I played Baldur’s Gate 2 a few months ago while having a break from Guild Wars… I managed to rip through a bunch of PvE encoutners with a really underpowered team by kiting all over the place, where in my infinite PvE nubness before Guild Wars I would have sat there ‘tanking’ them and got my butt handed to me ;)

I don’t think getting rid of Monks is the answer. Monks are one of the best things Guild Wars has brought to the MMO genre, where finally we see a healer whose focus is to stop damage from occurring in the first place (as opposed to just making red bars go up, i.e. a healbot).

In PvE not having a monk to play with isn’t that bad, since you can bring a hero along.

In PvP in the “pick your own team” games it’s a non-issue, since it’s so easy to roll up a max level character of any class.

In the random pairing games though, no such luck. I think Crimson’s suggestion of a better pairing algorithm would work wonders. The other idea I think would be good in future MMO’s is to give every class 2 distinct roles they have to choose from before the battle starts. This would dramatically increase the number of Monk-style characters a random team could pull together if they had to.

The whole issue with needing a Monk in your team to be successful in GW PvP Arena is definitely one I hope they fix in GW2. I must admit, it does make the skill requirement to play a successful Monk very high, which has always been my attraction to the class. It just sux when you don’t get one on your team when you load into RA. I wonder if a better team pairing algorithm would have solved the problem?