about publicly it was decided to rejig things into roles, essentially to allow for many more playstyles and so mercs could be more unique by each one consisting of a different bucket of roles, i.e. the key difference between classes and roles is that there are many more roles than classes and each merc can consist of several different roles rather than just a single class.
The problem is the UI was never updated with any mention of a mercs roles and mercs weren’t reworked to be more unique than before, essentially still meaning that they can all still be pigeonholed into classes which only added to the confusion, either go with classes or roles, not halfway in-between.
Now I hope this is just a slow turning frigate, and eventually each merc will be completely unique and each one will be unable to be designated a 1 out of 5 class, but instead it’s 3, 4 or 5 roles will be pretty clear to everyone.
TL;DR
Soldier and Engineer are definitely wrong because they are classes which are (should have already) being phased out, Assault might actually be correct, if it’s the name of one of the new roles (I can’t remember what they are right now)… you get the picture, no classes, only roles, learn to adapt to change.
