To be honest, watching the roles change from game to game for actually a long time now (far longer than I really epected, whew) I'm still not sure I'm particularly unhappy with it or for it.
There is a certain, small degree of positioning mechanics that no mmo ever seems to take into account that dates back to table tops and was made into specific rules in DnD 3rd ed especially. That of being on the front line literally blocked creatures passage and if they tried to move around you, you got to lay free damage on them.
And it also went both ways, where if you fired spells or arrows into melee you had almost as much chance of shooting your fighter in the back as you were to hit an enemy. Sometimes even more than 50% chance.
But, coming from one who never really liked the DPS role and really was always a tank or a healer, I've always liked playing that support role, its always more reactive than the "hit these buttons in this order for maximum damage, and who cares what the enemy is doing I'm killing stuff". Now there are some things you can alleviate this with, one is to decentralize which some games have done. If everyone can self heal, who needs a healer? If everyone can absorb enough damage, who needs a tank?
Personally, I find it boring if everyone's doing the same thing, and I often like the class roles. Even if you gave characters a list of skills to choose from ranging through everything from healing and tanking to dps and debuffing, I'd be willing to bet that people would very quickly specialize. Of course not entirely, a tank would probably take a few self healing things and the dps would also take a little tank, but people would specialize. And then a group of the specialists would trivialize everything that was made for a group of generalists, and then you've essentially got player based classes and content needing to be generated for those specialists and specific skill combinations that become the "required" tank and "required" healer and other support roles.
Mostly, it comes down to this. None of us in the real world are 100% something, but everyone specializes. There are few companies and corporations that are built of jack of all trades only. Even a game development company, there are designers, developers, producers, testers, managers, artists and these are specializations because it is more efficient to do it that way.
Which is what it all comes to. Efficiency. Players can and do find the most efficient way of doing things.
Don't you think it's odd that Parties even in WoW are not typically built with 5 healer tank dpsers? About the only time that happened was when Blood DKs came out and when I stopped that possibility was already on its way out. But you could build every character to self heal, do damage, and take a few hits before passing the threat. But you don't because its inefficient. Its more efficient to build a role and play that role.
One misconception posted a few time here is that EVE doesn't have the trinity.
It most certainly does, it just doesn't require you to use all 3 elements in every situation.
In the simple PVE such as mission running, you can get by with a good tank and fair DPS, self healing is normally adequate to get by.
However in the more challenging PVE, inclusing Complexes, Wormholes and Incursions all 3 elements are clearly needed, someone has to tank the room, someone needs to heal the tanker (logistics ships), crowd control can sometimes help (webbers) and of course, you need to sometimes kill your opponents with massive DPS before they kill you.
PVP is a different story, the tanking role pretty much not necessary. Its all about focused fire and killing the other side as rapidly as possible, however healing plays a huge role with elaborate spider tanking set ups, logistic ships healing, buffing ships boosting armor/damage, debuffing ships disabling the enemy (neutralizers, jammers), crowd control (warp scramblers/webbers) all working with DPS.
Now depending on the size of the fight you might not bring all of the above elements, or you might overcompensate in one area (DPS perhaps) in order to not worry about bringing a debuffer along with.
As I mentioned previously, I think GW2 will be the watershed MMO that will really show how well a non-trinity based title will play out and for that reason alone I'll be giving it a try.
Just trying to live long enough to play a new, released MMORPG, playing New Worlds atm
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"This is the most intelligent, well qualified and articulate response to a post I have ever seen on these forums. It's a shame most people here won't have the attention span to read past the second line." - Anon
I was just wondering, in what Fantasy novel or Fantasy Movies do we actually see a Cleric h that casts healing magic that suddenly heals all wounds, because that would make them gods.
But we always see them buff the team members, cast an protective spell or damage enhancing spells, speed enhancing spells.
Lets not destroy the trinity, but change the way the rolls play.
Clerics can only cast protective spells, but they can't move away from their circle of light which they draw their powers.
Mages has high damage, but it takes time to cast, and it stuns or damages the mob severely like movement is permantly disabled. ( leg blown off, or such ) ( and if you have more mages, their spells interact with each other, ice and earth , oil and fire ...etc
Tanks ( plate wearers ) move slow but high damage , or ( shield carrier ) casts a wall that blocks all sights to the casters but does no damage. ( can be upgraded to spike walls and such ) but of a certain radius, so positioning and planning is key
Leather wearers, moves quickly, quick damages but when enemy hit you, you can get concussions and will be out of combat for a while. But they can set traps to alter their direction. ( ink in the eye, stink bombs to disorient )
Its just my opinion, but won't this eliminate the need for any specifiy rolls for dungeon crawls.
If all you have is leather wearers, you will all move around using traps and disorient the enemy.
If all you have is plate wearers, you can have some that uses shields, and some high damages that slices off the enemy's limbs one by one.
If all you have is mages, you would set up fire traps , ice the floor to distract the enemy as you blast off nuclear bomb ( combo of fires balls )
if all you have is clerics, then you can have light based attacks where you can bring the weight of the light on the enemy.
And everyone bandages and rests after a battle.
And in PVP that would be an actual battle formation, ( Mages in the back, Archers infront of them, Plate wearers march forward while some stays to form a shield wall for the mages and archers. And some leather wearers behind the plate wearers. Of course if you are attacking a better general and they flank you, then you are screwed, just like any war. No miracle heals.
Life is a Maze, so make sure you bring your GPS incase you get lost in it.
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.
I disagree on several points here. The reason we have the trinity is that it's the basis for creating sand-box structures (encounters and environment) requiring team-play. In it's day WoW had some of the best teaming rythms ever. This would be the Molten Core/Blackwing Lair era IMO.
Encounters where people would actually TALK for a sec before an encounter to get the combat squad lined up (Bob, you CC mob A, Jean mob B, Frank you tank the Elite . . .), then execution! A practiced team would DANCE the encounter, you could SEE the challenges each role was having (e.g. a mob broke early from Jean's Ice Trap, and she double trapped it after pulling it back to her with a shot).
That was some good stuff, good game play, and opportunity to see people play classes they had mastered.
You are correct, NPCs don't attack players like players do. Hopefully an evolutionary tract that will slowly change, with NPCs getting smarter. Of course it may be developers WON'T do this because the vast majority of the player base would find that too hard. (e.g. Magister's Terrace in WoW, the encounter with the boss with four random-class spawned adds).
It is not a given that players play DPS or Hybrids because Healers die first and Tanks last. It has been my experience players jump on DPS classes because of a simple human dynamic that, IMO, kills a game's development in some respects: People LOVE to simply PEW-PEW-PEW, and then pew-pew some more.
There is a FASCNINATING lack of team-based awareness in the last two MMOs I've hit: The standard strat is to simply RUN at the mobs by people as they mash buttons frantically. Very little teamwork, very little squad/team awareness, everyone simply figuring everyone else will figure it all out.
Haphazard application of CC or debuff removal, haphazard or non-existant awareness of pulling/moving/manipulating mobs to keep from killing someone(s).
Just see a mob, run at it, and pew-pew-pew.
Here's a reason the "Holy Trinity" shouldn't go away: It fosters the need to learn your class and work together, because there are consequences to not (e.g. failure to complete the scenario), while blurring the lines between classes too deeply fosters mindless pew-pewism.
Because if mindless pew-pewism is where MMOs are going, that's a backwards step.
The problem is not design intent, it's the basic fundementals of game theory. I could explain it better with matricies and a lot of numbers, but the short version is that in any game, there will be a group of strategies/classes which (together) are better than any other combination of strategies available in the long run. If you make up a random game, the most common "winning combo" is rock-paper-scissors.
Since almost all games revolve around a health stat eventually the rock-paper-scissors outcome decays to specializing in inflicting damage, avoiding damage, regenerating.
If you want a game that does not decay to that combo, you need to either go out of your way to force a more complex balance (which risks making the game feel artificial or bloated) or have different definitions of victory other than the status of your health bar (most people completely ignore crafting or minigame-specialized characters when discussing tank-dps-healer)
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.
