Vanguard - Brad posts about balancing the classes (HELLA LONG) - Page 5

Zehn - Vhex · 06-22-2005, 11:21 AM

You can't really balance DPS classes. What every encounter boils down to is trying to have the right combination of support classes that you could essentially last indefinately. Once you have the 12~20 people you need to last forever, you toss in DPS classes to seal the deal.

You can go the EQ2/WoW route and just cap the raids so that you only have enough room for 4~20 dps classes.

You can alternatively have encounters like the Rathe Council or Emp Ssra, but with how specific those encounters were, you ran into problems with not haveing enough of the right people.

Andric d'Regor · 06-22-2005, 11:22 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Zehn_Druidbane

Actually, I'd much rather they handle healing more like CoH, or fuck it, let's go back to DnD on this one. Clerics main role wasn't exactly to sit there and cast cure light wounds. FUck no. A cleric was a badass mothafuckah who tore shit up, and then after the fight rez'd people who had died, cast heal and moved on.

I'd rather see the bread and butter of the 'healer' classes be in -preventing- damage. I still don't see why I have to be a masochist everfytime I play a healer. It reminds me of the one VG cats comic where Link is getting humped to death and just before the sweet release of death, that fucking fairy raises him only to be humped to death again.

Why is there essentially no 'protection from evil' type spells? Let's take the AC buffs and make them more reactive rather then pro-active. Toss a fire ward on someone to absorb fire damage, prismatic shield to reflect the next magical attack, shield of shadows that increases dodge by 50% for a few seconds. PW:S shouldn't be the expection to the rule, it should -be- the motherfucking rule.

In my time playing a cleric and now priest, my favorite part of encounters has been the "FUCK IT, BURN, EVERYONE NUKE, CLERICS, NECRO'S, JUST FUCKING NUKE" phase when the mob is at 5% and all your MT's are dead.

But this could just be me. Maybe other priests enjoy hitting flash heal at 75% over and over and over again...

Really got to agree with this. Think the whole concept of main tank gets agro, healers heal and everyone else dps is a bullshit mechanic and the main thing wrong with near every raid in every MMORPG is that designers have designed raids around that mechanic. Whole class structures are balanced around it and it sucks.
Bit of luck if DDO implements D&D clerics properly and does well maybe some other games will look as to how the Clerical calsses could be used apart from just heal bots.

Malakie Torsade · 06-22-2005, 11:23 AM

Glad to see fanboism still running rampant 'round here.

Anyhow,

Quote:

Amen! If it ain't broke, don't fix it!

That's just the thing; I think most people playing MMO's today, newbies or veterans, are of the opinion that original EQ WAS broken. People who want Masochism Online(tm) are in a very small minority. You know what would happen if Vanguard was as "hardcore" as EQ at release? Those people who post here, saying they want the good old days of badassery? I'm willing to bet that at least half of them cancel their subscription in under 6 months and/or come to these forums to bitch about how much Vanguard sucks.

Why? Partially because people really don't know what they want a lot of the time. They want a certain change but don't think about other ramifications. Or they are blinded by nostalgia. Or they are selfish in their desires and demands. These boards are also a breeding ground for negativity, but that's beside the point.

I like the philosophy behind what he's saying, but if he really is aiming for the hardcore crowd, I don't think this is the game to do it with. Hardcore players are the first to whip out the parsers and point out that Wizards do 0.3% less DPS than a Rogue even though they are supposed to be equal. I'm of the opinion that such a design ideal would be better suited for a game targetted more toward casual players, a la WoW.

Dis · 06-22-2005, 11:46 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Zehn_Druidbane

Actually, I'd much rather they handle healing more like CoH, or fuck it, let's go back to DnD on this one. Clerics main role wasn't exactly to sit there and cast cure light wounds. FUck no. A cleric was a badass mothafuckah who tore shit up, and then after the fight rez'd people who had died, cast heal and moved on.

