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General: Messing with the Holy Trinity
SBFord
Former Associate EditorMember LegendaryPosts: 33,129
The Holy Trinity is that curious mix of tank, healer and DPS specialist that exists in most MMOs today. In her latest Player Perspectives column, Isabelle Parsley takes a look at the Holy Trinity and opines that the concept itself may soon be on the way out. Check out Player Perspectives and then add your thoughts to the mix.
It’s a concept as old as pen’n’paper games themselves and there’s a sound basis for it. For one thing, it gives players a chance to play different roles and it gives people different things to do in encounters; if everyone around the table (or at the keyboard) could do exactly the same thing as everyone else, we’d all get bored pretty quickly. More to the point, game balance requires that if you can do A really well, you’re usually not all that good at B and you might be utterly crap at C – because if any single class could do everything, then everyone would end up playing it and, again, everyone would get bored.
Read more of Isabelle Parsley's Player Perspectives: Messing with the Holy Trinity.
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Comments
You said it all. The only reason we have the trinity is because PVE is stupidly unoriginal. NPCs do not attack players like players attack players. Healers get killed first in PVP, tanks get killed last. Thus most people play DPS or hybrid. In PVE people play the trinity because it can used to make the mobs react exactly how you want.
You touched on a point that I think should be the next step for MMO's, enemy AI. In mmo's all enemies usually react the same way, they don't really care for their lifes. There is no concept of enemies fleeing or attacking more intelligently, they focus on some imaginary thing we call aggro and fight till death. I believe this will come sooner or later but probably later since new mmos are experimenting with other aspects of gameplay right now.
Not to be a farce-herder here. However, the "Holy Trinity" is a World of Warcraft term for Tank/Healer/Dps. This term was never used, and is not genuinly followed, in any other game except WoW or Eq/EQII.
The "Holy Trinity" as it were, is not as popular, and generally you get grouped in other well known MMO's that are a mishmash for purposes of playing with anyone for social or XP reasons.
Quite frankly, the Trinity doesn't exist outside the three games I mentioned. Heck, last night I was in a Dark Age of Camelot group that only had 2 healers, and the rest were mages or pet users. No tanks, and we did more than a "Holy Trinity" group is possible of doing with fewer deaths...if any.
The Theory of Conservative Conservation of Ignorant Stupidity:
Having a different opinion must mean you're a troll.
You are wrong.
The Trinity is present in so many games that building an endless list would be really easy.
Anyway, I ll just give you a few quick and known examples:
-Lotro
-Allods
-Vanguard
I just won't go on but trust me I could go for a really long list. Heh, even in games where you can build your toon however you want, like CO, people go for tanking builds and healing builds, just becouse the trinity it's the most effective way to tackle the hardest content.
I also think, like some others have posted here, that the best way to get rid of the trinity is working on the mobs AI and getting rid of the old agro/threat mechanisms.
Still, you have to keep in mind that some players, like myself, actually have more fun tanking and healing than doing crowd control or dps or any other role.
I disagree 100%. While the term might not have been made popular until recently even the most open-ended games end up being boiled down to healer/tank/dps. The article mentioned EVE which I had not really thought about, but it is very true. Sure to solo you need to tank and dps in EVE, but if you've ever done L4s or L5s with a corp then you would know having a dedicated tank, dedicated energy/shield/armor repairers and dedicated DPS is necessary. UO had some of this too when you went to take down big dragons you wanted mages/archers for dps, bandage healers keeping a GM parryer (tank) alive.
DnD was a bit different, while there were those classes that were better at taking damage than others, "AI" was typically determined by where players were positioned. The tanks were up front not just because they were melee, but because it gave the mob "AI" an "easy" target. Less intelligent creatures might just attack what is near them rather than run all the way to the back to assault the fragile evoker/ranger who is picking them apart.
EQ is an interesting example and while the trinity was the core of the group, CC and puller were also very distinct roles that I think most have forgotten about. WoW essentially combined the CC, puller and DPS roles to make everyone able to deal dmg and make things "more interesting" for people who played those classes.
"They essentially want to say 'Correlation proves Causation' when it's just not true." - Sovrath
well game marked as "martial arts MMO" normally don't use the trinity everyone is a dps, both usign the trinity or not was made, only diference is the trinity make people form groups to take some parts of the game, if not everyone would be working alone.
