Dynamic Team Additions and Team Balance

I'm sure we've all had games where a person just doesn't come in at the start of the round, this can lead you at a 3/4, 5/6, or 7/8 disadvantage, in all cases it is rather bad, specifically the first two, especially with random teams, and even in the Tomb, you have to admit most of those teams are randomly chosen, but they get to choose the amount of healers at least.

Or, you've had people leave in the midst of the game cause they died. It really imbalances it, and I think it should take people who are waiting and throw them in there last minute, better to have a guy as you are 20 seconds into the game just running from spawn than no one...

As well, what is with the balance in how teams get monks, I've had zero monks in at a time on my ranger, and the opposing team had two primary and three secondary, that is an impossible fight unless none of the enemies heal...at all. Plus, on my monk after being tired of the imbalance there and not getting enough healers, I've been passed up for getting into the randomly determined groups, in every other MMO, healers are a commodity, people sit around forever waiting for another healer, guilds pick them up like they were rare boss loot, and while it is random, primary healers should get sort of first dibs on the spots, it will make battles actually last, and the amount of monk primary and secondary needs to be balanced, a primary counting for say 1.5, a secondary counting for 1 (two sources of energy and health will technically be greater than one's own). Sucks if they just chose monk for secondary but, it will be alot more likely that they get in.

Just thinking that there has to be some measures in to make sure both teams, especially randomly chosen, can have a fun battle, not pre-determined because one person lost connection and you have no healing to their team of monks. And before someone says, why don't I make a monk, as I said I did, and you can't expect everyone to, that would just make battles stupid.

PvP is very Monk-reliant, and even PvE emphasizes it noticeably. It'd be nice if there were better heal options (self and other) in the other professions.

I believe Healing Signet is available for all classes ?!

QFE

I am often the ONLY monk in my group even though that's just PVM. ... er PvE here isn't it (sorry, used to it being PvM from ultima online shard I play on) anyway being the only monk has it's advantages, such as everyone is nice to you, but it means that I have to worry to much about the others. No one heals me, I have to heal myself AND the others.

I have noticed skills that make it so that if others get hit, i get health etc, which is cool, but it would be nice for each class to have a small healing skill that directly heals any friendly char, but not make it as powerfull as the monks spells.

I'd personally like to see the monk healing get a slight nerf and/or have other classes gain some of the healing ability of the monk, as horogan suggests. I mean, right now there are 5 classes that deal damage and 1 class that removes it - so it seems the logic suggests that the one class has to be powerful enough to overcome the other 5 even if only for a short time.

Ideally you'd want every class to be useful, but not absolutely required - since absolute requirements lower the diversity of builds and make things a bit too formulaic over time. However, it seems monks are an absolute requirement for any team that wishes to survive let alone prosper. That sort of class requirement will ultimately make joining already started matches problematic since if a monk left and was replaced by something else, that team just took a massive hit in its effectiveness.

Laz