I'd rather see the bread and butter of the 'healer' classes be in -preventing- damage. I still don't see why I have to be a masochist everfytime I play a healer. It reminds me of the one VG cats comic where Link is getting humped to death and just before the sweet release of death, that fucking fairy raises him only to be humped to death again.

Why is there essentially no 'protection from evil' type spells? Let's take the AC buffs and make them more reactive rather then pro-active. Toss a fire ward on someone to absorb fire damage, prismatic shield to reflect the next magical attack, shield of shadows that increases dodge by 50% for a few seconds. PW:S shouldn't be the expection to the rule, it should -be- the motherfucking rule.

In my time playing a cleric and now priest, my favorite part of encounters has been the "FUCK IT, BURN, EVERYONE NUKE, CLERICS, NECRO'S, JUST FUCKING NUKE" phase when the mob is at 5% and all your MT's are dead.

But this could just be me. Maybe other priests enjoy hitting flash heal at 75% over and over and over again...

EQ2 does this - Inquistor and Templar class cast reactive heals as opposed to twitch heals (IE flash type heals). One of the things done right by this game, hopefully this concept sticks and evolves.

Dis

Mkopec1 · 06-22-2005, 12:06 PM

I really dont think the classes and their roles are the problem. If you go with a system like Zen pointed out, it just seems mundane, boring..... Everyone do the same DPS? Fuck that.

I think the key to all this shit is to somehow rethink the "end game". Do we really need to have raids of 40 morons going after 1 monster? Is this all these games are going to resort to from now on, 40, 50, 60 people together figting "UBER GOD_001"?

And even if we do have to have raids, ok. How bout rethinking those so you dont end up having 40 DPS classes and 10 support. What if these encounters are designed in a way to make tose efforts worthless, because they would get wiped every time.

How bout more AI and intuitive encounters which take all the combined classes at a raid and somehow scale the difficulty per that individual raid?

How bout scrapping the entire "hate list" BS and go with some other method of AI.

I dont know, having 20 classes in a game, where each can do the same shit is too watered down. I know thats not what you meant Zen, but you get my drift.

I want specialized individual classes, or skillsets that distinguishes me from all the other ones. I mean Why choose a Cleric over a Templar. or Bloodmage? If they are not truly unique from one another?

Maybe we need to do away with classes all together, and just go with some skill system, where each individual that ever makes a character is unique. Like SB or UO....

I know the shit is hard to balance, but if you can get a semblance of balance, then a skill based system is the way to go IMO.

Dis · 06-22-2005, 12:10 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Mkopec1

I really dont think the classes and their roles are the problem. If you go with a system like Zen pointed out, it just seems mundane, boring..... Everyone do the same DPS? Fuck that.

I think the key to all this shit is to somehow rethink the "end game". Do we really need to have raids of 40 morons going after 1 monster? Is this all these games are going to resort to from now on, 40, 50, 60 people together figting "UBER GOD_001"?

And even if we do have to have raids, ok. How bout rethinking those so you dont end up having 40 DPS classes and 10 support. What if these encounters are designed in a way to make tose efforts worthless, because they would get wiped every time.

How bout more AI and intuitive encounters which take all the combined classes at a raid and somehow scale the difficulty per that individual raid?

How bout scrapping the entire "hate list" BS and go with some other method of AI.

I dont know, having 20 classes in a game, where each can do the same shit is too watered down. I know thats not what you meant Zen, but you get my drift.

I want specialized individual classes, or skillsets that distinguishes me from all the other ones.

That is what I am screaming (on these forums) WHY DO WE HAVE TO DEBATE WHAT WE CURRENTLY HAVE!!!. Why cant it be something completely different. Totally agree.

BTW I think Zehn's ideas are a great start.

Dis

Suineg · 06-22-2005, 12:15 PM

If you have played Guild Wars you will understand what I am about to talk about. It brings more of a twitch concept to everything and avoids the MT concept as much as I have played. I haven't dealt much with the PvP aspect and could care less so don't bring it up it doesn't matter...