@fadedbomb>; I could agree the term holy trinity came from "wow" or about that time, but the tank healer dps is used for a long time ever since P&P game came around, you always need someone to take the hit or "block" the way to your less armed and/or light armored friends
You clearly don't have much MMO experience if those are the only three you can think of.
WoW did not coin the term "holy trinity." The tearm has been made popular as of late, largely due to WoW.
FFXI
Lotro
Vanguard
RIFT
EVE (evolved into these roles the further in you got)
UO (not always but definitely present for larger fights)
FFXIV
AoC
There are many, many, MANY more. From F2P titles to sub. In fact, there are so many I'm convinced that you are just trolling.
Is it so strange that an enemy would not understand game mechanics as clearly as players who are not inside of the game? In real life, if you were faced with a big, armored knight and a skinny guy in a robe... which one are you going to be more wary of? Now, this might change if the robed guy throws fireballs at you, but you're still dealing with someone swinging an axe at your face. Those low damage, high threat moves... they're meant to frighten the monster, to keep it afraid of that axe shot to the face. The warrior feints, and keeps the monster focused on the axe. Threat is actually very realistic.
If the monster turns from the guy with the big axe, that big axe will find itself implanted in the monster's spine. Aggro in this case is the very sensible notion that not attempting to stave off Mr. Axe is a terrible idea. When fighting a group of enemies, like a raid, the monster must go on the defensive. Onyxia was defending her eggs, remember?
HP, mana, threat... all of these exist to attempt to represent a realistic scenario. The dragon wants to keep its eyes free of that shiny purple sword, and so attempts to knock down or incapacitate the person swinging at it. Yeah, those fireballs hurt, too, but the dragon will tunnel vision on the most obvious threat. She probably won't even see the couple guys in the back wiggling their fingers. Remember, there's probably no visual cue to link a healing spell to its source. Realistically, the monster must deal with the problem in front of it before moving on to the next one. And this realism is actually what a threat system is trying to reproduce.
Important facts:
1. Free to Play games are poorly made.
2. Casuals are not all idiots, but idiots call themselves casuals.
3. Great solo and group content are not mutually exclusive, but they suffer when one is shoved into the mold of the other. The same is true of PvP and PvE.
4. Community is more important than you think.
The trinity is as nessecary for an mmo as veiled grinding. It won't go away ... it will only be further hidden or expanded upon. There is nothing the matter with the current setup .. other than it really needs to be adjusted in the titles that want to venture away from the set : Tank > Healer > Dps. There are plenty of ways to expand the trinity into essentials and its been done in many games, with success.
Bottom line is .. you will always need someone to soak up damage, someone to heal that damage, and someone to kill the mob.
There is no escaping it , I'm not even sure why everyone wants to try ... there are plenty of other avenues of inventiveness the genre needs to explore instead.
Im curious how the writer mentioned Rift and TSW as games going for a different direction, but fail to mention the behemoth of a mmo on the horizon, GW2. Do a quick google for "gw2" and "holy trinity".....
The Holy Trinity is maybe the biggest reason I've not played a mmorpg for a while. Limiting if you can use a ranged attack, limiting which enemies you can defeat and how groups should be organized and so many other contexts (especially when this PvE set-up also spills into PvP), it leads to limiting combat in an already limited interaction limited to combat!
However I think in a mobile mmo such as Pocket Legends where things are already so limited (eg UI, dungeon-runs, trash mobs etc) then using a HT combination to produce team work adds depth to the available spamming touch skills in combinations that are all that is available for each class in this "Gauntlet multiplayer redux"; adding team rote routine roles and some limited tanking CC and kiting and support (heals, shields, buffs, debuffs) and timing all this and communicating as well and seeing as it's only between 5-10mins it's engaging fun within the limitations already in place.
To have to suffer this set-up on a PC MMO for more than an hour on a sub mmo, I'll pass until combat is massively improved.
http://www.gdcvault.com/play/1014633/Classic-Game-Postmortem
Enemy AI needs to advance. or studios could use some of what is already available. I remember playing elder scrolls and getting jumped. I was sword and board at the time and got a lucky shot that diarmed the mob. They took off. I persued. We ran to a structure in the distance, I lost sight of him inside. I scouted the area and found some stairs. I started up and met him on his way back down. he was rearmed and now had a shield as well. I finally killed the mob and continued up stairs and found an open and empty chest.
