If that's his design philosophy, then PE may well become a pretty bland game. Balance character builds around combat only and you're basically back to Diablo school of design, as opposed to making some builds/classes underpowered in combat, but able to make up the difference in usefulness to the party outside of combat, such as dialogue skills, lock-picking, identifying traps, secret doors ad passages, utility stuff, etc.
Here's a primer for you:
Every class will be good in combat. Sawyer wants to remove as many traps in character creation as he can because he hates it when players stop playing games because they made a bad choice. He also wants as many builds and party combinations to be viable as possible.
The classes are being designed as role-ready, which is a little bit pigeonholed on paper, but we'll have to see how we go. If you play characters out of role, they will be inefficient and you may run into trouble, but it should be viable to do it some of the time. From the way Sawyer has been describing it, classes have natural counter-classes as well.
Rogues and
Rangers are the damage dealing classes. They will do the highest single target damage of all of the classes. These characters will probably not hold up well to being beat on though, a Fighter's sticky abilities counter a Rogue. The Ranger shares health pool with it's animal companion. We do not know if you get bonus health/stamina from this link, but a Ranger also has to be careful that their animal companion doesn't get trapped ... kind of like Lone Druid in DotA 2 except a lot more terminal.
Barbarians will be good at dealing with trash mobs and squishies. Barbarians will be tough as well and can take a lot of hits from average enemies, but they will probably suffer if targeted by high DPS characters because their deflection sucks and they are 'peaky' characters.
Fighters and
Monks are the characters you want out in the front being the tanks, soaking up the DPS. Fighters have high Deflection and can hold people to them with their class abilities, Monks want to take damage to power their status effects which you can use to hold people back from your squishies.
The original Fighter description in the very first class update read that "And while fighters are often thought of as being primarily melee-based, they can specialize in a variety of weapons, including bows, crossbows, and even firearms.". In a recent statement Sawyer said that using a Fighter as a ranged character is playing against type because most of their abilities are melee based. You could still probably specialize in a Ranged weapon but you'd never get the chance to use half the class abilities. You can probably build a Fighter as a non-tank and play one like a Ranger or a Rogue, but you'll be doing it at 70-80% efficiency compared to the class that fills that role.
Wizards are designed to be versatile spell casters. Their spells will probably let them do everything, but their Grimoire limits the array of spells they have access to per encounter, so rather than having a spell for everything available in an encounter you have to pick your spells correctly. Sawyer has also said that while Wizards are versatile their spells will never be as effective as another classes ability if they are similar.
Paladins are good when positioned near allies. They will never be able to 1v1 a high DPS class and win, but if you stick them in melee near your Fighters/Monks etc their short range auras will benefit them, and likewise if you set them up with a Bow or an Arquebus and stick them near the Rangers and Wizards, and use the short range auras to buff their attack speed or accuracy etc.
Chanters are supposed to be pretty versatile, they can be melee or ranged, have good accuracy and average defenses and they chant while fighting to give status effects to the party and/or themselves. The Chants have a large aura range compared to the Paladin. After a certain amount of ticks, the Chanter can unleash a (usually offensive) roar, which probably has to be close range to either damage/stun/slow etc a group of enemies. Chanters look like they'll be one of those classes that can 'fill' any role with a varying degree of efficacy loss. For example: You could tank with a Chanter, it would be less efficient than using a Fighter or a Monk, but better than using a Rogue, Ranger, Cipher or Wizard. They might have an aura that makes them more 'tanky' and they might have a Roar that does an AoE cone stun, but they will never be as good as a Fighter or a Monk and if you use a Chanter as the tank they will run out of Health over an adventuring day faster than a Fighter or a Monk would and they wouldn't be able to last as long in an Encounter if being beat on by tough guys.
You know about
Ciphers from the latest update.
The classes we know the least about are
Priests and
Druids. They both are spell caster classes and have access to all of their spells rather than relying on a Grimoire, but their spell list is not as extensive as a Wizard. One could assume that you can build a melee or ranged Cleric or Druid, and Druids will be able to shapechange into "anthropomorphic animal forms, more like lycanthropes in appearance". You can cast spells while in your animorph form but you can't hold weapons. So one would assume that you could have a Bow Druid, shapechange into a Man-Bear and then wade into melee with Claws. Priests have the only non-self Stamina regen spell(s) so far that we know. Priests also benefit from being in close proximity to allies to give them their Sacred Circle passive accuracy bonus, but if they aren't they get it themselves.
The class 'role' design overall sounds pretty robust, it just plays against a few of the traditional archetypes that some of us are used to. For me the Paladin and the Barbarian are in the frey, toe to toe with the biggest monsters just as much as the Fighter is. Wizards are also nerfed quite a bit.