1.) Heals are all flash and group and aoe heals.
2.) Regen spells make a real difference but they take away from your Mana regen so you have to manage what buffs you will put on each person.
3.) Health is the key to everything.
4.) You cancel the buffs you cast on someone else with your UI or they can cancel it if they want.
5.) Debuffs that are feedback type damage. AKA If they cast something with that debuff on they take damage in their health or mana!! That's right I said mana not just the plain old health that every mmorpg does.

I love the concepts of all that. I can cast this buff on someone but my mana will regen slow hrmm I have to make a choice and might have to kill buffs in real time so that I can get my mana up to cast on someone else.

Zehn - Vhex · 06-22-2005, 12:28 PM

The only problem I had with the EQ2 templar was...that was pretty much all you did. But more importantly EQ2 uses 'power' which is basically mana, and the problem with healers and mana is, let's put it this way, if your heal revies 2000 health and lets your party live for another 3.5 seconds, all the damage done in that 3.5 seconds essentially belongs to you. So if you can outdamage your entire party, then your nukes will be mana efficient. However, you can't let your tank die and normally they're taking damage too fast for you to do anything but heal, so nuking is a waste of time.

You remove mana from the equation, then suddenly doing things other then healing become viable. It's not "Can I nuke?" it's "Do I have the time to toss one in? Will it overagro?" It also opens up the avenue of a good priest not being one with an 8k mana pool, but one who can toss in nukes, keep the group alive, toss around a few "Hold Person's" and effectively manage agro.

Creediki · 06-22-2005, 12:40 PM

Doc, yea.. your post was way out of line.

Ok.. we have had more specific discussion of what makes or breaks balancing in 3 pages of Bull than Brad has in his 2 attempts. Thinks that the other designers were "too" focused on balance that they killed their game... Ok, here's a bit of wisdom for you Brad. They probably thought what they were doing was fine, and good for the health of the game.... umm.. just like how you are going to go about making decisions.

Unless you have some sort of different methodology or process that you're going to go by to help you make better decisions.... I'm going to say you're tragically self-delusional.

Dis · 06-22-2005, 12:44 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Zehn_Druidbane

The only problem I had with the EQ2 templar was...that was pretty much all you did. But more importantly EQ2 uses 'power' which is basically mana, and the problem with healers and mana is, let's put it this way, if your heal revies 2000 health and lets your party live for another 3.5 seconds, all the damage done in that 3.5 seconds essentially belongs to you. So if you can outdamage your entire party, then your nukes will be mana efficient. However, you can't let your tank die and normally they're taking damage too fast for you to do anything but heal, so nuking is a waste of time.

You remove mana from the equation, then suddenly doing things other then healing become viable. It's not "Can I nuke?" it's "Do I have the time to toss one in? Will it overagro?" It also opens up the avenue of a good priest not being one with an 8k mana pool, but one who can toss in nukes, keep the group alive, toss around a few "Hold Person's" and effectively manage agro.

One thing I really liked about the templar class was the instant combat rez spell. The reason being is I discovered a very interesting scenerio. When you group with an evacer and say someone pulls a few too many mobs, or you get adds etc and the evac is called. Well by this time my "power" is low, and either the tank or some DPS class is getting his head bashed in, I had to make a choice as to who I thought would last longer until the evac was pulled off or I had to make sure the evacer stayed alive or otherwise suffer a long CR. Well the handy insta rez would save the day, because I would have to let a group member bite the dust, to save power for heals on the needed person, I would then time my spell based on the announcement of evac to cast rez a second before evac triggered. After "Accidently" doing this, I begin to start using this aquired knowledge when things got hairy, and at the same time get some nice compliants from my groupmates at the fact we dont have to do a shard recovery because of this. It is as close to the same feelings I had in EQ when I would pull off a sweet mez on a raid or in a group that would save the day etc (holding 4/5/6 or PoE Rathe event).