I rembered reading how the new mob AI was based on a list of "needs" at the time that mobs AI "needed" a weapon. So it ran and got one.
Compared to other games, Bethesda's Elder Scrolls series is hidously ugly graphicwise. But the AI...
Very Sexy.
More of that kind of thinking from mobs (Trash or otherwise) woven into the graphics that are out, and are for lack of a better term; standard. That is a game I would buy a lifetime sub to.
This concept is not exclusive to MMO games. Instances and raid bosses are computer generated "battles". In every battle (real-life or in-game) certain roles need to be filled. The lines may be blurred and terminology changed, but at the end of the day, these roles are essential to this type of game and I really don't understand why there is such an urge to change this.
I think we could do with seeing how some of the big incoming non-trinity games like GW2 and TSW do before making all kinds of judgement calls on the trinity.
A lot of problems are being hoarded onto the trinity even though we've got absolutely no idea what will happen if they're removed in modern MMOs.
There's just a lot of assumptions going around how removing the trinity will fix everything. And we all know whose mother assumption is......
We are the bunny.
Resistance is futile.
''/\/\'''''/\/\''''''/\/\
( o.o) ( o.o) ( o.o)
(")("),,(")("),(")(")
A more solid example would be facing entrenched infantry while their artillery is pounding the snot out of you. Do you slog your way through their lines because they're right there in front of you, firing at you from their trenchlines, or do you attempt to bypass them, take out their artillery support, then encircle and annihilate them.
It's stupid to try and hammer your way through a defended position, especially while they're well-supported. But if you can knock out that support before engaging them, you save yourself a world of hurt. And remember that once you reach them, artillery is helpless and overrunning them is a joke. For very little expenditure, you can immediately swing the odds in your favor.
Besides, why worry at all about the size of the axe if it's not hurting you in the first place? I'll brave the the little knicks and scratches from tank's blade in order to beeline for the little SOB behind him, busily lining me up for a li'l nukular lovin'..
There's more to threat than what's immediately in your face. Human players realize it. When AIs do the same, kiss the trinity goodbye.
The trinity exists to support grouping. By creating specific group roles, it increases complexity of encounters to be more interesting.
When you remove the need for roles, by removing the need to have a tank and/or a healer, you're essentially dumbing down grouping. This can be both a good and a bad thing, depending on how complex of a game you want to play. Personally I see it as a bad thing, but I like my games to be more than zerging and button mashing.
It doesn't have to be tank, DPS, healer. It can be different combinations of roles. It could be two roles, to a dozen or more roles. The point is that having needed roles is what makes the grouping dynamic more interesting.
No game will ever kill the trinity, even Gw2 and TSW which claim to not "have" the trinity... will have it.
Its pretty simple really ... Someone will always be taking damage, something will always be healing that damage, and someone will always be dealing damage.
You can't get away from it ... you can only disguise it, hence the reason that this new emphasis on getting away from "The Holy Trinity" is a complete waste of developers time.
after reading some of the posts above ive come to realise hardly any of you really know eve at all. its kinda stupid really that you would all say that eve does use this whole holy trinity thing..
well i can tell you it does not. eve is a hybrid system. there are no classes in eve just setups. in eve you can be what ever you want you can even design and create your own class based specifically off the skills you learn and train. any long term eve player knows this.
you are not locked into the 3 primary classification that has been made so pungent by wow. dont say its not wow because it is wow.. not all games used to focus on classes so much and not all games woudl empower combat and casting classes. in early mmo's their where classifications for many types fo play styles that dont even exist in modern mmo's today and its all down to the wow trend all the copies and clones of wow such as the many lists above, yes thats right they are all clones and copies of wow.. its silly to deny it you can see and feel it when you log into these games, the exact style is identical in almost every way.. you dont have control over the progression or development of your charecter because you can have everything your class offers.. their is no choice or selection.
