Shattered Kingdoms

If you played a healer, shaman or priest, priest might be easier, you would have people taking you everywhere and showing you all kinds of stuff, becasue everyone needs a healer to go on dangerous trips.

First of all, welcome to the game. As you have already read, each of the four classes you have mentioned have their advantages and disadvantages. I will not restate what is already said, but I would strongly encourage you to be patient when playing. Shattered Kingdoms can have a very stiff learning curve that takes a long time to adjust to. I would also urge you to spend some time learning basic game mechanics before jumping head first into PK. Sometimes, mixing yourself up with the wrong crowd can put you between a rock and a hard place - leaving you with the feeling you can never learn or explore because you have people who are constantly killing you.

While I would say you should always play what you seem most interested in, I would encourage considering one other class. Priests are very essential to this game. Heal and resurrection are two spells that are usually in high demand. As such, priests are often invited along to the more difficult areas of the game.

And enchant, though you won't get many exotic invitations just on account of that.

Personally for a first character if you are looking for a melee class I wouldn't start with a merc. Yes, being a meat shield is easy, but one of the more confusing parts of the game is weapon specs in my opinion. Weapon specs can be extremely confusing if you are not familiar with the weapon system, and something you might think is good to spec into could turn out to be garbage compared to something you might find later on in the game.

Bards are another no no when starting out as well, it takes a lot of knowledge about stats and modifications to really play them well, unless of course you play a dancing centaur (lol don't play a dancing centaur if you think I'm serious).

Generally, healers are the most needed classes around for doing things, and are the easiest ones to get into groups with but learning how to heal and to watch peoples health at the start won't be easy. It'll take some practice before you get a handle on it.

I started with barbarians myself, and I feel it's probably one of the easier classes to get the hang of. Mine was a half-elf barb, and I didn't stack my stats to make the ultimate character since I didn't know how at the time, but he turned out just fine in pvp, and with the current changes a barb could do just fine now as well even if you screw them up a bit.

Play a priest, barb or scout if you're new to sk and muds. Sorc or rogue as well if ur only new to sk.

Same reasons as stated.