Firstly, I love DotE! I really could gush about it for some time. ~But~ personally I'd love to see a little more replayability and deeper party customisation added in. Personally I think a system of unlockable classes could hit both of these targets in a compelling way.



Currently, each hero has their own set of skills that suggest certain roles, as well as defining their unique flavour. I believe these two aspects could be separated to grant greater flexibility, and allow players to make a greater number of super-interesting decisions.



Instead of having a fixed set of (5-8?) skills, a character would have 1-3 flavour skills, defining what's special about them (be it masochism, or arachnoid~ism); but additionally they would have (selectable) hero classes, be it Rogue, Berserker, Technician or Aristocrat (..), and these would have their own associated skills. Classes might also provide small bonuses or detriments to stat points. Initially each hero would be bound to their default class, rendering gameplay very similar to how it currently is, however after accumulating class-xp for clearing levels or the whole game (per hero, not per account), an additional 2-3 classes would become available. To clarify this point, class-xp would accumulate between games, and a hero would only have one class per game.



To give an example, perhaps we would look at the Ken design and say his crucial flavour is 'Maso', and his default class is a solo-oriented 'Brawler' (incidentally he would likely share this class with Mizi). Whichever game you played, Ken would retain his Maso flavour, but you might want to customise him towards greater mobility, or a more team-friendly role -- to pick an easy example, the archetypical Warrior, who has greater damage mitigation, reduced damage output, and draws enemy attention to himself. Some classes could be highly specialised to a certain role, while others could be more "all-round" type affairs; for instance you might have the class 'Mercenary' sitting somewhere between traditional Rogue and Warrior classes. Being further able to personalise your heroes would be a nice reward for loving them to death like cherished old teddy bears. PS: I'm sure my class names aren't at all lore-friendly, they are just examples.



Anyway, that's my idea

Sorry, it's a bit big I know

Your suggestion is not very rogue-like in design.



Consider a gradient of random. On one end of the spectrum is "random", on the other end is "player choice", and in the middle is the absence of the two: predetermined events that will surely occur, yet the player cannot control.



I'll show you a good example of this gradient in action: Let's say you find a character on floor 5, and you already have four characters. Do you buy that character? Your decision to buy that character is based in that spectrum.



The character comes with a lot of random... Who that character is, and whether or not that character is luckily favorable or unfavorable becomes a pivotal point of what makes this game enjoyable; because random elements force players to adapt. Other random factors to consider; will this character's strengths likely help you, despite you not knowing what the floors ahead contain?



Next is the middle, the things that are set in stone. Every character has an unchangeable skillset. We make most of our decisions based on this, because random is not really what we can account for.



Lastly, player choice. The player may be stuck with certain characters, but he can still level his characters up at his own pace, and he can equip any items he wants to these characters. Okay, not just ANY items, in fact, the items are at random, from a random merchant on a random floor, but we're know for sure to have SOME merchants at some point in the game, and from that point, the player can choose which items (of said random selection) to buy.



Now to your suggestion: If the player could choose his characters' classes, then he wouldn't have to worry about a random element in the game: which characters he will find later on. When you find a character, you're supposed to evaluate the decision of purchasing him. While from a newbie's standpoint, the heroes on later floors may seem to be there just in case your characters die (and that is partially the case), it's also the case that players base their decisions on which characters they find and which they expect to find but they have not yet found. (don't worry about reading that one over)



So by my logic, my suggestion to the developers is to add something like the merchant, who exhibits a good sense of "random, controlled, player choice". Let's look at what they recently unveiled: The dust monster. When you kill it, you get dust. The dust monster appears at random, in a random room. The players know that the monster exists, and if they also know that they don't have any dust, they'll make it their priority to kill that monster, which is that player's choice. So by my logic, they're already working on my suggestion. Thank you, Amplitude Studios.

I think perhaps we can both agree that DotE is already a mix of random and choice elements. Where exactly the right place on that gradient is -- is likely to be a matter of personal preference (remember that 'Rogue-like' is only one of several contrasting descriptors Amplitude uses for DotE). One thing I could make more clear from my suggestion though is that I wouldn't see classes as allowing you to cram any hero into any role, rather it would allow for a modest degree of specialisation around the current system; and that would be a privelege you would have to earn.



To add another example, Sara might only have two class options: Infiltrator (a very squishy running spec), and Mercenary, a spec that would give her slightly more combat utility at the cost of some of her speed, but would not overcome limitations imposed by her stats. Gameplay variety is nice?

Elise and Golgy are characters that allow for heavy player choice since they let you equip them with two devices. Golgy can change from operator, "infiltrator", and "mercenary" already, like your description. Stats wise, there's not much the developers can do to make these characters much different from each other, apart from abilities. If you want a character like Sara, but more like fightery and less fast, there's Ken. Asking for character classes is like asking for player choice, yet restricting player choice is important because restriction makes for good game design (it forces you to do things the hard way).



Gameplay variety is nice, but the devs have to be selective about what they want to work on.



So if you want Sara to become a mercenary, you can just switch to Ken. Correction, you might be able to switch to Ken, if you get him randomly.