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How will you deal with class population imbalance?
People don't often play tanks or healers in most games I've experienced. The ones who do play those characters get massive perks in their queue times and are valued over general dps. How will you handle these imbalances when people will naturally want to be more of one thing and less of another?
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As for tanks, I hope that the diversity of secondary augments will allow players to enjoy the various types of tanks that can be created to keep the population up.
In saying that - I hope everyone enjoys all the classes because you can make them suitable to your own play style ^^
Traditionally hybrids are either too strong (being able to perform multiple roles equally well) or too weak (being able to perform no role as well as a pure class). Straddling that line will be very tricky but I hope they can pull it off else hybrid classes will be played only for the novelty and challenge.
Bad Dygz......you come play with the rest of us dammit!
Lets overly simplify and put it like this:
TANK build 1 - Tanking
TANK build 2 - DPS
HEALER build 1 - Healing
HEALER build 2 - DPS
DPS build 1 - DPS
DPS build 2 - Utility / Support
So in this scenario every class could do DPS. Tanks could additionally tank, healers could additionally heal, and DPSers would additionally have some utility aspects.
From my understanding something like the confirmed class, Paladin, is not a pool of tank and cleric abilities but tank abilities augmented by cleric abilities . A tank is still a tank, but its play style and utility is different depending on its secondary class. I don't think Tank - Cleric or Tank - Bard or Tank - X will be too different from each other, but enough to have a niche and something to bring to a group or party to set them apart.
What I am talking about however is a tank / tank being more "tanky" than say a tank/rogue. It would seem logical that augmenting your tank abilities with MORE tank instead of tank/x would make the pure class the best at their role and hence being more desired as a tank than a hybrid tank.
Also "augmenting" your main classes abilities is not quite as cut/dry as they have made it seem. When they talked about x/cleric they mentioned this would give that combo self healing but not the ability to heal others apparently. Not sure that self healing directly augments the Paladin's current skills themselves but more augments the primary class with a new skill. So there is some gray in there.
The same way I deal with life...
I can only speculate that this might be a possibility in increasing the population of a particular class. But keep in mind this has been a challenge in every MMO the Tanks/healers and Utility are high priority for getting into good raid guilds while the dime a dozen DPS have to prove that they are better than one another. So it will be interesting on how they will "patch" classes.
But if your fear of being a unique class is troublesome you are more likely to be an asset because of future buffs to your class, or rarity that guilds would compete over. This is why guild leaders like myself, look out for utility, tanks, healers, and Crafters because I know they are valuable assets and I try to make sure they are happy with the guild.
The biggest issues I have seen in other MMOs have been when a patch invalidates a class. For example, fighter and rogue are probably melee DPS. If a patch cripples a rouge under certain circumstance, you may be out of luck until a new patch.
The above happened to me in vanilla Rift. I started playing a mage healer. One patch mages were made OP, the next they were nerfed, not only was it no longer possible to main heal, but DPS was so low that no one would group with a mage. Most of my guildies had to re-roll.