Tycn said:
On the contrary, it is the existence of dedicated healers that allow teams to use dedicated whateverelses, as oppose to the homogenised jack of all tradeses that we will see in GW2.
You -can- have dedicated whateverelses without having healers - if everyone can heal themselves, you're effectively eliminating the need for someone who -only- heals. That doesn't mean that your self-healing builds won't have specialized roles within them, but that they can take other roles. Every profession has had alternative ways to aid the team: wards, wells, whatevers, so let's make more use of these in damage mitigation, instead of direct healing.
Rewarding specialisation means that disrupting and killing things has a much more profound impact on the game since they contribute to the team in unique ways. The importance of specialisation also makes the strategic element of build selection that much more interesting.
The benefit of such is arguable. Yes, killing a team's only Monk will likely have a profound, even devastating impact on their performance. Is that a good thing? Wouldn't skilled players benefit from having to fight a while, analyze the enemy's strategy before deciding the best approach?
I get your point, but I would argue (and hope) that every profession will keep the alternatives that made playing with builds great. Teams have never consisted -solely- of damage dealers. Even spike teams consisting of only one profession require everyone to play a secondary role: so enforcing such on both teams provides the possibility of complexity again.
And again: I -hope- it doesn't devolve into crap FFAs where everyone tries to do the most damage by themselves. This isn't yet WoW.
It would have been nice to have more viable options outside of gimmicky builds but I don't consider monks as "bringing very little in terms of contact". Sure their presence is obligatory, but the fairly unique skills required for playing them and the tactical depth that their presence brings makes them a useful component of the game.
I can see your point. Maybe I'm just butthurt that a Monk is such a pillar of just about every team in GW as opposed to, say, Mesmers - which I find much, much more interesting to play. It's this that leads me to hope that the game can be balanced around a different philosophy of play, different from the one that's been prevalent through MMO history. Let's try one where Heal, Heal+ and Heal Party aren't the focus of defensive / support teamplay.
Since monks operate in tandem with the off-monk defenses such as blinds, snares and interrupts rather than being the only line of defense, teams still have plenty of defensive flexibility. It still hinges on the not explicitly defensive characters to prevent the burden being placed on their dedicated healers from being too great, a burden fundamentally linked to the management of the energy system that quite possibly has been removed as well.
This ties in with what I've been aiming at. We can still have other means of defending our characters through means other than direct healing.
The "solution" of removing healers entirely seems to hail from the Bethesda school of game design.
Maybe. If it's a case of "it doesn't work the way we want it to so let's get rid of it" then it's certainly bad for the game. If it works by furthering creative design in the classes that do remain, then I find myself excited to think how it'll work.