The nail in the coffin for the trinity in GW2 is that they've gutted your ability to play a dedicated red-bar pusher. There are no ally-targeted spells, the skills that are useful for healing your allies are either enemy-targeted or area-targeted, and they are generally much weaker than any single professions' self heal (which, mind you, is a requirement to bring, because you have a skill slot dedicated to a self heal). This means all healing is relegated to supplementary healing. There are a lot of <support> abilities on various classes - stuff like buffs and prots and walls and condition removers and skills other professions can combo with for big damage - so those of you who enjoy supporting your teammates will have plenty to do...but sitting in the back healing is not going to be one of them. With no healbot behind you, no tank will be able to sit there soaking up all the damage and taking all the healing.
Now let's talk about tanking. Since your skills are fixed to your weapon, you can't build your character to be full of only armor skills and taunts (actually, there are no taunts in the game, so that's right out anyway). Yes, you can modify your atts to have maximum health and armor, but you're always going to have at least 3 damage skills on your bar; if you're not using them, you're only half of a character, and since max party sizes are going to be 5, you're going to be dead weight for your team.
Lastly, DPS. You can certainly build yourself to be mostly focused on damage (save for the requirement to bring a self-heal and to be mostly responsible for your own healing and damage mitigation through rolling/dodging). However, since everyone has some way of swapping skill sets in battle (most professions have one other weapon set to swap to, eles have attunements, engineers have their kits), there is nothing in the way of you going full damage most of the time, but still dropping some good support skills and control effects around the battlefield as needed. Not doing so is, again, not playing your character to their fullest. In other MMOs if you play a hybrid you're giving up a lot of power in some area, that's simply not the case in GW2.
So, while there might always be "someone taking damage, someone healing damage, and someone dealing damage", it does not have to be the case that those three roles will be fixed on individual party members for the entirety of the dungeon/event/mission. If your support character can't keep up with the healing, eventually someone else is going to need to pick up the slack. If your frontline can't handle the damage, someone else might need to step in and let him fall back and heal. If your damage characters are paying attention, they can do more for their party by filling in the other two roles as needed than they could simply spamming fireballs.
Anyone who has played GW1 knows that you don't need a holy trinity to beat difficult content. It was possible in GW1 to play like that, but seldom was it the most efficient build. GW2 is going beyond that, actively discouraging players from building their characters in such a way by simply not giving them the tools necessary to create these builds (taunts, big other-ally heals, lots of personal damage reduction skills). In light of all of this, calling it a waste of developers' time to even try to break the trinity is just ignorant.
Everytime I hear "holy trinity" I die a little inside. It is simply baffling that people complain about this core system of the mmorpg. But like everything else, the genre is getting destroyed by newcomers who want the genre to be what they want it to be. Whether it is injecting fps qualities or single player rps qualities, outside influences have been chippin away at the genre. There is nothing wrong with the holy trinity and defined group roles. In fact, both lie at the core of the mmorpg system. Yet, what we have today is a community of people who want their toons to be able to do everything and yet somehow still dominate every other "god" opponent they come across. Why do you need a group if you can tank, heal and dps? Hell, why do you even need to be online with other people? It just blows my mind that people even talk about things like this. I guess its just a matter of accepting that the mmorpg genre doesn't exist anymore. At best, the mmorpg genre today is a piecemeal collection of all the other genres with no defining trait.
There is a reason that since the beginning of time, militaries have been divided into units with specific strengths and weaknesses. No succesful military force has ever been comprised of a "all role" unit. And yes, I am quite aware that games are not real life, but I am also aware that roles define everything we do; and for good reason.
1. A lot of games are becoming multiplayer and online. A lot of mmorpgs are taking ideas/systems in other games and adding them. It's always a fluid genre.
2. HT works up to a point. I think perhaps in turn based games or games where blocking contact/distance = difference between melee and ranged abilities used and in turn may have helped give rise to strategy of HT? But as mmorpgs become more infused with faster connections and physics engines that allow real-time additions not just conditions on statistics that are adjustable before combat state then calculated each turn; instead combat allowing movement and position and persistent battlefield effects to influence stats and which skills used I think HT becomes subservient to giving players options for their on-the-spot decisions (as well as pre-planning) that leads to versatility being the most important tool... and more variety being the spice of combat, surely?
3. I think football/soccer/futbol is an apt analogy: A defender looks after the backline and marks the opposition strikers/offensive players. Note an offensive player can be any of midfield/defender/striker! Second a defender can score a goal and if they are tall (usually) they are especially good at offensive set-pieces. Another defender a type called a wing-back can be an auxillary offensive player coming up and creating an overlap on the wing or support midfielder crossing the ball into a crowded penalty area for the strikers. That is just a bit of the variety and versatility in this world game. It's dynamic but formation and strategy are very important ie how to defend a lead etc.
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.
Let's throw away this concept of "because everyone can perform all the roles the game will not be group oriented" (because I feel that's just what you've gotten out of what you've read about the game) and look at it from a different point of view. What if because everyone can perform each role in their own way, they start to use skills that both help their allies as well as themselves, basically everyone is doing the things that would be expected of a trinity set-up but this time they are peforming it individually although it is benefiting not just themselves but the whole team. Wouldn't that feel like a more... group oriented game where everyone is saving each others ass, "oh you're losing health, better help you heal" "Oh, that mob is after you better pull him towards me" "Oh you're down, let me rez you." And this can be done by your whole team... not just one person, wouldn't that be a more fun game, a more active, group-oriented, "save me and I'll save you" type of game? Think about it.
As I mentioned previously, I think GW2 will be the watershed MMO that will really show how well a non-trinity based title will play out and for that reason alone I'll be giving it a try.
Uo the first mmo had no trinity, as i said trinity came afterward. Go play Uo and you will see how it shine both in pve and pvp, even if the combat system was heavily tweaked since old UO (pre EQ), since the game shifted into a item based game now; Uo wasn't a gear based game at all before, since everybody used pretty similar crafted gear.
For you i'll try to explain combat in non trinity game: it is no more about rock/scissor/paper when you solo; it is about offensive/defensive rythm since you have to both dps and heal to fight well. In group it is basically the same principle except that the character that will heal/undot is the one with enought mana to do it, and not a dedicated healer/buffer. This is a huge difference. Offense defense is not the same as tanking, supporting, you just can't mix those aspect and say they are the same, they are not.
So the dynamic of fighting is just totally different, and is great indeed. Anyone that duel in Uo know how superior that kind of combat is. Because duel become so much closer to real life duel were offensive/defensive rythm make the fight. In trinity pve it is all about that stupid rock/scissor/paper, so you know with a good % whos class will win, if both oponent have similar strengh. In group it is about adaptability of the players and it is about an other type of cohesion. But still cohesion is very imporant for the success of your group. And honeslt non trinity combat just fit so much better pvp, it is just not strange most pvp game try to stay away from the trinity. Trinity system is made and designed for pve exclusively, so once more the fact it doesn't fit to pvp is nothing strange.
I don't see what's wrong with the holy trinity. The only reasonable argument, imo, is having to wait for a tank/healer.
But that's because 99% of the people want to play a dps class. They want to pew pew. So the solution is? Remove healers and tanks altogether as Guild Wars 2 is doing.... There are people who can't even comprehend how someone can enjoy to play a healer /facepalm
Look at Diablo 2. There were no real healers and tanks (well maybe barbs but not really tanks were they). The solution to the holy trinity is quite simple. Make all classes dps and balance around this. This way you can cater to dps loving peeps.
Well, there is nothing really wrong with the holy triad but combat in a trinity game differs little from combat in another. You rarely get surprised and the difference between combat in Meridian 59 (the first) and Rift (the latest) is surpisingly small since it is 15 years between the games.
So the problem is that too many games using it and it eventually gets boring in the long run.
What GW2 does is one way to make combat feels different, with a good AI that works fine.
There are other ways as well, the only thing that matters is that there should be some kind of co operation and tactics, GW2 solves that with attacks that combos together with other peoples skills among others.
The important thing at least in the long run is that a new games combat should feel different from the combat of old games. You just can do the exact same thing so long.
