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Quote from Richy

How powerful do you think the Monks healing has the potential to be and do you think at some point every team will want one?

I'm guessing at some point some sort of Breath of Heaven Mantra of Retribution spec with some nice item bonuses will appear and dominate PvP. Until blizz nerfs it of course =P

What are you thoughts? Will a healer class dominate pvp?

I think its too early to tell. But I hope that there will be many ways to play PvP. I hope there will be some kind of glass-cannon strategy, where your team will have insane dmg output to take out enemy players very fast, if they concentrate their effort. Just imagine several barbarians leap attacking you with giant two- handed axes, thats something that would make me quite nervous

In my experience from playing almost every blizzard game since diablo 1 and warcraft 1 and played wow since day 1 with high end achievements such as high warlord I'd have to commend blizzard in their ability to balance the game. Wow was slightly harder to balance due to having 10 different classes, but they still managed to pull it off with great success. They adopted a philosophy (in my opinion) of making 1 or 2 classes overpowered at a time and rotating the current flavour of the month to different classes so no 1 class can be dominant at all times, or else there will be an overflow of that particular class. With diablo3 they chose to stick to only 5 classes and I am very excited about that because it is exponentially easier to balance each class against every other class, so i believe the pvp (and pve) aspect of diablo will be very very balanced and that no one class will have a large advantage over another class. After release, if there were any obvious advantages a class possess I would bet blizzard would fix it in the next patch as soon as possible.

So in answering your question, do I think healers will dominate pvp? I don't think so. I have so much faith in blizzard to balance the game, and that the best most skilled players can win with any class.

I agree with much of what I see in the replies on this post. Just because you see a couple healing abilities on a class doesn't mean to any extent that there will be a healing dominant class. Each class is given some sort of sustainability, Wizard's have their control spells, Barbarian's have life steal, Demon Hunter's have traps and escapes, Witch Doctors have pets and fear, and Monk's have their heals.

Delving too far into one specific aspect of a character would only weigh your mates down in that what you offer becomes limited due to the type of game Diablo is. It is a kill kill kill game, you only have a few abilities, mostly with cool-downs, if you are a Monk doing nothing but throwing out the occasional heal, and aside from that doing poop for damage, you are better off just lowering the difficulty of the monsters by not being in the game to start with.

Or in a PvP sense just you'd be just a quick easy target to eliminate, also therefor a waste of space.

The way I see it currently, Diablo 3 is going to required a steady balance of damage, and sustainability. Each player is going to have to do their part in both, otherwise you aren't pulling your own weight, no matter what it is you are doing.

If you have too much sustainability you are not doing damage, if you have too much damage, you are too much of an easy target to eliminate. That goes for both PvE, and PvP

They might lower the effectiveness of heals in PvP. Either that or they can muck everything up by adding Mortal Strike effects. :/

I for one am definitely going to try out the monk as mainly a healer in pvp. As long as you can keep a partner or 2 or 3 up I'm betting an arena group wouldnt want to go without one, especially if it turns the tide of battle in their favor. Don't forget they have shields with runes, auras and a myriad of other things that could mean a LOT of heals going out. Guess we will see.

I personally doubt it. Blizz try to keep everything fair when it comes to game like Diablo with limited multiplayer aspect. I mean besides farming with your friends, the only other multiplayer opportunity is the pvp n it is going to draw more attention to the former. Thus, I have a reason to believe that all classes will be equally balanced out in the pvp otherwise we'd just be seeing teams of Monks fighting with each other :/
On, similar bases, classes like barbarian have skills (Earthquake) to coz massive damage in a very short time, won't give you much time to heal if caught. And the Demon hunter's imaple with rune will keep you stunned for the entire pvp, when will you heal. So, the conclusion is, everything is going to be balanced out, don't worry.

I personally played the 4v4 arena at blizzcon, the monk was one of the harder classes to play well with what was provided (pre-set skills, a blue weapon and white armor). The monk does a lot of running to survive, but when your cooldowns are up, nothing can stop it. The healing they gave us was nice while dashing away, but nothing compared to what orbs did.

I was playing with the skill tool even though obsolete until its updated And concluded that a 3 tier barbarian can have just over 4000 armor and still dish out some damage and that a 1st tier barbarian can have well over 19,000 armor,combine that with the 5 seconds of 90% damage reduction,60% of which is reflected makes a barbarian dam-near invulnerable for that time,and after that having the 57,480 life being returned to me over 120 seconds makes for a fearsome warrior indeed and a mighty foe even the legions of inferno will have trouble dealing with:)

Healing is always a great help for PvP, but damage output will be so massive that if your tactic is based on healing you wont stand a chance imo. But we really need to see more of the game so that we can talk about stuff like this, since nothing really to base on how it's all working, seen too little of game so far to be able to really have good judgement about what is best.