If there were more things like this in EQ2 I would continue to play it.

Dis

Thalndiz · 06-22-2005, 12:54 PM

I would hope that the developers of Vanguard take the time and effort to explore game mechanic/class balance possibilities in such the way Zehn described. Any new MMO would do well to take an entirely different approach to class roles in groups and raids. The old "put a tank on it and keep him healed while we fuck it up" mentality is played out and retarded. Getting a hard on for how much damage you output, how much you mitigate, or how much you heal is also fucking retarded. The best kind of class system will work to eliminate this dynamic.

Pilsbane · 06-22-2005, 01:30 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Andric d'Regor

Really got to agree with this. Think the whole concept of main tank gets agro, healers heal and everyone else dps is a bullshit mechanic and the main thing wrong with near every raid in every MMORPG is that designers have designed raids around that mechanic. Whole class structures are balanced around it and it sucks.
Bit of luck if DDO implements D&D clerics properly and does well maybe some other games will look as to how the Clerical calsses could be used apart from just heal bots.

Amen. It was ok in EQ because they didn't know better, but WoW did the exact same thing! Except instead of complete heal, this time its flash heal. I don't think I'll migrate to another game that does this. I might as well stay in WoW if I want to play a game with taunt-bots and heal-bots.

Havelock · 06-22-2005, 01:35 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Thalndiz

I would hope that the developers of Vanguard take the time and effort to explore game mechanic/class balance possibilities in such the way Zehn described. Any new MMO would do well to take an entirely different approach to class roles in groups and raids. The old "put a tank on it and keep him healed while we fuck it up" mentality is played out and retarded. Getting a hard on for how much damage you output, how much you mitigate, or how much you heal is also fucking retarded. The best kind of class system will work to eliminate this dynamic.

The defensive target and reactive tanking mechanics could make aggro management in Vanguard a lot different than in earlier games.

Taggle · 06-22-2005, 03:13 PM

The combat formula for every single MMOG out there, and all role playing games in general is:

(Player_mitigation > Mob_damage + Player_damage > Mob_regeneration ) / time = win

All of the "roles" you are talking about are the same.

The notion of proactive heals is nothing new. Slow, Mez, Runes are all types.

Balance is making sure that one class cant both mitigate and do damage more than other classes. That is all, there is nothing magical about roles or multi roles or anything. (Note you can "fix" this with non combat roles...which is how pen and paper games tend to do it - we need a door opener...but we are talking about combat roles).

Zhen's proposal sounds appealing until you break it down. Then all it does is take an already simple mechanic, and puts a constant to even simplify it further. No offense but the suggested idea shows a lack of understanding in how the nuts and the bolts work. It adds a new layer of flavor, but doesnt change the underlying problem in the least.

The whole notion that class balance around DPS is a problem is around because folks are being blinded by the shiney exterior. The genre is defined by this underlying mechanic...changing it, changes the genre.

You could make a fantasy game that doesnt have all of that, but it wouldnt be the same type of game. Let's make an end boss with a huge eye that archers have to use FPS skill to shoot, while jumping around dodging tenticles. It would work, but its not really what we think of as a RPG.

Dandain · 06-22-2005, 04:06 PM

I think Guildwars deserves a bit of a plug in this thread as a good example of what is possible in a smaller scale, but more specifically a system where you basically have the "2 specializations" aspect as posted above.

Collision detection can be a very sweet gameplay feature. In guildwars Collision detection is alive and well, there is no "Taunt" function precisely. A loose monster will often beeline for the healer, however your Warriors can block and wall off your soft bodies, this is an excellent mechanic for 8 person groups where you can afford to have 2 or more shield type people, and since there isn't exactly a taunt the objective becomes one of desiring that the monsters hit only the tanks which makes healing an very active role where you use at least half your skills constantly and the remaining when they are most situationally effective. The AI seems to attempt to path to healers and once you step in its path the AI does a check, and then begins to attack the obstruction, if the obstruction moves it will often head out for a more lucrative target.