Heck, I would love a "Theif" based MMO where the main thing would be avoiding combat instead of fighting in it, there would be no need for a classic triad there even if you would use different kinds of thieves for different things (lockpicking, finding hidden stuff, solving puzzles, disarming regular and magical traps and so on). It would also feel very different.
There will always be room for a triad game but if the genre want to start growing again we also need a few games with different combat systems.
Another idea is by using a commander like in Natural selection instead of healers and put in formation combat (the commander will help you where to stand, you will see a glowing spot where he put you).
People acting like the trinity is inevitable seem to forget a lot of basic facts about what is required for it to work, which is actually quite a lot.
First, the AI needs to be designed with the trinity in mind. The targets it picks have to be heavily influence by the role of the target (often through role abilities). You can't have intelligent AI, because then the trinity wouldn't work.
Secondly, tanks need a lot of specific sorts of abilities in oder for HT to work. They need to be far, far tougher than anyone else. If not, then they aren't needed. They cannot deal much damage, otherwise the flimsy dps aren't needed. They need to have artificial abilities that make enemies attack them even though they are no threat.
Thirdly, you need to have people that can spam healing constantly and people need to be taking enough damage so that this is necessary. Healing can't generate a lot of threat generally, or the healer will get killed (if he's very tough, then you are back to not needing a tank, so healers must be flimsy).
The need for DPS is rather debateable, actually, but as it is the one role that actually makes sense in a more general way, it is rather hard to avoid.
That's a lot of stuff, affecting every aspect of the game from enemy health, damage, intelligence, to class abilities and specailizations. It's far from trivial or even natural to have the Holy Trinity.
I'd further add that this is hardly the only way to have specializations. You can easily have a game with different roles. As I mentioned once before in these forums, you could have a Greek Warfare MMO where you have cavalry (fast strikers), phalanx (slow, powerful, frontl-line attackers), and ranged attackers. A lot of warfare historically has had similar roles (with others), and definitely never had the MMO roles. Or you could have roles that use, deny, and control areas, do more straight up attacking, and so forth. GW2 is more the latter, where each person has most of the healing needed, but working together and using AoE buffs and combos is needed. Combos is another way you can encourage people to interact with each other. One of the best parts about FFXI when I played it was the group combos (sadly I hear they don't matter what now). That require a lot of teamwork and made a huge difference...the trinity really was more of an obstacle to good play than anything else, imho.
The problem is not design intent, it's the basic fundementals of game theory. I could explain it better with matricies and a lot of numbers, but the short version is that in any game, there will be a group of strategies/classes which (together) are better than any other combination of strategies available in the long run. If you make up a random game, the most common "winning combo" is rock-paper-scissors.
Since almost all games revolve around a health stat eventually the rock-paper-scissors outcome decays to specializing in inflicting damage, avoiding damage, regenerating.
If you want a game that does not decay to that combo, you need to either go out of your way to force a more complex balance (which risks making the game feel artificial or bloated) or have different definitions of victory other than the status of your health bar (most people completely ignore crafting or minigame-specialized characters when discussing tank-dps-healer)
Hard to imagine you know much about game theory when you equate rock-paper-scissors to tank-healer-dps. They are NOT the same at all. RPS works because each options counters one of the others and is countered by a third. That's decidedly NOT what is happening in the Holy Trinity. RPS is a lot more like real combat than the Holy Trinity could ever be, and is an example of another and in many ways more sensible method of divying up roles.
And just like real life combat, just because recovery is important in the long term, that doesn't mean it matters in an individual battle. There's no need for healing/recovery to matter. Further, there's no need to give that as one of the jobs, anymore than you should give the "mitigating damage" obligation to just one person. There are many, many successful games that avoid this both on the computer and elsewhere. Rather pathetically such mechanics are almost never seen in MMOs.
never implied that the holy trinity and group roles were synonymous.
I did in a previous post however, state that the trinity exists because of the need to create group roles. This is particularly true when group content needs to be tuned to offer consistent challenges.
There in lies the issue, designing challening group content. If you develop content with a specific group composition with specific roles to be filled in mind, you can much more reasonably tune the difficulty of content where it will be hard enough that you require the group composition you're designing for, while presenting challening gameplay.
If you're designing for any composition, then designing challenging content becomes extremely difficult. On one hand content might be far too easy for certain group makeups, but the exact same encounter could be a brick wall of difficulty. Of course, if you give every class the tools to soak damage, deal damage, and heal you can mitigate this issue... but then you're pretty much making everyone in the group able to fill every role, which kills the group dynamic and makes things very bland in my opinion.
I'm not saying it's impossible to deviate from the trinity, simply that there are decent reasons why so many games use the trinity concept to design around.
If GW2 can pull of their 'trinity-less' system, great, I'd love to see it. Personally though, I have my reservations as to how well it's going to work when everyone can do everything, because it sounds rather boring to me when everyone is doing the exact same thing and is no different from everyone else.
So let's have roles that MAKE SENSE, rather than ones that require the AI to be idiots. The Holy Trinity completely fails here, because it is as artificial as they come.
I like the GW2 solution, which seems to be going towards "you need some Crowd Control, some healing, some combos, and some damage dealing capability" and then gives everyone pretty much all the healing they need on their own (if they play smart), and lets the group figure out how they want to divide the other duties (which could go one person doing all the CC or each person having a little CC). This is a lot more fluid and makes a lot more sense.
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.
When CCP can "discover" larger fonts I'll likely play more. But even with going up to 13 font and expanded size its a brutally tiny text to read. Matterfact after 20 minutes or so on my 21.5 inch viewable hd monitor it is unbearable. I think they designed a wonderful game but they gotta fix that for many of us to play.
Heh, I actually find the realism thumpers here kinda funny. MMOs are far, far, far from realistic, that's why they are games.
Why have these crazy health bars, if you get a sword to the face or shot in the neck, you're dead. What's with all these armor mitigation in the thousands requiring multiple hits to kill a human being, and what's with killing 20 more goblins making you able to take another five hits from a sword?
And what's all this respawning stuff? If you're dead, you died, go reroll, right? Let's make this real! I want a real combat simulator in my MMOs, not these silly AI rules and what not.
If combat were realistic in an MMO you'd have first person shooter rules without respawns and the game would be worse then boring.
And it may really be a matter of personal preference, and if it is I can accept that not everybody shares my opinion, but I'm typically not a fan of most generalist games. Well everyone can do everything, so everyone essentially ends up being a clone of each other. Oh wait, the characters can specialize? You mean like heal/support, damage mitigation, and damage dealing? Now you've got classes again.
Personally, I think that if any MMO would actually incorporate positioning mechanics, so many issues with the ideas of the classes would be solved. But even EVE never seemed to get around to that, hence why yould could literally fire through an asteroid or friendly ship and hit your target.
And for sword and board MMOs, think about what that would do to strategy. No more of this mindlessly mashing a specific set of combos to maintain hate, all of a sudden a front line fighter (or fighters) are about containing an enemy who's actually actively trying to get to or throw something at the people in the back, who are trying to manuever for a good shot and then get behind cover again. no more "hate" which yes is a ridiculous mechanic, just an intelligent AI that you have to out think, who can push back fighters to create an opening, who can pull back to get around the fighters who let their guard down.
Personally, I think that's a far better solution than "You're special, just like everybody else."
And it may really be a matter of personal preference, and if it is I can accept that not everybody shares my opinion, but I'm typically not a fan of most generalist games. Well everyone can do everything, so everyone essentially ends up being a clone of each other. Oh wait, the characters can specialize? You mean like heal/support, damage mitigation, and damage dealing? Now you've got classes again.
Maybe you should spend about 10 minutes thinking of other avenues of specialization. D&D, other CRPGs, and computer games in general have had many, many different and important types of specialization. Only MMOs ever make them along healing, damage mitigation, and damage dealing as the most important/vital areas of specialization. Well, think or read the thread, either one would do.
Actually, looking at the older versions of DnD, there was in fact damage mitigation on the front line (Fighters and Paladins, Barbarians later) DPS specialization (Rogues, rangers, wizards, sorcerers) and Healers (Clerics). And they did in fact perform their jobs rather well, even if the script was a little different. And those were pretty much the three roles you could specialize into, though dual classing allowed more generalizing overall.
