Why can't we have five classes?
I'm curious as to why we always seem to be stuck with only four classes in battlefield titles of late. From a balance perspective it comes across as an odd choice as there's always one hybrid class p...
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If you make medics weak, no-one uses them. This is what happened in Battlefield 2 because everyone who wanted a good gun had to use assault (or restrict themselves to very short ranged Anti-Tank weapons the DAO12 & P90, the medic SMGs were rubbish) until Medics got the G36E in the Special Forces expansion, at which point they became the by far most used class in the game because the G36E was better than the Assault Class guns.
Grenade launchers aren't useful enough to have people use them if they aren't the strongest gun.
BF3 and BF4 was a game of medic trains, because that class had enough of a good gun to make it worth using so the lemming sweat squads would be able to kill anyone they came across and revive.
99% of people only play Support because it gets self-healing and can use good guns still. If you took away self-healing and/or ability to use good guns, the class would evaporate. You'd be left with battledads who LMG bipod onto their deployable cover spamming "suppressive fire" from their 200 round mags and hitting nothing, and the few maniacs who run around with their paddles out and don't do any shooting.
Engineer & Anti-Tank was a pointless distinction. If you were in a vehicle or a rep guy you'd be taking an engineer and have no need for anti-tank. If you were on the ground as infantry, you didn't have a vehicle so you would take anti-tank to kill enemy vehicles. Merging them is fine.
Only BF2 had anything that needed a "Spec Ops" class, one that was intended to blow up backfield commander assets and hunt down the enemy commander. In modern games, you can make a recon a spec ops by taking C4 and a suppressed weapon.
By splitting the roles, players would have to choose between healing or ammo instead of having both.
No-one would ever play the ammo class. People who pick the healing class don't care about the minor benefit of supplying ammo. They would remain playing the healing class and then pickup kits from the ground or kill themselves to respawn with new ammo.
MackTKau I get what you're saying, and I agree that in older Battlefield titles like Battlefield 2, weapon balance had a huge impact on class pick rates.
But I think the situation is very different now.
With the current open weapon system, players are no longer locked into specific guns per class like they were in Battlefield 3 or Battlefield 4. That fundamentally changes player behavior. Today, a lot more players choose their class based on gadgets, utility, and role rather than just weapon strength.
For example, saying that no one would play an ammo-focused class doesn’t really hold up anymore. Even back in BF3 and BF4, Support couldn’t self-heal, yet it was still widely used. Not because of survivability, but because of its utility—ammo resupply, suppression, explosives, and area control.
Also, the idea that Support players just sit on a bipod and do nothing is a bit of a stereotype. It’s like saying all Recon players just camp. In reality, every class has multiple playstyles:
-aggressive
-defensive
-objective-focused
-team-support oriented
And each of those can be effective depending on the situation.
Splitting roles like healing and ammo wouldn’t necessarily “kill” one of them—it would create meaningful trade-offs. Right now, when one class can do too much, it reduces team dependency. Battlefield has always been at its best when squads rely on each other.
So I think the real question isn’t “will people play it?”, but rather “does it improve teamwork and class identity?” — and in my opinion, it does.
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