6v6 HA is bad for several reasons.
1. game balance
This is most important IMO. I feel skills in GW are balanced for 8v8 play (damage wise and heal-wise etc). Making in 6v6 will make HA unbalanced cookie-cutter build arena.
Also imporatnt parts of metagame will be dropped out. Just to name few:
- spike (it is still possible to do spike in 6 players, but you will completely lose backline).
- balanced (anyone speaking about creativity ? balanced temas of many sorts are where creativity comes into play most I think, but they will become less viable now, because the main advantage of balanced - reduced effectivity at the cost of ability to face any situation, will be greatly reduced. There will be not enough place to take counters too all kind of situations in sufficient number)
Gimmick builds will become much more powerful because of inability to pack anough versatility into balanced teams, who if played well, can usually face most if not all cookie-cutter builds out there right now.
2. griefing possible and longer matches
Yes. You see right. All you people who believe it will bring faster matches are probably wrong (except for timed maps where it depends on timer). Reason is offense will be reduced. And I can still take 3 monk backline, now I want to see you fight against it with your reduced offense, when it is good for keeping 8-man team alive for a good amout time. The match will take forever if both teams are skilled.
And it will be possible to make griefing builds now. Right now it does not matter if you take some 8 monks or something designed to somehow get through Zaishen and then just our-bore opponent. Will not work because 8-man team has enough offense to crack weak point and land some minispike or soemthing, also spikes would make short work of such team in 8v8, in 6v6 they will lack power for it (unless they run without backline at all making them complete gimmick as well).
3. lack of high level PvP arenas
There are only 2 high level PvP arenas atm. GvG and HA. For more casual players, there are lot of more possibilities: RA, TA, Alliance battles, those PvP arenas in Cantha (not sure how they are called, Jade Quary, Fort Aspenwood or something?). 6v6 HA will stop this arena from being good for high-level competetive players for reasons described earlier. That will leave us with only 1 really competetive PvP and that is GvG. Which is hard to organise without guild or when not enough guildies are online. For these times (being without guild or when not many people in guild are online) the HA was perfect opportunity to do with friends and even taking 1-2 players from PuG (this will prob. no longer happen, since I have no prob. at all to make 6-friends team, that is if I bother to play that kind of HA anymore).
IMO, if they wanted some mid-step 6v6 arena, they should have made TA as 6v6. We would have then more diverse options:
4v4 random - RA
4 player team - AB (even though there is 3v3 such teams)
6 player team - TA
8 player team - HA
8 player guild team - GvG
That would be much better I think than 6v6 HA. Still I dont think it is good to change TA into 6v6, I only say it would be lesser evil than change HA to 6v6 if they can't make new 6v6 arena but have to change old one.
4. Fame and Ranks
Yes old debate. I know how alomost everyone deems them worthless. For myself it does not mean that much either (mind you I am not unranked). Though very high ranks (R11+ maybe ?) still mean something and the lower ranks at least mean you have been there and won some.
But with changing HA to 6v6 the whole concepts changes drasticaly, Fame would no longer represent experience from winning this type of matches (though can still mean to some degree you know maps).
If HA is changing to 6v6, either Fame should be reset to 0, or locked where it is and new ranking system being put into place.
So that is what I think.
For myself, I planned to buy Nightfal right from the start just for the new PvP skills (did not even finish Cantha yet, that PvE is simply to boring for me, I have it for PvP skills alone as well), and I was already preparing 8v8 builds based on Nightfall skills to try out in HA (and already did some during preview). Now I will prob. wait to see if they make HA really 6v6. If they do I don't know, either I find some good GvG guild (the one I am in atm we are just getting used together but they are HA-ers mostly, I did some GvG in previous guilds but they were disbanded for different reasons). Or if I find none, I will prob. let GW go. It was great game, but PvP is only thing I am really interested in GW now and from only 2 real PvP arenas they would destroy 1 of them, the easier accesible one to say.
Mc
PS: Hey, why not making weekend 6v6 GvG event, with double champ points rewarded and for 1100+ rating matches. Now seeing big success of such event (which I have no doubt would happen), make 6v6 GvG permanent thing and we are all happy...