Of course, there's non combat specializations, but really, those are the three main areas of combat as have been said. And even in 4th edition with the introduction of new wigged out abilities, it really further defines the roles. Warden comes to mind with the ability to drag just about any enemy right in front of them. And non combat specializations really don't translate into any combat area of a game, in practically any game.
Really, thinking back to any Tabletop where combat was involved, those really are the three roles available. And you can expand pretty much every combat "specialization" to one or two of those. Sniper? You're there to kill the enemies before they kill you or your team. Engineer? Build turrets to kill enemies faster.
You sit there and say that thinking for 10 minutes and you could name many specializations that would not fit into heal/support, tank, or dps, yet you mention none. I would be willing to bet that you could fit any combat specialization into one of those three roles, and if you can prove me wrong I'll have learned something. Other than that, this thread hasn't developed any different ideas for specializations, only touting generalization as a more practical way of doing combat. Which is by definition not specializing at all.
Actually, looking at the older versions of DnD, there was in fact damage mitigation on the front line (Fighters and Paladins, Barbarians later) DPS specialization (Rogues, rangers, wizards, sorcerers) and Healers (Clerics). And they did in fact perform their jobs rather well, even if the script was a little different. And those were pretty much the three roles you could specialize into, though dual classing allowed more generalizing overall.
You either never played D&D or your memory is clouded by Holy Trinity Glasses.
Yes, you had more damage mitigation on the front line. Who had it? Fighters, Paladins, Rangers, Rogues (due to high dex), and such classes like CLERICS. Basically, anyone who actually fought on the front line. Why? Because they needed it to survive. Why? Because anyone on the front line could get attacked in melee. No threat control means no tanks and that means everyone needs similar protection. Hence front line people all had good AC one way or another.
Now who did damage? Just rogues, rangers, wizards, sorcers? Well, that suggestion of yours is quite frankly totally wrong. Fighters in all editions of D&D could put out a ton of damage. Clerics and Druids could put out quite a bit of damage, and in fact were among the most effective combatants in 3.X (CoDzilla,* anyone?) In D&D everyone can do significant damage unless you completely neglect that aspect of the class. Also, a huge role for any magic user was handling aoe effects, including crowd control (and buffing). Acting like they are dpsers is plain silly (and in fact, a high level wizard can be tougher than a fighter).
Now how is healing done in D&D? It's done mostly outside of combat. Healing in combat is not spammed like in MMO. A huge part of dealing with damage in D&D is simply avoiding it. If an emergency happens, then a Cleric or Druid might have one to three spells to deal with that, but they have to last for several encounters. Most healing they have doesn't heal enough to be useful in combat, and it is just better if they attack, use a CC or defensive spell, or something else.
Trying to fit D&D classes into Holy Trinity roles just doesn't work. Enemies aren't stupid, classes don't have the right abilities, if everyone attacks the fighter then he dies (e.g. can't tank like a HT Tank), the healer simply can't keep up with all the damage in combat. Heck, the simple difference in toughness between front-line people and others in D&D just isn't nearly as pronounced as the difference between tanks and non-tanks in HT.
Anyhow, you are trying to jam round pegs into square holes...it doesn't work. It is perhaps the worst characteristic of people who advocate the HT...their complete and utter inability to understand there are other possible ways to have combat roles that have at best the most superficial of similarities with the Holy Trinity. Fact is, HT is far from the only game in town, especially outside of MMOs (where HT basically doesn't exist at all).
*Stands for Cleric or Druid, since either could be an absolute combat monster.
I love the trinity but I agree 100% with the OPer, blurred classes are the best. I'm currently playing Rift and I'm a Cloromancer (Healer caster), Elementalist (Pet caster), and Pyromancer (DPS caster) all at the same time. Last night I was running a dungeon with some people and our tank went down. So what happened... well as a DPS role the boss jumped me. However as a Cloromancer I healed myself, and as a Pyromancer I quickly threw on my damage shield. I effectively tanked the boss as a cloth wearing DPS rolled wizard. AMAZING I say. Its moments like that that you truely feel as epic as Gandolf.
The botton line is, teamwork is great, and honestly I wouldn't have made it without my friends (even the dead tank who tanked for the crucial 45 seconds it took us to defeate the bosses adds) but its great when anyone can fill any role. Sure I could tank, but our actual tank was way better up untill he fell in battle, but what Rift does so masterfully is that even if one person in your group dies, hope does not.
Lastly even in Rift, someone has to play the role of healer/DPS/tank. However the game is so flexable that you can switch your role instantly if you need to (or relatively instantly). So yah hybrids, blurrs... its all good and a lot of fun!
Actually, looking at the older versions of DnD, there was in fact damage mitigation on the front line (Fighters and Paladins, Barbarians later) DPS specialization (Rogues, rangers, wizards, sorcerers) and Healers (Clerics). And they did in fact perform their jobs rather well, even if the script was a little different. And those were pretty much the three roles you could specialize into, though dual classing allowed more generalizing overall.
You either never played D&D or your memory is clouded by Holy Trinity Glasses.
Yes, you had more damage mitigation on the front line. Who had it? Fighters, Paladins, Rangers, Rogues (due to high dex), and such classes like CLERICS. Basically, anyone who actually fought on the front line. Why? Because they needed it to survive. Why? Because anyone on the front line could get attacked in melee. No threat control means no tanks and that means everyone needs similar protection. Hence front line people all had good AC one way or another.
Now who did damage? Just rogues, rangers, wizards, sorcers? Well, that suggestion of yours is quite frankly totally wrong. Fighters in all editions of D&D could put out a ton of damage. Clerics and Druids could put out quite a bit of damage, and in fact were among the most effective combatants in 3.X (CoDzilla,* anyone?) In D&D everyone can do significant damage unless you completely neglect that aspect of the class. Also, a huge role for any magic user was handling aoe effects, including crowd control (and buffing). Acting like they are dpsers is plain silly (and in fact, a high level wizard can be tougher than a fighter).
Now how is healing done in D&D? It's done mostly outside of combat. Healing in combat is not spammed like in MMO. A huge part of dealing with damage in D&D is simply avoiding it. If an emergency happens, then a Cleric or Druid might have one to three spells to deal with that, but they have to last for several encounters. Most healing they have doesn't heal enough to be useful in combat, and it is just better if they attack, use a CC or defensive spell, or something else.
Trying to fit D&D classes into Holy Trinity roles just doesn't work. Enemies aren't stupid, classes don't have the right abilities, if everyone attacks the fighter then he dies (e.g. can't tank like a HT Tank), the healer simply can't keep up with all the damage in combat. Heck, the simple difference in toughness between front-line people and others in D&D just isn't nearly as pronounced as the difference between tanks and non-tanks in HT.
Anyhow, you are trying to jam round pegs into square holes...it doesn't work. It is perhaps the worst characteristic of people who advocate the HT...their complete and utter inability to understand there are other possible ways to have combat roles that have at best the most superficial of similarities with the Holy Trinity. Fact is, HT is far from the only game in town, especially outside of MMOs (where HT basically doesn't exist at all).
*Stands for Cleric or Druid, since either could be an absolute combat monster.
I couldn't agree more. In D&D, back when I played it (AD&D, 2nd Edition rules) there was no trinity and heck clerics were just as good at "tanking" as well... anyone. The only class that was paper thin were wizards and sorcerers and with the right stats they too could defend themselves. I'd love to see D&D concepts put into an MMO.
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.
I think Richard Bartle would say something different about the trinity origins.
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Hard to imagine you know much about game theory when you equate rock-paper-scissors to tank-healer-dps. They are NOT the same at all. RPS works because each options counters one of the others and is countered by a third. That's decidedly NOT what is happening in the Holy Trinity. RPS is a lot more like real combat than the Holy Trinity could ever be, and is an example of another and in many ways more sensible method of divying up roles.
