There appears to be some confusion about how the character slots will work, I'm not a dev but I will do my best to give clear information on how the character slots are used from my understanding of what the devs have said and other games like this in the market (i.e Planetside 2).

First off, your characters are NOT bound to specific classes. You will be able to change classes upon deployment, redeployment after death (re spawning), or at certain consoles/nodes inside bases that allow you to change class.

Your character will have a different 'loadout' for each class (possibly multiple loadouts for the same class). Selecting the class is similar to selecting a loadout in Battlefield. Each class will have access to different weapons (i.e Devastator marines with heavy bolters) but some weapons/equipment will be shared across multiple classes (i.e bolt pistol). It's possible that vehicles will have different configurations (i.e swapping out the main gun on a predator for a lascannon) which will function in a similar way to classes.

Your characters unlock equipment, elite/hero classes, vehicles(?) and accessories independently (with the exception of items you bought with real money, they will be available for every character provided the character is part of the faction that can use said item). From my understanding, there will be a tech tree (possibly one for each class) where you can unlock new equipment, weapons etc using a currency acquired by performing in game actions (i.e killing enemies, securing objectives, reviving downed friendly players). You will NOT level up each class independently, if you acquire X amount of points playing a devastator marine, you can use it to unlock items from the tactical marine tree. If an item you unlock can be used on more than one class, you only need to unlock it once. For example, unlocking an upgrade for the bolt pistol in the tactical marine tech tree will also unlock it for the other classes that use bolt pistols.

Your characters will be locked to the faction AND sub-faction you select. You can't make a *blood raven, then move him to the Ultramarines. Your characters appearance will also be permanent (by which I mean actual facial features, hair, eye colour etc. You can customize the appearance of armour and equipment with any cosmetics you've unlocked freely).

I can't find all the threads, posts and streams this came from, so I'm afraid I can't link sources. Hopefully this clears up a few questions I've seen floating around here. If any devs see this and find anything incorrect, please post the correct information below.

EDIT: *You can't make a Blood Raven at all. I was aiming for Blood Angel and missed. Fuck it, blame it on Magnus...

Hmm, so there will be facial costumization? Good to know.

I wouldn't expect anything super detailed, it's not a major feature for a game like this so expect limited customization for facial features (You'll have a helmet on most of the time anyway)

Great job, almost perfect

Motherfu....I'll edit that out xD

Do you have any information about a limit to loadouts? I guess many people made a character for each side (as I did) and would need more than that one eldar character to freely play all roles and/or loadouts...

You can unlock everything for your faction/subfaction on one character, I believe each class will have it's own loadout(s). It was mentioned on one of the more recent livestreams that each piece of equipment/weapon has a weight value, and you can only carry up to a certain weight. You only need one character to play all roles/loadouts for a faction/subfaction, but you may need to alter your loadout for each individual class between spawns if you want to change the equipment for your chosen class that you don't have in one of your pre-set loadouts.

Sweet! Thanks for that immediate reply and for clarifying that.

It sure would be nice having not only 3-4 available loadouts or else I would need to delete my characters from the other faction... Would this be a problem, cause i spent all my RTP on my first Eldar.
Do you happen to know if i would have access on my second Eldar to all equipment of my first?^^

Yes, this is one of the few things I can say with 100% confidence. If you buy something with RTP, it will be available on any character/class that can use it, so every Eldar character you make will be able to use the Eldar equipment (provided it's usable by your selected class).

Thats good to know. I guess I'll need more than a single Eldar then. Good bye SM and CSM then!