Here's my 10 cents on crossbowmen.. although we are diverting from the topic.
One of the reasons I prefer to play my crossbowmen over my archer is that I find it hard to aim when i'm firing at such a high rate and be accurate, I either misplace my shot, or entirely miss, rarely getting headshots, when I first got my archer, I barely missed and pretty much always got headshots, but now I'm just too shakey and not very coordinated for the high rate of fire.
My second reason is that some enemies you cant 1 hit kill like a crossbowmen.
My third reason is that if I want to kite I would rather use my Master Pealtast.
My Fourth reason is that crossbowmen are more sturdy than archers, they live longer, can shield if needed, and are somewhat decent in combat.
My fifth reason is that they have repeaters... So some people say that archers are "better" than crossbowmen because they shoot faster, well in some cases and different circumstances yes, but think of it this way, I would rather have 10 crossbowmen with 10 repeaters shooting from the side into the front of the shield wall than 10 snipers on hard/ragnarok mode.
Give a crossbow a repeater and it wrecks stuff open, oh, and you don't really have to aim, just pray 'n' spray
However some people are just naturally used to shooting at such a fast rate, *Cough* Brennanx *Cough*, always getting headshots, always shooting on target, even from a long distance, I don't know how he does it or how he copes with the high rate of fire, but me personally, I'm more of a slow and steady hit em hard, or spray and pray guy.
Back to the topic!
I believe that there are deffinantly too many
ARCHERS In NI, I don't mind when there are too many pikeman because they can slash and throw, but over 4 snipers.. especially when they can be T3 sometimes is just too much hurt for the team as many other classes could potentially be of much more use, i'd say if there were caps on servers, (which there will not) I would go with max 4 archers.