You read completely wrong beginners guides.
The game was made to be classless, actually and to support hybrid builds first and foremost. The current state of it is due to several big changes during the last few weeks of the beta, going from empowering hybrids too much to empowering focused strict classes to much and back and forth... which ended in the system like the current one, that unintentionally swings back to making focus builds a bit more advantageous then it should.
The scales are tipped a bit. Not much and it could have been done better with more time but there wasnt any and the game shipped.
However... hybrid builds and those that spread skills to non-combat skills are very viable and much more fun to play, because of diversity of options they have.