Speaking strictly from the perspective of a monk, there are a lot of sweet things here. As a monk you can be a healer spec, you have a good regen, you have many strong direct heals, group version, versions that do more hitpoints based on how many debuffs buffs on your target, and one of the sweetest spells called healing seed. This spell lasts for 20 seconds and has a 25 second recycle, this causes for strategic use. This spell functions as a both a reverse damage shield and radiates heals to all adjacent friendly players when they recieve any form of damage. Some spells are limited to touch range only, some can only target others and not yourself.

You can also spec in protection prayers. This lets you do things like buff your entire group for 12seconds at a time for 50% melee blocking. Reversal of fortune, it flips the next damage recieved into positive hitpoints up to a set amount (great for super hard hitting single targets or giant spells). You can cap the max amount of hitpoint lost to a single attack for short periods.

There is also a more offensive smite spec, however being that GW also suffers a shortage of healers, this is not a spec to get you quick invites but it can be very effective, especially against undead.

You can also have different second classes to bring different utility, you can be a Mezmer subjob for the skill Mimicry to copy an ally's spell temporarily. You can be an elementalist to have melee and magic wards to place. You can be a warrior to have some defensive self mitigation abilities. However all this comes at a cost. 8 spell slots, and elite spells which are very powerful, span all the specializations in various forms but you can only bring 1 elite.

I think this is the kind of tactical situation that is most desired. While everything in GW may not be balanced exactly for PvE, it has a great amount of individuality on what you can bring to a group, more ideally however is how you can compliment the composition of your group by bringing certain abilities but still serving the same overall function (damage mitigation preemptively, or reactively). The attribute point system allows you to spec deeply in 2 things, or close to completely in 3. Having access to around 150 skills, of which you can only chose 7 and 1 elite allows a tailoring of what you want to be, and the game does not penalize not chosing one way or another.

06-22-2005, 12:06 PM	#65 (permalink)
Mkopec1 Registered User Join Date: Jul 2002 Location: Detroit Posts: 5,221	I really dont think the classes and their roles are the problem. If you go with a system like Zen pointed out, it just seems mundane, boring..... Everyone do the same DPS? Fuck that. I think the key to all this shit is to somehow rethink the "end game". Do we really need to have raids of 40 morons going after 1 monster? Is this all these games are going to resort to from now on, 40, 50, 60 people together figting "UBER GOD_001"? And even if we do have to have raids, ok. How bout rethinking those so you dont end up having 40 DPS classes and 10 support. What if these encounters are designed in a way to make tose efforts worthless, because they would get wiped every time. How bout more AI and intuitive encounters which take all the combined classes at a raid and somehow scale the difficulty per that individual raid? How bout scrapping the entire "hate list" BS and go with some other method of AI. I dont know, having 20 classes in a game, where each can do the same shit is too watered down. I know thats not what you meant Zen, but you get my drift. I want specialized individual classes, or skillsets that distinguishes me from all the other ones. I mean Why choose a Cleric over a Templar. or Bloodmage? If they are not truly unique from one another? Maybe we need to do away with classes all together, and just go with some skill system, where each individual that ever makes a character is unique. Like SB or UO.... I know the shit is hard to balance, but if you can get a semblance of balance, then a skill based system is the way to go IMO. __________________ When I am working on a problem I never think about beauty. I only think about how to solve the problem. But when I have finished, if the solution is not beautiful, I know it is wrong. Last edited by Mkopec1; 06-22-2005 at 12:10 PM..

