Any chance we could increase the overall limit to combat and magic skill merits? There is no game balance issues if you allowed a person to merit more combat skills, so long as you leave the 8 merit cap in place on the individual skills.
If SE sincerely wishes to force people to specialize in certain jobs, then fine... leave things as they are... but honestly I have several jobs which I truly love and hate having to favor only a 2 of them with capped combat skill merits. (same goes for mage jobs).