RPS is just the extreme simple case where there is only one possible way to play each strategy and only one way to play the game - no distractions, no complications, no variation between the encounters. Lurking underneath each complex game is a very simple game once you boil off all the complications. It may not be practical to calculate (especially when human reflexes and changing encounters are factored in), but powergamers eventually find something close to the essence of it.
(Now, a counter-argument against me that I would recommend is the ecosystem analogy - nature is full of different species that find their niches; that leads into an interesting discussion of the qualitative difference between themepark and sandbox game dynamics once you reach a critical threshold of different minigames)
Hard to imagine you know much about game theory when you equate rock-paper-scissors to tank-healer-dps. They are NOT the same at all. RPS works because each options counters one of the others and is countered by a third. That's decidedly NOT what is happening in the Holy Trinity. RPS is a lot more like real combat than the Holy Trinity could ever be, and is an example of another and in many ways more sensible method of divying up roles.
RPS is just the extreme simple case where there is only one possible way to play each strategy and only one way to play the game - no distractions, no complications, no variation between the encounters. Lurking underneath each complex game is a very simple game once you boil off all the complications. It may not be practical to calculate (especially when human reflexes and changing encounters are factored in), but powergamers eventually find something close to the essence of it.
(Now, a counter-argument against me that I would recommend is the ecosystem analogy - nature is full of different species that find their niches; that leads into an interesting discussion of the qualitative difference between themepark and sandbox game dynamics once you reach a critical threshold of different minigames)
You seem to have completely missed my point. The RPS dynamic is NOT what the Holy Trinity is. You don't have tanks beating healers beating dps. The interelation is just not the same at all.
RPS would be something like Cavalry, Infantry, Archers, where Cavalry units beat Archery units which beat Infantry units which beat Cavalry units. That's something completely foreign to Holy Trinity design. It would also be far more dynamic than HT in a group scenario, since Rock players would need to try to get at Scissor units and stay away from Paper units, etc, etc -- there's a lot more movement and tactics involved inherently than you see in the Holy Trinity. HT tries to make up for this with gimmicks, because that's the only way to make fights interesting there as the base dynamic is as boring as can be.
And the better counterargument against your other points is that if the "best solution" and the 2nd through 10th best solutions are all within say 5% of each other, then the vast majority of gamers don't care (and the variation between setups will be far smaller than the skill variation between players anyhow). Sure you'll see "elite" guilds making a big deal out of it, but that doesn't really matter.
Beyond that, even claiming that HT will somehow always be the best solution completely ignores the fact that HT only works because of a great deal of the game's design must support it. Remove those supports and HT just falls flat on its face. Instead of designing a game for HT, the game can be designed with some other collection of systems in mind, perhaps one that allows a lot more individual flexibility (even if the group is expected to bring certain minimum sorts of abilities to the table). A huge problem (out of many) with HT is that it is inherently very anti-hybrid, since you can't have half of a tank and still tank effectively. Design for a different system, and you can enable a lot more player freedom. GW2 looks to be doing this (as an example). Eve, from what I understand, already does this.
I couldn't agree more. In D&D, back when I played it (AD&D, 2nd Edition rules) there was no trinity and heck clerics were just as good at "tanking" as well... anyone. The only class that was paper thin were wizards and sorcerers and with the right stats they too could defend themselves. I'd love to see D&D concepts put into an MMO.
Yeah, positioning were the thing in a game like that. But I guess the devs think that we are too dumb to use any actual tactics.
There is DDO, and Cryptip is releasing their online version of Neverwinter nights later this year. Both are CORPGs so not exactly MMOs but should at least be close enough.
Guildwars AI actually makes the combat closer to P&P combat as well. Far from perfect but at least a bit.
BTW: Check out the "Pathfinder" pen and paper RPG, it is the real improved D&D instead of the crap that is 4 edition. It is actually surprisingly good (even if Monte Cook is slightly involved).
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To be honest, watching the roles change from game to game for actually a long time now (far longer than I really epected, whew) I'm still not sure I'm particularly unhappy with it or for it.
There is a certain, small degree of positioning mechanics that no mmo ever seems to take into account that dates back to table tops and was made into specific rules in DnD 3rd ed especially. That of being on the front line literally blocked creatures passage and if they tried to move around you, you got to lay free damage on them.
And it also went both ways, where if you fired spells or arrows into melee you had almost as much chance of shooting your fighter in the back as you were to hit an enemy. Sometimes even more than 50% chance.
But, coming from one who never really liked the DPS role and really was always a tank or a healer, I've always liked playing that support role, its always more reactive than the "hit these buttons in this order for maximum damage, and who cares what the enemy is doing I'm killing stuff". Now there are some things you can alleviate this with, one is to decentralize which some games have done. If everyone can self heal, who needs a healer? If everyone can absorb enough damage, who needs a tank?
Personally, I find it boring if everyone's doing the same thing, and I often like the class roles. Even if you gave characters a list of skills to choose from ranging through everything from healing and tanking to dps and debuffing, I'd be willing to bet that people would very quickly specialize. Of course not entirely, a tank would probably take a few self healing things and the dps would also take a little tank, but people would specialize. And then a group of the specialists would trivialize everything that was made for a group of generalists, and then you've essentially got player based classes and content needing to be generated for those specialists and specific skill combinations that become the "required" tank and "required" healer and other support roles.
Mostly, it comes down to this. None of us in the real world are 100% something, but everyone specializes. There are few companies and corporations that are built of jack of all trades only. Even a game development company, there are designers, developers, producers, testers, managers, artists and these are specializations because it is more efficient to do it that way.
Which is what it all comes to. Efficiency. Players can and do find the most efficient way of doing things.
Don't you think it's odd that Parties even in WoW are not typically built with 5 healer tank dpsers? About the only time that happened was when Blood DKs came out and when I stopped that possibility was already on its way out. But you could build every character to self heal, do damage, and take a few hits before passing the threat. But you don't because its inefficient. Its more efficient to build a role and play that role.
Those who are willing to lead, Tank.
Those who are willing to assist, Heal.
Those who look out only for themselves, DPS.
One misconception posted a few time here is that EVE doesn't have the trinity.
It most certainly does, it just doesn't require you to use all 3 elements in every situation.
In the simple PVE such as mission running, you can get by with a good tank and fair DPS, self healing is normally adequate to get by.
However in the more challenging PVE, inclusing Complexes, Wormholes and Incursions all 3 elements are clearly needed, someone has to tank the room, someone needs to heal the tanker (logistics ships), crowd control can sometimes help (webbers) and of course, you need to sometimes kill your opponents with massive DPS before they kill you.
PVP is a different story, the tanking role pretty much not necessary. Its all about focused fire and killing the other side as rapidly as possible, however healing plays a huge role with elaborate spider tanking set ups, logistic ships healing, buffing ships boosting armor/damage, debuffing ships disabling the enemy (neutralizers, jammers), crowd control (warp scramblers/webbers) all working with DPS.
Now depending on the size of the fight you might not bring all of the above elements, or you might overcompensate in one area (DPS perhaps) in order to not worry about bringing a debuffer along with.
As I mentioned previously, I think GW2 will be the watershed MMO that will really show how well a non-trinity based title will play out and for that reason alone I'll be giving it a try.
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I was just wondering, in what Fantasy novel or Fantasy Movies do we actually see a Cleric h that casts healing magic that suddenly heals all wounds, because that would make them gods.
But we always see them buff the team members, cast an protective spell or damage enhancing spells, speed enhancing spells.
Lets not destroy the trinity, but change the way the rolls play.
Clerics can only cast protective spells, but they can't move away from their circle of light which they draw their powers.
Mages has high damage, but it takes time to cast, and it stuns or damages the mob severely like movement is permantly disabled. ( leg blown off, or such ) ( and if you have more mages, their spells interact with each other, ice and earth , oil and fire ...etc
Tanks ( plate wearers ) move slow but high damage , or ( shield carrier ) casts a wall that blocks all sights to the casters but does no damage. ( can be upgraded to spike walls and such ) but of a certain radius, so positioning and planning is key
Leather wearers, moves quickly, quick damages but when enemy hit you, you can get concussions and will be out of combat for a while. But they can set traps to alter their direction. ( ink in the eye, stink bombs to disorient )
Its just my opinion, but won't this eliminate the need for any specifiy rolls for dungeon crawls.
