I'd like to see 16+ classes in at launch, seems a bit much though given their limited resources.
If they have a lot of classes, I hope they end up doing what I talked about earlier--really designing the game with a "strategic" mind set. WoW has really focused on the tactical aspect of MMO's--buffs have been homogenized into discreet categories, most of them raid wide and essentially copies with different names. I remember the push for this with WoW--and the lead developer saying "you shouldn't want X class because he brings Y buff, you should just want the player because they are good". And that made sense if you're only focused on discreet encounters and how your tactical game plays out (IE what you do within a fight.) And WoW is very focused on that, discreet encounter or "tactical" difficulty.
But it cost the game big in terms of strategic challenge. What I mean by that is in a game with more unique buffs, and limited buffing based on group (Especially things like auras)--your group compositions affected the outcomes of fights a great deal. Do you put a the guy with +Fire Resist aura in with the melee during a heavy fire AE fight, or do you put augment the group with a melee aura buff and let them use the weaker targeted fire resist? Or maybe you set your melee groups up to have less melee damage but include both buffs, so the individual melee in the group are more durable and do higher DPS each (But lower overall.)
Now the above does lead to "raid stacking"--and that was seen as bad. But I think that stemmed more from WoW's focus on tactical difficulty. In WoW, the fights themselves were meant to be a challenge. While in EQ, sustaining the fights, and moving on to the next kill was the challenge--so the challenge was in fighting
efficiently, and strategically. If the game is focused more on doing things effeciently, then I believe a system where each class greatly affects the raid in unique ways, wouldn't lead to class stacking per encounter but rather would lead to carefully designing guilds to maximize efficiency of the classes already there.
I say it a lot, but building a guild or a group should be a meta game in and of itself--much like building a deck of cards in a TCG. When WoW tore down the "unique" buff system, they got rid of that meta game. But I think it's one aspect that should be revisited and perhaps iterated on a great deal. I'd love it if a group that had a Warrior, Rogue, Enchanter, Shaman, Ranger, Cleric played completely and totally differently than a Paladin, Rogue, Wizard, Enchanter, Necromancer, Druid--and not just on the WoW sense of the word where each class does it's own thing, but rather that the buffs brought to the table can make the SAME class (In this case, the rogue) play completely differently. So in this rough example, the Rogue in our first group would play as a melee DPS (Standard) with melee buffs to improve his damage. But in the second group, while he still could play as standard melee DPS, he
couldinstead play the role of setting up enemies for the casters to kill--because he's got certain buffs from the paladin and the Wizard/Necro themselves, to make certain skills of his weaken enemies to casters.
So, in essence, each class affects another differently depending on group comp. This way, even a small number of variables at the class level, can produce an extremely large amount in the meta play of groups--and this can create tons of outcomes for forming and using group. Would this be hard to balance? Yeah. But I hope with less focus on instancing, and discreet encounters (IE less "tactical" focus), balance won't matter
as muchin terms of how difficult a mob is to defeat but rather, it should be about efficiency. Which is what EQ was more about--killing a mob wasn't tactically very hard usually, even raid bosses. What was hard was doing it efficiently enough to gear the raid, and make it so you could get to the mob before someone else--EQ was an example of efficiency over direct difficulty (Which is another way of saying strategic difficulty instead of tactical difficulty.)