06-22-2005, 12:15 PM	#67 (permalink)
Suineg Registered User Join Date: Sep 2002 Location: San Diego, CA Posts: 2,646 -98 Internets	If you have played Guild Wars you will understand what I am about to talk about. It brings more of a twitch concept to everything and avoids the MT concept as much as I have played. I haven't dealt much with the PvP aspect and could care less so don't bring it up it doesn't matter... 1.) Heals are all flash and group and aoe heals. 2.) Regen spells make a real difference but they take away from your Mana regen so you have to manage what buffs you will put on each person. 3.) Health is the key to everything. 4.) You cancel the buffs you cast on someone else with your UI or they can cancel it if they want. 5.) Debuffs that are feedback type damage. AKA If they cast something with that debuff on they take damage in their health or mana!! That's right I said mana not just the plain old health that every mmorpg does. I love the concepts of all that. I can cast this buff on someone but my mana will regen slow hrmm I have to make a choice and might have to kill buffs in real time so that I can get my mana up to cast on someone else. __________________

06-22-2005, 12:40 PM	#69 (permalink)
Creediki Fires of Heaven WoW Member Join Date: Feb 2002 Posts: 439 +9 Internets	Doc, yea.. your post was way out of line. Ok.. we have had more specific discussion of what makes or breaks balancing in 3 pages of Bull than Brad has in his 2 attempts. Thinks that the other designers were "too" focused on balance that they killed their game... Ok, here's a bit of wisdom for you Brad. They probably thought what they were doing was fine, and good for the health of the game.... umm.. just like how you are going to go about making decisions. Unless you have some sort of different methodology or process that you're going to go by to help you make better decisions.... I'm going to say you're tragically self-delusional. __________________ Fires of Heaven ****************** Who Dares Wins

06-22-2005, 03:13 PM	#74 (permalink)
Taggle Registered User Join Date: Oct 2003 Posts: 224 +0 Internets	The combat formula for every single MMOG out there, and all role playing games in general is: (Player_mitigation > Mob_damage + Player_damage > Mob_regeneration ) / time = win All of the "roles" you are talking about are the same. The notion of proactive heals is nothing new. Slow, Mez, Runes are all types. Balance is making sure that one class cant both mitigate and do damage more than other classes. That is all, there is nothing magical about roles or multi roles or anything. (Note you can "fix" this with non combat roles...which is how pen and paper games tend to do it - we need a door opener...but we are talking about combat roles). Zhen's proposal sounds appealing until you break it down. Then all it does is take an already simple mechanic, and puts a constant to even simplify it further. No offense but the suggested idea shows a lack of understanding in how the nuts and the bolts work. It adds a new layer of flavor, but doesnt change the underlying problem in the least. The whole notion that class balance around DPS is a problem is around because folks are being blinded by the shiney exterior. The genre is defined by this underlying mechanic...changing it, changes the genre. You could make a fantasy game that doesnt have all of that, but it wouldnt be the same type of game. Let's make an end boss with a huge eye that archers have to use FPS skill to shoot, while jumping around dodging tenticles. It would work, but its not really what we think of as a RPG. Last edited by Taggle; 06-22-2005 at 03:16 PM..

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06-22-2005, 11:21 AM	#61 (permalink)
Zehn - Vhex Lord of the Dance Join Date: Apr 2002 Posts: 8,796 +166 Internets	You can't really balance DPS classes. What every encounter boils down to is trying to have the right combination of support classes that you could essentially last indefinately. Once you have the 12~20 people you need to last forever, you toss in DPS classes to seal the deal. You can go the EQ2/WoW route and just cap the raids so that you only have enough room for 4~20 dps classes. You can alternatively have encounters like the Rathe Council or Emp Ssra, but with how specific those encounters were, you ran into problems with not haveing enough of the right people.