If all you have is leather wearers, you will all move around using traps and disorient the enemy.
If all you have is plate wearers, you can have some that uses shields, and some high damages that slices off the enemy's limbs one by one.
If all you have is mages, you would set up fire traps , ice the floor to distract the enemy as you blast off nuclear bomb ( combo of fires balls )
if all you have is clerics, then you can have light based attacks where you can bring the weight of the light on the enemy.
And everyone bandages and rests after a battle.
And in PVP that would be an actual battle formation, ( Mages in the back, Archers infront of them, Plate wearers march forward while some stays to form a shield wall for the mages and archers. And some leather wearers behind the plate wearers. Of course if you are attacking a better general and they flank you, then you are screwed, just like any war. No miracle heals.
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I disagree on several points here. The reason we have the trinity is that it's the basis for creating sand-box structures (encounters and environment) requiring team-play. In it's day WoW had some of the best teaming rythms ever. This would be the Molten Core/Blackwing Lair era IMO.
Encounters where people would actually TALK for a sec before an encounter to get the combat squad lined up (Bob, you CC mob A, Jean mob B, Frank you tank the Elite . . .), then execution! A practiced team would DANCE the encounter, you could SEE the challenges each role was having (e.g. a mob broke early from Jean's Ice Trap, and she double trapped it after pulling it back to her with a shot).
That was some good stuff, good game play, and opportunity to see people play classes they had mastered.
You are correct, NPCs don't attack players like players do. Hopefully an evolutionary tract that will slowly change, with NPCs getting smarter. Of course it may be developers WON'T do this because the vast majority of the player base would find that too hard. (e.g. Magister's Terrace in WoW, the encounter with the boss with four random-class spawned adds).
It is not a given that players play DPS or Hybrids because Healers die first and Tanks last. It has been my experience players jump on DPS classes because of a simple human dynamic that, IMO, kills a game's development in some respects: People LOVE to simply PEW-PEW-PEW, and then pew-pew some more.
There is a FASCNINATING lack of team-based awareness in the last two MMOs I've hit: The standard strat is to simply RUN at the mobs by people as they mash buttons frantically. Very little teamwork, very little squad/team awareness, everyone simply figuring everyone else will figure it all out.
Haphazard application of CC or debuff removal, haphazard or non-existant awareness of pulling/moving/manipulating mobs to keep from killing someone(s).
Just see a mob, run at it, and pew-pew-pew.
Here's a reason the "Holy Trinity" shouldn't go away: It fosters the need to learn your class and work together, because there are consequences to not (e.g. failure to complete the scenario), while blurring the lines between classes too deeply fosters mindless pew-pewism.
Because if mindless pew-pewism is where MMOs are going, that's a backwards step.
Unfortunately I'm seeing more and more of that.
Wherever you go, there you are.
The problem is not design intent, it's the basic fundementals of game theory. I could explain it better with matricies and a lot of numbers, but the short version is that in any game, there will be a group of strategies/classes which (together) are better than any other combination of strategies available in the long run. If you make up a random game, the most common "winning combo" is rock-paper-scissors.
Since almost all games revolve around a health stat eventually the rock-paper-scissors outcome decays to specializing in inflicting damage, avoiding damage, regenerating.
If you want a game that does not decay to that combo, you need to either go out of your way to force a more complex balance (which risks making the game feel artificial or bloated) or have different definitions of victory other than the status of your health bar (most people completely ignore crafting or minigame-specialized characters when discussing tank-dps-healer)
The nail in the coffin for the trinity in GW2 is that they've gutted your ability to play a dedicated red-bar pusher. There are no ally-targeted spells, the skills that are useful for healing your allies are either enemy-targeted or area-targeted, and they are generally much weaker than any single professions' self heal (which, mind you, is a requirement to bring, because you have a skill slot dedicated to a self heal). This means all healing is relegated to supplementary healing. There are a lot of <support> abilities on various classes - stuff like buffs and prots and walls and condition removers and skills other professions can combo with for big damage - so those of you who enjoy supporting your teammates will have plenty to do...but sitting in the back healing is not going to be one of them. With no healbot behind you, no tank will be able to sit there soaking up all the damage and taking all the healing.
Now let's talk about tanking. Since your skills are fixed to your weapon, you can't build your character to be full of only armor skills and taunts (actually, there are no taunts in the game, so that's right out anyway). Yes, you can modify your atts to have maximum health and armor, but you're always going to have at least 3 damage skills on your bar; if you're not using them, you're only half of a character, and since max party sizes are going to be 5, you're going to be dead weight for your team.
Lastly, DPS. You can certainly build yourself to be mostly focused on damage (save for the requirement to bring a self-heal and to be mostly responsible for your own healing and damage mitigation through rolling/dodging). However, since everyone has some way of swapping skill sets in battle (most professions have one other weapon set to swap to, eles have attunements, engineers have their kits), there is nothing in the way of you going full damage most of the time, but still dropping some good support skills and control effects around the battlefield as needed. Not doing so is, again, not playing your character to their fullest. In other MMOs if you play a hybrid you're giving up a lot of power in some area, that's simply not the case in GW2.
So, while there might always be "someone taking damage, someone healing damage, and someone dealing damage", it does not have to be the case that those three roles will be fixed on individual party members for the entirety of the dungeon/event/mission. If your support character can't keep up with the healing, eventually someone else is going to need to pick up the slack. If your frontline can't handle the damage, someone else might need to step in and let him fall back and heal. If your damage characters are paying attention, they can do more for their party by filling in the other two roles as needed than they could simply spamming fireballs.
Anyone who has played GW1 knows that you don't need a holy trinity to beat difficult content. It was possible in GW1 to play like that, but seldom was it the most efficient build. GW2 is going beyond that, actively discouraging players from building their characters in such a way by simply not giving them the tools necessary to create these builds (taunts, big other-ally heals, lots of personal damage reduction skills). In light of all of this, calling it a waste of developers' time to even try to break the trinity is just ignorant.
1. A lot of games are becoming multiplayer and online. A lot of mmorpgs are taking ideas/systems in other games and adding them. It's always a fluid genre.
2. HT works up to a point. I think perhaps in turn based games or games where blocking contact/distance = difference between melee and ranged abilities used and in turn may have helped give rise to strategy of HT? But as mmorpgs become more infused with faster connections and physics engines that allow real-time additions not just conditions on statistics that are adjustable before combat state then calculated each turn; instead combat allowing movement and position and persistent battlefield effects to influence stats and which skills used I think HT becomes subservient to giving players options for their on-the-spot decisions (as well as pre-planning) that leads to versatility being the most important tool... and more variety being the spice of combat, surely?
3. I think football/soccer/futbol is an apt analogy: A defender looks after the backline and marks the opposition strikers/offensive players. Note an offensive player can be any of midfield/defender/striker! Second a defender can score a goal and if they are tall (usually) they are especially good at offensive set-pieces. Another defender a type called a wing-back can be an auxillary offensive player coming up and creating an overlap on the wing or support midfielder crossing the ball into a crowded penalty area for the strikers. That is just a bit of the variety and versatility in this world game. It's dynamic but formation and strategy are very important ie how to defend a lead etc.
http://www.gdcvault.com/play/1014633/Classic-Game-Postmortem
Let's throw away this concept of "because everyone can perform all the roles the game will not be group oriented" (because I feel that's just what you've gotten out of what you've read about the game) and look at it from a different point of view. What if because everyone can perform each role in their own way, they start to use skills that both help their allies as well as themselves, basically everyone is doing the things that would be expected of a trinity set-up but this time they are peforming it individually although it is benefiting not just themselves but the whole team. Wouldn't that feel like a more... group oriented game where everyone is saving each others ass, "oh you're losing health, better help you heal" "Oh, that mob is after you better pull him towards me" "Oh you're down, let me rez you." And this can be done by your whole team... not just one person, wouldn't that be a more fun game, a more active, group-oriented, "save me and I'll save you" type of game? Think about it.
This is not a game.