in eve every one can be everything, but it takes alot of time to have everything so instead the players uniquely specialise in areas that dont even exist in other modern mmo's
you guys really should spend more time in eve before compairing to other games. you need to clear your heads and go learn more about other games outside the horrid system wow is. wow and its clones have ruined online gameing on a whole and people are finally starting to see it. hence why their are now topics on how or if wow is dieing. so if topics like that are coming out then surely it must be true.. wow is indeed dieing its seen its day and it has a number of years beneath its belt..
its dated now and lacking many new features that are showing up in newer games. wow also lacks scope and its once fledgling mmo community has now become some what more e xperienced and had chance to sample other mmo games and discovered that there are indeed better and more complex mmo games out there offering far more than what wow does.
im going to say this once more. wow is a pile of crap.. it always has been, unfortunately the new comers to online gameing mainly fueld by the extreme amount of advertiseing on wow's part are now discovering better games that have more depth and more content and genrally just more scope and they look better too play better run better. there really is no comparrison.
so yes you guys need to spend more time with eve before saying it has the dodgy holy trinity system. it does not!! players can design the charecter for any role at the drop of hat to meet certain situations, eve represents role flexibility and unique charecter development. no one players fits their ship or trains their charecter the exact same way. they are all diffrent. sure you do get a few folk that form specialist groups that will fly a spidertank gang where they all fit pretty much the same stuff to support each other.. but you will find they are a mix and match of heal and combat/ and combat in eve has many many diffrent directions. its not just dps like in wow.
play eve more and discover a better game.
Tbh, that is very right to say. If there is not a competing hypothesis of how combat should be done... : O
It's funny because I'm no fan of healers in MMOs having to rely on them, yet I've found in Pocket Legends the best class is the healer!! I'm wondering why and I think it's to do with the variety this class provides:
Skills: debuffs, buffs, heal, rez, shield, single-target dmg+root, AoE knockback, AoE, drain+heal dot etc...
Basically these compare favorably to the Tank/Damage skills by being able to support(heal+rez+buffs+knockback) + Tank a little (shield+heal+knockback (then run!)) and add a little damage with a drain spell which is weakest option but very useful for survival. So seems to me it's the versatility that is the really enjoyable gameplay factor when it comes to combat. Adding a layer of teamwork/planning/communication/combos adds tons, but it should be building on top of individual versatility imo?
http://www.gdcvault.com/play/1014633/Classic-Game-Postmortem
It doesn't allow for more complexity. It may seem like, because you know what they can do, so you can put exactly that in that dungeon, while if you do not know, there may be cases a group has no chance of ever getting that thing done, because they lack the certain something, but at the same time you know exactly what you will face. You know that if you bring two healers, 1 tank and 5 dps, you will get it done.
There is no "we can't proceed because we do not have a thief who can pick the lock", or "we can't kill that monster because it's immune to physical damage" or "while we do not have non-physical dps, lets go around it, lure it back to the magic traps and activate them".
And the so called "holy trinity" dumbs down grouping. You know exactly what you need. There can be 1000 players wanting to join your group of 5 or whatever, they can be your best friends, but sadly, you need a healer. Yes, it's easier to make a group without it, as you do not need exact that one class, but thats not complexity. It's only easer because you do not limit yourself, but the choosing who you will take with out is more difficult, and thats the important part. Not how long it does take to make a group. Thats just because everyone wants a healer etc.
If you are free to take any class, no matter if you already got that part covered or not, and the chances of being succesful are the same in the long run, who do you take?
Also, if you have predefined roles, i'd say thats more button mashing. The tank is expected to have some skills to manage aggro, some to increase his armor/health etc, some to increase movement speed to pull enemies in etc, the healer needs lot of heal skills, some resurrect, the dps needs some speed to move from one enemy to the other, some attacks, some skills to increase damage from normal attacks or skills. It can go so far that it boils down to the exact same skills for every tank, dps and healer.
If you are free to take whatever you want, you need to decide what you take, and you need to know when to use it. Should you heal yourself now, should you use the giant damage skill to take out that monster attacking your friend, with the risk of yourself dying..maybe you can stun the one attacking you, so you can go for the other, as thats faster than healing yourself, and you still won't die, but then you won't get rid of either monster, and they can still kill you.