06-22-2005, 12:28 PM	#68 (permalink)
Zehn - Vhex Lord of the Dance Join Date: Apr 2002 Posts: 8,796 +166 Internets	The only problem I had with the EQ2 templar was...that was pretty much all you did. But more importantly EQ2 uses 'power' which is basically mana, and the problem with healers and mana is, let's put it this way, if your heal revies 2000 health and lets your party live for another 3.5 seconds, all the damage done in that 3.5 seconds essentially belongs to you. So if you can outdamage your entire party, then your nukes will be mana efficient. However, you can't let your tank die and normally they're taking damage too fast for you to do anything but heal, so nuking is a waste of time. You remove mana from the equation, then suddenly doing things other then healing become viable. It's not "Can I nuke?" it's "Do I have the time to toss one in? Will it overagro?" It also opens up the avenue of a good priest not being one with an 8k mana pool, but one who can toss in nukes, keep the group alive, toss around a few "Hold Person's" and effectively manage agro.

06-22-2005, 12:54 PM	#71 (permalink)
Thalndiz Registered User Join Date: Mar 2005 Posts: 7 +0 Internets	I would hope that the developers of Vanguard take the time and effort to explore game mechanic/class balance possibilities in such the way Zehn described. Any new MMO would do well to take an entirely different approach to class roles in groups and raids. The old "put a tank on it and keep him healed while we fuck it up" mentality is played out and retarded. Getting a hard on for how much damage you output, how much you mitigate, or how much you heal is also fucking retarded. The best kind of class system will work to eliminate this dynamic.

06-22-2005, 04:06 PM	#75 (permalink)
Dandain Registered User Join Date: Nov 2004 Posts: 337 -3 Internets	I think Guildwars deserves a bit of a plug in this thread as a good example of what is possible in a smaller scale, but more specifically a system where you basically have the "2 specializations" aspect as posted above. Collision detection can be a very sweet gameplay feature. In guildwars Collision detection is alive and well, there is no "Taunt" function precisely. A loose monster will often beeline for the healer, however your Warriors can block and wall off your soft bodies, this is an excellent mechanic for 8 person groups where you can afford to have 2 or more shield type people, and since there isn't exactly a taunt the objective becomes one of desiring that the monsters hit only the tanks which makes healing an very active role where you use at least half your skills constantly and the remaining when they are most situationally effective. The AI seems to attempt to path to healers and once you step in its path the AI does a check, and then begins to attack the obstruction, if the obstruction moves it will often head out for a more lucrative target. Speaking strictly from the perspective of a monk, there are a lot of sweet things here. As a monk you can be a healer spec, you have a good regen, you have many strong direct heals, group version, versions that do more hitpoints based on how many debuffs buffs on your target, and one of the sweetest spells called healing seed. This spell lasts for 20 seconds and has a 25 second recycle, this causes for strategic use. This spell functions as a both a reverse damage shield and radiates heals to all adjacent friendly players when they recieve any form of damage. Some spells are limited to touch range only, some can only target others and not yourself. You can also spec in protection prayers. This lets you do things like buff your entire group for 12seconds at a time for 50% melee blocking. Reversal of fortune, it flips the next damage recieved into positive hitpoints up to a set amount (great for super hard hitting single targets or giant spells). You can cap the max amount of hitpoint lost to a single attack for short periods. There is also a more offensive smite spec, however being that GW also suffers a shortage of healers, this is not a spec to get you quick invites but it can be very effective, especially against undead. You can also have different second classes to bring different utility, you can be a Mezmer subjob for the skill Mimicry to copy an ally's spell temporarily. You can be an elementalist to have melee and magic wards to place. You can be a warrior to have some defensive self mitigation abilities. However all this comes at a cost. 8 spell slots, and elite spells which are very powerful, span all the specializations in various forms but you can only bring 1 elite. I think this is the kind of tactical situation that is most desired. While everything in GW may not be balanced exactly for PvE, it has a great amount of individuality on what you can bring to a group, more ideally however is how you can compliment the composition of your group by bringing certain abilities but still serving the same overall function (damage mitigation preemptively, or reactively). The attribute point system allows you to spec deeply in 2 things, or close to completely in 3. Having access to around 150 skills, of which you can only chose 7 and 1 elite allows a tailoring of what you want to be, and the game does not penalize not chosing one way or another.