Uo the first mmo had no trinity, as i said trinity came afterward. Go play Uo and you will see how it shine both in pve and pvp, even if the combat system was heavily tweaked since old UO (pre EQ), since the game shifted into a item based game now; Uo wasn't a gear based game at all before, since everybody used pretty similar crafted gear.
For you i'll try to explain combat in non trinity game: it is no more about rock/scissor/paper when you solo; it is about offensive/defensive rythm since you have to both dps and heal to fight well. In group it is basically the same principle except that the character that will heal/undot is the one with enought mana to do it, and not a dedicated healer/buffer. This is a huge difference. Offense defense is not the same as tanking, supporting, you just can't mix those aspect and say they are the same, they are not.
So the dynamic of fighting is just totally different, and is great indeed. Anyone that duel in Uo know how superior that kind of combat is. Because duel become so much closer to real life duel were offensive/defensive rythm make the fight. In trinity pve it is all about that stupid rock/scissor/paper, so you know with a good % whos class will win, if both oponent have similar strengh. In group it is about adaptability of the players and it is about an other type of cohesion. But still cohesion is very imporant for the success of your group. And honeslt non trinity combat just fit so much better pvp, it is just not strange most pvp game try to stay away from the trinity. Trinity system is made and designed for pve exclusively, so once more the fact it doesn't fit to pvp is nothing strange.
Well, there is nothing really wrong with the holy triad but combat in a trinity game differs little from combat in another. You rarely get surprised and the difference between combat in Meridian 59 (the first) and Rift (the latest) is surpisingly small since it is 15 years between the games.
So the problem is that too many games using it and it eventually gets boring in the long run.
What GW2 does is one way to make combat feels different, with a good AI that works fine.
There are other ways as well, the only thing that matters is that there should be some kind of co operation and tactics, GW2 solves that with attacks that combos together with other peoples skills among others.
The important thing at least in the long run is that a new games combat should feel different from the combat of old games. You just can do the exact same thing so long.
Heck, I would love a "Theif" based MMO where the main thing would be avoiding combat instead of fighting in it, there would be no need for a classic triad there even if you would use different kinds of thieves for different things (lockpicking, finding hidden stuff, solving puzzles, disarming regular and magical traps and so on). It would also feel very different.
There will always be room for a triad game but if the genre want to start growing again we also need a few games with different combat systems.
Another idea is by using a commander like in Natural selection instead of healers and put in formation combat (the commander will help you where to stand, you will see a glowing spot where he put you).
The possibilities are endless.
People acting like the trinity is inevitable seem to forget a lot of basic facts about what is required for it to work, which is actually quite a lot.
First, the AI needs to be designed with the trinity in mind. The targets it picks have to be heavily influence by the role of the target (often through role abilities). You can't have intelligent AI, because then the trinity wouldn't work.
Secondly, tanks need a lot of specific sorts of abilities in oder for HT to work. They need to be far, far tougher than anyone else. If not, then they aren't needed. They cannot deal much damage, otherwise the flimsy dps aren't needed. They need to have artificial abilities that make enemies attack them even though they are no threat.
Thirdly, you need to have people that can spam healing constantly and people need to be taking enough damage so that this is necessary. Healing can't generate a lot of threat generally, or the healer will get killed (if he's very tough, then you are back to not needing a tank, so healers must be flimsy).
The need for DPS is rather debateable, actually, but as it is the one role that actually makes sense in a more general way, it is rather hard to avoid.
That's a lot of stuff, affecting every aspect of the game from enemy health, damage, intelligence, to class abilities and specailizations. It's far from trivial or even natural to have the Holy Trinity.
I'd further add that this is hardly the only way to have specializations. You can easily have a game with different roles. As I mentioned once before in these forums, you could have a Greek Warfare MMO where you have cavalry (fast strikers), phalanx (slow, powerful, frontl-line attackers), and ranged attackers. A lot of warfare historically has had similar roles (with others), and definitely never had the MMO roles. Or you could have roles that use, deny, and control areas, do more straight up attacking, and so forth. GW2 is more the latter, where each person has most of the healing needed, but working together and using AoE buffs and combos is needed. Combos is another way you can encourage people to interact with each other. One of the best parts about FFXI when I played it was the group combos (sadly I hear they don't matter what now). That require a lot of teamwork and made a huge difference...the trinity really was more of an obstacle to good play than anything else, imho.
Hard to imagine you know much about game theory when you equate rock-paper-scissors to tank-healer-dps. They are NOT the same at all. RPS works because each options counters one of the others and is countered by a third. That's decidedly NOT what is happening in the Holy Trinity. RPS is a lot more like real combat than the Holy Trinity could ever be, and is an example of another and in many ways more sensible method of divying up roles.
And just like real life combat, just because recovery is important in the long term, that doesn't mean it matters in an individual battle. There's no need for healing/recovery to matter. Further, there's no need to give that as one of the jobs, anymore than you should give the "mitigating damage" obligation to just one person. There are many, many successful games that avoid this both on the computer and elsewhere. Rather pathetically such mechanics are almost never seen in MMOs.
So let's have roles that MAKE SENSE, rather than ones that require the AI to be idiots. The Holy Trinity completely fails here, because it is as artificial as they come.
I like the GW2 solution, which seems to be going towards "you need some Crowd Control, some healing, some combos, and some damage dealing capability" and then gives everyone pretty much all the healing they need on their own (if they play smart), and lets the group figure out how they want to divide the other duties (which could go one person doing all the CC or each person having a little CC). This is a lot more fluid and makes a lot more sense.
Another article full of stuff everyone already knows.
Talking bout the issues..and keepin it funky.
When CCP can "discover" larger fonts I'll likely play more. But even with going up to 13 font and expanded size its a brutally tiny text to read. Matterfact after 20 minutes or so on my 21.5 inch viewable hd monitor it is unbearable. I think they designed a wonderful game but they gotta fix that for many of us to play.
Heh, I actually find the realism thumpers here kinda funny. MMOs are far, far, far from realistic, that's why they are games.
Why have these crazy health bars, if you get a sword to the face or shot in the neck, you're dead. What's with all these armor mitigation in the thousands requiring multiple hits to kill a human being, and what's with killing 20 more goblins making you able to take another five hits from a sword?
And what's all this respawning stuff? If you're dead, you died, go reroll, right? Let's make this real! I want a real combat simulator in my MMOs, not these silly AI rules and what not.
If combat were realistic in an MMO you'd have first person shooter rules without respawns and the game would be worse then boring.
And it may really be a matter of personal preference, and if it is I can accept that not everybody shares my opinion, but I'm typically not a fan of most generalist games. Well everyone can do everything, so everyone essentially ends up being a clone of each other. Oh wait, the characters can specialize? You mean like heal/support, damage mitigation, and damage dealing? Now you've got classes again.
Personally, I think that if any MMO would actually incorporate positioning mechanics, so many issues with the ideas of the classes would be solved. But even EVE never seemed to get around to that, hence why yould could literally fire through an asteroid or friendly ship and hit your target.
And for sword and board MMOs, think about what that would do to strategy. No more of this mindlessly mashing a specific set of combos to maintain hate, all of a sudden a front line fighter (or fighters) are about containing an enemy who's actually actively trying to get to or throw something at the people in the back, who are trying to manuever for a good shot and then get behind cover again. no more "hate" which yes is a ridiculous mechanic, just an intelligent AI that you have to out think, who can push back fighters to create an opening, who can pull back to get around the fighters who let their guard down.
Personally, I think that's a far better solution than "You're special, just like everybody else."
Maybe you should spend about 10 minutes thinking of other avenues of specialization. D&D, other CRPGs, and computer games in general have had many, many different and important types of specialization. Only MMOs ever make them along healing, damage mitigation, and damage dealing as the most important/vital areas of specialization. Well, think or read the thread, either one would do.
Actually, looking at the older versions of DnD, there was in fact damage mitigation on the front line (Fighters and Paladins, Barbarians later) DPS specialization (Rogues, rangers, wizards, sorcerers) and Healers (Clerics). And they did in fact perform their jobs rather well, even if the script was a little different. And those were pretty much the three roles you could specialize into, though dual classing allowed more generalizing overall.
