EVE New Citizens Q&A

Well it's just a chain of missions so it's not really a break from that. Have you considered shooting some other players?

To answer your question I'm not aware of any changes. Should be fairly easy in a frig or destroyer but you might need a hand on the last two missions.

it has decent rewards for newer players but is a long and boring grind. It's really aimed at new players taking a tour of high sec more than anything else. If you don't need the rewards, it's not much more than spamming stargates with the occasional shot fired at rats.
Worth doing? I guess if a few mil in rewards and some standing matters to you. Otherwise, there is much more lucrative content to pursue.
If you need a break from mission running, then I can't exactly recommend an arc with 50 or so missions in it. Especially since you will get far more reward just spamming 50 missions for whatever agent you already have standings with. If you are tired of the mission grind- then epic arcs aren't really going to help other than have you traipsing around high sec warping to zero on a gate and hitting jump.

I suggest going nomad and doing anoms/sigs. I personally use a Confessor in high and low sec. It's quick to move around and change systems, it mostly one shots NPC frigates right off the field. The probe launcher fitting bonus means you aren't gimping a fit or need to offline the probe launcher all the time.
Just in high sec a well fitted Confessor will pay for itself in no time with faction/DeD loot drops.

I always found it fun and profitable

as an aside, I will say the pretty much the same of the faction L4 epic arcs. I did the Minmatar one recently and it was just a glorified version of the SoE. That is- a whole bunch of flying around high sec (snore) and simple missions for less reward than I would have gotten just spamming regular missions. There are about 2 missions that approach a regular L4 in difficulty, the rest I would say are on the level of L1-L2. Other than faction standings gain- I don't see any reason to run epic arcs. (and now that you don't need 8.0 standing to get jump clones with NPCs, even less reason to)

Like any content in Eve, I say go ahead and check it out. But to be honest, epic arcs are just more of the same missioning, and often more about flying around and courier type missions than combat.

As for rewards, other than faction standing, I pulled in much more reward just flying around high sec doing anoms/sigs. In one good evening I scored a couple Mid-Grade Slave implants, several faction and dedspace modules, and a faction armor rep that fetched me tens of millions alone. Far better use of your time than epic arcs, IMO.

The 'branching' aspect of epic arcs is almost false advertising. It's usually just a decision made at the end that determines what loot you get for completing the arc. It has no real bearing on the experience.