Seeing as how Monk is the only class that could really be classified as a "Healing class" one would have to assume that Monks in pvp will almost feel obligated to using BoH as much as possible to keep their team alive. Plus with one of monks mantras being a passive aoe heal its also very likely we could see monks staying out of the fight, but close enough to their team for the mantra to tick on them.

Even with BoH runed with say Obsidian or Indigo and mantra of healing runed with really any of the runes seeing as they all give great defensive benefits the monk would still need to at some point return to the fight just because of going spirit starved. At that point they would easily get overwhelmed if they put too much emphasis on healing/defensive abilities and runes as opposed to utility/survivability, especially since BoH now has a cooldown. So no, I don't think healing monk would dominate pvp. Can their healing be useful to a pvp match? absolutely. But can their the healing be used for the entiretly of a match, thats very doubtful.

Quote from Richy

How powerful do you think the Monks healing has the potential to be and do you think at some point every team will want one?

I'm guessing at some point some sort of Breath of Heaven Mantra of Retribution spec with some nice item bonuses will appear and dominate PvP. Until blizz nerfs it of course =P

What are you thoughts? Will a healer class dominate pvp?

I see your point here Richy, but the thing is lifesteal will be a pretty big factor as well. it could be viable but its too early to see now, i sure want to try it. That or a dodge/armor tank monk

Hopefully they wont dominate pvp...BUT...hopefully they wont be useless ->WoW Cataclysm lol

I imagine they may have to implement some kind of debuff in PvP decreasing player heals or crowd control effects on players.

Jay said in a video interview he won't let the game be balanced around pvp at all. He said its a game centered around PVE and its balanced that way. He said he doesn't want to support Diablo 3 as an Esport and knows everyone will want to try and make it one, but they aren't going to let it effect PVE at all. So i doubt there will be much PVP balance from the way Jay said they have no plans to support pvp much. Only change he said they were thinking about adding to pvp is diminishing returns on stuns. But who knows... i for one would like to see Diablo 3's pvp be super balanced and competitive. Doubt they even have put time into balancing PVP... all their resources seem to be going into making systems more fun (rune change ect).

TLDR; Jay wilson in an interview said PVP will not be balanced because they have no plans to balance around pvp, but make classes as cool as they can and not sacrifice one bit to pvp balance, cept diminishing returns on stuns.

Quote from Penox

This same arguement has been brought up in every single game that has had healers and PvP...

Yes, healers will be slightly better in the beginning of the game since the skills are usually balanced best for high-end gear. It will balance out as the players adapt and learn how to counter ones healing... Of course this is just speculation, but the same thing has happened before..

The question is whether or not heals will skill with attack power. I hope so, or heals will end up at a point where they are entirely useless, due to increased health pools and increased damage output. Of course, I'm definitely interested in playing a support/tanking monk with healing skills included in PvE, but it would be nice to see that style of play be viable (and scalable) in PvP as well.

As it has been said before, if pvp is anywhere near D2, I don't think the healer class will do any difference. He'll be dead before there's anything that requires healing. But considering much of the balance knowledge will come from WoW, I think it'll be pretty much like WoW.

Well after the monk pops its cooldowns and the barb pops his, next thing I imagine happening when they run out is the barb permanently stunning his opponent into the ground.

As it is set up healings seems like a balanced utility. Because the monk is using a constant-limited resource (Spirit) to heal, he will have to constantly choose between Damage output and Healing. It seems to be better to continue attacking and debuffing the target for 25% of his damage output while making him go into defensive gameplay than trying to healbot; but a mantra of healing + direct heal combo may give you or your partner just enough strength to counter a burst. This gives it a better live action feeling and makes every battle more dynamic but not overpowering. The real question of balancing is how much will the average health pool be and will healing skills scale with gear (as do damage skills). If the healing is too strong, scales, and spirit generation is too high, then a problem shows up. But that's all just fine tuning. The current design is balanced towards having healing as utility.

I was considering Witch Doctors for a strong support. WD finally got fine tuned though and don't seem to be tanks anymore. The previous skill system granted them too much mitigation (20% mitigation + 40% damage transfer to dogs + 65% mitigation + some other thing I cant recall right now). WD will be the real forum buster for "balancing". Like warlocks in WoW, people have a hard time defining balance on a utility char due to the difficulty of play, damage output, and survivability.

A lot of people that will be playing D3 played WoW so sadly I think you'll see a lot of healer classes... D2 players will rage and say "remember D2 where people would get yelled at for healing in PvP"

I for one don't like the healing abilities because I hate WoW and I played D2 but I got over it and will accept that it is part of the game. Hopefully they add something in the game like if you heal you take dmg anti-healer class maybe? OH THAT WOULD BE FUN !!!!!