Of course, there's non combat specializations, but really, those are the three main areas of combat as have been said. And even in 4th edition with the introduction of new wigged out abilities, it really further defines the roles. Warden comes to mind with the ability to drag just about any enemy right in front of them. And non combat specializations really don't translate into any combat area of a game, in practically any game.
Really, thinking back to any Tabletop where combat was involved, those really are the three roles available. And you can expand pretty much every combat "specialization" to one or two of those. Sniper? You're there to kill the enemies before they kill you or your team. Engineer? Build turrets to kill enemies faster.
You sit there and say that thinking for 10 minutes and you could name many specializations that would not fit into heal/support, tank, or dps, yet you mention none. I would be willing to bet that you could fit any combat specialization into one of those three roles, and if you can prove me wrong I'll have learned something. Other than that, this thread hasn't developed any different ideas for specializations, only touting generalization as a more practical way of doing combat. Which is by definition not specializing at all.
You either never played D&D or your memory is clouded by Holy Trinity Glasses.
Yes, you had more damage mitigation on the front line. Who had it? Fighters, Paladins, Rangers, Rogues (due to high dex), and such classes like CLERICS. Basically, anyone who actually fought on the front line. Why? Because they needed it to survive. Why? Because anyone on the front line could get attacked in melee. No threat control means no tanks and that means everyone needs similar protection. Hence front line people all had good AC one way or another.
Now who did damage? Just rogues, rangers, wizards, sorcers? Well, that suggestion of yours is quite frankly totally wrong. Fighters in all editions of D&D could put out a ton of damage. Clerics and Druids could put out quite a bit of damage, and in fact were among the most effective combatants in 3.X (CoDzilla,* anyone?) In D&D everyone can do significant damage unless you completely neglect that aspect of the class. Also, a huge role for any magic user was handling aoe effects, including crowd control (and buffing). Acting like they are dpsers is plain silly (and in fact, a high level wizard can be tougher than a fighter).
Now how is healing done in D&D? It's done mostly outside of combat. Healing in combat is not spammed like in MMO. A huge part of dealing with damage in D&D is simply avoiding it. If an emergency happens, then a Cleric or Druid might have one to three spells to deal with that, but they have to last for several encounters. Most healing they have doesn't heal enough to be useful in combat, and it is just better if they attack, use a CC or defensive spell, or something else.
Trying to fit D&D classes into Holy Trinity roles just doesn't work. Enemies aren't stupid, classes don't have the right abilities, if everyone attacks the fighter then he dies (e.g. can't tank like a HT Tank), the healer simply can't keep up with all the damage in combat. Heck, the simple difference in toughness between front-line people and others in D&D just isn't nearly as pronounced as the difference between tanks and non-tanks in HT.
Anyhow, you are trying to jam round pegs into square holes...it doesn't work. It is perhaps the worst characteristic of people who advocate the HT...their complete and utter inability to understand there are other possible ways to have combat roles that have at best the most superficial of similarities with the Holy Trinity. Fact is, HT is far from the only game in town, especially outside of MMOs (where HT basically doesn't exist at all).
*Stands for Cleric or Druid, since either could be an absolute combat monster.
I love the trinity but I agree 100% with the OPer, blurred classes are the best. I'm currently playing Rift and I'm a Cloromancer (Healer caster), Elementalist (Pet caster), and Pyromancer (DPS caster) all at the same time. Last night I was running a dungeon with some people and our tank went down. So what happened... well as a DPS role the boss jumped me. However as a Cloromancer I healed myself, and as a Pyromancer I quickly threw on my damage shield. I effectively tanked the boss as a cloth wearing DPS rolled wizard. AMAZING I say. Its moments like that that you truely feel as epic as Gandolf.
The botton line is, teamwork is great, and honestly I wouldn't have made it without my friends (even the dead tank who tanked for the crucial 45 seconds it took us to defeate the bosses adds) but its great when anyone can fill any role. Sure I could tank, but our actual tank was way better up untill he fell in battle, but what Rift does so masterfully is that even if one person in your group dies, hope does not.
Lastly even in Rift, someone has to play the role of healer/DPS/tank. However the game is so flexable that you can switch your role instantly if you need to (or relatively instantly). So yah hybrids, blurrs... its all good and a lot of fun!
I couldn't agree more. In D&D, back when I played it (AD&D, 2nd Edition rules) there was no trinity and heck clerics were just as good at "tanking" as well... anyone. The only class that was paper thin were wizards and sorcerers and with the right stats they too could defend themselves. I'd love to see D&D concepts put into an MMO.
I think Richard Bartle would say something different about the trinity origins.
http://www.youhaventlived.com/qblog/2010/QBlog190810A.html
Epic Music: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vAigCvelkhQ&list=PLo9FRw1AkDuQLEz7Gvvaz3ideB2NpFtT1
https://archive.org/details/softwarelibrary_msdos?&sort=-downloads&page=1
Kyleran: "Now there's the real trick, learning to accept and enjoy a game for what it offers rather than pass on what might be a great playing experience because it lacks a few features you prefer."
John Henry Newman: "A man would do nothing if he waited until he could do it so well that no one could find fault."
FreddyNoNose: "A good game needs no defense; a bad game has no defense." "Easily digested content is just as easily forgotten."
LacedOpium: "So the question that begs to be asked is, if you are not interested in the game mechanics that define the MMORPG genre, then why are you playing an MMORPG?"
RPS is just the extreme simple case where there is only one possible way to play each strategy and only one way to play the game - no distractions, no complications, no variation between the encounters. Lurking underneath each complex game is a very simple game once you boil off all the complications. It may not be practical to calculate (especially when human reflexes and changing encounters are factored in), but powergamers eventually find something close to the essence of it.
(Now, a counter-argument against me that I would recommend is the ecosystem analogy - nature is full of different species that find their niches; that leads into an interesting discussion of the qualitative difference between themepark and sandbox game dynamics once you reach a critical threshold of different minigames)
You seem to have completely missed my point. The RPS dynamic is NOT what the Holy Trinity is. You don't have tanks beating healers beating dps. The interelation is just not the same at all.
RPS would be something like Cavalry, Infantry, Archers, where Cavalry units beat Archery units which beat Infantry units which beat Cavalry units. That's something completely foreign to Holy Trinity design. It would also be far more dynamic than HT in a group scenario, since Rock players would need to try to get at Scissor units and stay away from Paper units, etc, etc -- there's a lot more movement and tactics involved inherently than you see in the Holy Trinity. HT tries to make up for this with gimmicks, because that's the only way to make fights interesting there as the base dynamic is as boring as can be.
And the better counterargument against your other points is that if the "best solution" and the 2nd through 10th best solutions are all within say 5% of each other, then the vast majority of gamers don't care (and the variation between setups will be far smaller than the skill variation between players anyhow). Sure you'll see "elite" guilds making a big deal out of it, but that doesn't really matter.
Beyond that, even claiming that HT will somehow always be the best solution completely ignores the fact that HT only works because of a great deal of the game's design must support it. Remove those supports and HT just falls flat on its face. Instead of designing a game for HT, the game can be designed with some other collection of systems in mind, perhaps one that allows a lot more individual flexibility (even if the group is expected to bring certain minimum sorts of abilities to the table). A huge problem (out of many) with HT is that it is inherently very anti-hybrid, since you can't have half of a tank and still tank effectively. Design for a different system, and you can enable a lot more player freedom. GW2 looks to be doing this (as an example). Eve, from what I understand, already does this.
Yeah, positioning were the thing in a game like that. But I guess the devs think that we are too dumb to use any actual tactics.
There is DDO, and Cryptip is releasing their online version of Neverwinter nights later this year. Both are CORPGs so not exactly MMOs but should at least be close enough.
Guildwars AI actually makes the combat closer to P&P combat as well. Far from perfect but at least a bit.
BTW: Check out the "Pathfinder" pen and paper RPG, it is the real improved D&D instead of the crap that is 4 edition. It is actually surprisingly good (even if Monte Cook is slightly involved).