Also i find it somewhat funny that everybody managed to avoid mentioning Guild Wars 2 while talking about the holy trinity, even though it's ArenaNets goal to do away with it.
I'll wait to the day's end when the moon is high
And then I'll rise with the tide with a lust for life, I'll
Amass an army, and we'll harness a horde
And then we'll limp across the land until we stand at the shore
Ok for once we can't blame this on WoW like somebody said. I would love to blame all the things wrong with the genre on WoW and i do most of the time but not the trinity. I played DAoC years before WoW came out and we did the tank, healer, dps thing. FFXI came out a year before WoW and I was a tank for a long time. Same goes for L2 when it came to any kind of PvE or leveling, you needed tank, healer, dps. We always had to have a tank and healer before we could party back in those days. I would call it tank, support, and dps though. In a lot of games having a healer isn't enough you need to a buffer/debuffer too.
Some game coming out are trying to change this by eliminating certain roles. GW2 claims to have gotten rid of the healers, and Archeage is claiming to get rid of the tanks. We will see if that will actually happen though. I for one don't really care trinity roles can stay if they want I've never been too concerned.
When everyone is just doing 'their thing' without consideration toward the rest of their group, then the grouping dynamic is most definitely dumbed down. That's the point of roles, a group member fills a role in consideration to the rest of the group.
If a player chooses to take the role of keeping attention of enemies on them, and another player decides to watch the first player's health more closely and throw more heals at them because they expect them to take more damage... woops you've suddenly recreated the 'trinity' again, regardless as to whether or not characters can do every role or not. This is what GW2 will end up with, the only difference being that any character can fill any role... but the roles are all still there in some form or another.
It's the same thing, just with more character flexbility... but you'll still end up with players having to begrudingly fill roles they might not want.
Dont kid yourself Anireth. Unless every class is a mirror there will be prefered classes to group with and it will have impact on difficulty etc.
I don't know if you even read the comments about EVE. Do you say that NO holy-trinity exists in any aspect of EVE at all? Because the point wasn't made that EVE was all about the trinity, it was that even in open-ended games like EVE, players are drawn to roles like the holy trinity for specific aspects of the game (missioning specifically). And saying its different because each person can be any role? How is that different from a game like Rift where the trinity is VERY prevalent, yet any member of a group can play any role INCLUDING NON-TRINITY ROLES LIKE BUFFER (bard). WoW has crafting which has NOTHING to do with the holy-trinity, trading and an AH which has nothing to do with the holy trinity, heck even PvP throws the trinity out the window, yet you still slam it as a pile of crap because of it.
Someone must've taken a dump in your cereal this morning, nothing was said about EVE dry-humping the holy-trinity, its the players who pick the roles in EVE, not the game.
"They essentially want to say 'Correlation proves Causation' when it's just not true." - Sovrath
The article could have gone into a little more detail about why the trinity—and roles in general—exist in the first place. Isabelle mentioned in the opening that if everyone could do the same thing as everyone else, we would get very bored. But it's a little more than that. Even a little bit of specialization goes a long way. If there is anything that you can do even a little bit better than anyone else in the group, the optimal strategy is for you to do just that one thing and nothing else. If everyone can deal damage but you can deal a little more, why would you ever heal? If you took a little less damage, why would you let anyone else take a hit?
Seperating group members into dedicated roles is an optimal strategy. The trinity has persisted for so long because it's a moderately difficult puzzle to solve with a solution that is fun, exciting, and familiar. When I say that tank-and-spank is a moderately difficult puzzle, I'm not trolling. By virtue of the fact that you're reading the comments on an article about MMORPGs, you are already in the top 10 percentile of MMO skill. Trust me on this: there are a huge number of people who are way below your level for whom the basics of group strategy are not trivial. Figuring out how to manage aggro or heal efficiently is a challenge, even when the game spells it out for you at every occasion.
The notion that better mob AI is a "solution" to the trinity is foundationless. All fights against a computer-controlled opponent are going to get solved. An optimal solution will be found. Having a tankable AI ensures that the solution (trinity) will be exciting and rewarding and will require teamwork with each person playing a role. Having an AI that actually tries to win the combat or survive is a virtual guarantee that the combat will have a simple and boring solution. Especially AI that runs away. This is terrible. Never suggest it again.