I implore the devs to work on archetypes and classes before it's too late.

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But that's my point though. I can't give an example from other games, and maybe even other games have better "classes", but in L2 there were 5 mage classes. Pretty much all of them had different stats due to being different races, but their base function didn't really change (outside of one of them who got added later on). They had different elemental bases, but outside of just a few abilities they were pretty much recolors. Though you could even exclude one of the mages cause he's in-between a summoner and a mage.

But even with all of that, they were still considered "different classes" and were valued separately. So if Intrepid manage to make good augments - I'd still consider those 8 "classes" different enough to be considered classes.

Even if we take that damn TP augment and consider that it's a school of augments, we might be able to apply that school to more abilities, which might create a "teleport-warrior" whose gameplay and party role would most likely differ from smth like a "fire-warrior" and would most definitely make it different from a "life-warrior". So in theory it's not just 64 classes, but potentially even more, if each archetype has several augment schools within them (like mage's TP and Elements). And yes, as you said, augments don't only come from classes so there might be even more depth and variety in it.

And exactly because of those possibilities I reserve my judgement for class design until we see that design. I'm preparing to just have 8 roles with maybe some variance, but I hope that Intrepid manage to pull off what they want and what they've promised. And so far they've been able to pull off quite a few things already.

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I'd say Ashes has 8 roles (if Intrepid manage to develop them that way) and they each have 7 functional branches on top of those roles. I definitely hope each class is as different from each other as possible, but as I said in a previous comment, in most games classes are quite similar within their roles, so as long as the game requires every tool that each class has - I feel like classes will feel different enough. Especially if class switching is really expensive/hard/long.

This discussion is cool and all, but you know what Intrepid really have to do? Make their classes distinct enough to be considered classes in the current definition of what a "class" is.

Btw is there even a concrete definition of what a class is supposed to be in an mmorpg? There's the general definition from the wikipedia, but I'm not sure if everyone would even agree that it totally fits the mmorpg genre.

If Intrepid design their classes in such a way that a mage/tank can do some things that a mage/rogue can't - would you consider them as separate classes? They do different things and you need one to do one specific thing and you need the other to do something else. That sounds like enough of a differentiation for me. And I feel like people might be happy when they hear that they can even change their class specification if they want to. Obviously not all people, but still.

In other words, let Intrepid prove that they do in fact have 64 classes first. And if they fail at that - make them change their definitions so that people on release don't get jebaited.