Questions and answers...

[etherial]

[Kasbak]

[Panda]

I can verify that specific attention was paid to give each discipline a distinctive flavor a style with regard to their talents. It will still be possible to create a Thief and a Scout with quite a bit of cross-over, but they definitely each have their niche. Scouts are stealthy, but that isn't their primary focus. They are primarily about gathering information and traveling to a lesser extent. Thieves, on the other hand, are all about being sneaky; getting into and getting out of trouble.

I'm surprised that a Scout was more impressive in combat than... well, anything. For the first eight Circles in 3E they get a spectacularly unimpressive array of combat talents. Anticipate Blow is probably the most useful, but they have nothing to improve their initiative as well. This isn't to say Thieves are much better, but they have the option of going through the steps of Surprise Strike. It's not real pretty. You're mostly going to be looking at things beyond the discipline as to what they bring to the table for effectiveness in combat. An obsidiman Scout will probably be more impressive in combat than a windling Thief. The opposite is also true.

All of that aside, all of the "miscellaneous" disciplines (not combat, not magician) now have more options to participate in combat, if that is how they want to roll.