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The End of the Holy-Trinity?
wvmaxfangvw
Member Posts: 22
No not those guys. The other Holy-Trinity: Tanky, Spanky and Grouphugs McHealbot. For those of you who don't know, these three have been the backbone of RPGs since Massively Multiplayer meant your kitchen table sat 10 with room for everybody to roll their dice comfortably. It seems, however, that at a young age of 35 (let's be realistic, that's ancient by Gamer standards) their reign is coming to an end.
First, let's have a look at the inherent flaw in the Holy-Trinity concept. "XXXXXX Group Looking for Healer/Tank then we go!" has been a much loathed yet tolerated battle cry since the early days of the MMORPG and one of the reasons they failed to capture the mainstream attention until very recently. You simply required more time to prepare for playing than you actually spent playing. The simple fact is, being the guy getting punched in the face or throwing band-aids is far less appealing than punching faces and throwing knives. This creates an inbalance where the number of potential simultaneous groups is capped solely by the availability of two specific types of characters who can pick and choose from a vast legion of damage dealers desperately needing them. To make matters worse it is even further limited by these two joining separate groups, each of which needs their counter-part but neither of them with enough room to combine. Thank god back in those days I always played a healer and made it a habbit to keep several good tanks on speed dial. My experience was still horrendous but could have been far worse otherwise.
More in the now, talking specifically Q4 2011 and the 2012 roster, which is swiftly closing in on us, we see a near-simultaneous paradigm shift on the part of developers (as often happens when a good idea has reached it's proper time). Versatility was once a fancy way to say that your character sucked at everything equally and specialization (mini-maxing) was king. Now, like the dinosaur, we find that which can not adapt is destined to perish. Three of the biggest looming titles; Star Wars: TOR, The Secret World, and Guild Wars 2 are all three moving in the same direction, away from the Trinity. Though not all in the same fashion.
Bioware (SWTOR) has expanded on what classes like the Druid, Paladin and Shaman archetypes of their predecessors already knew, protecting your friends does not make for an innate aversion to smashing people skulls in. Their class system starts with all characters being primarily damage dealing roles and later gives them the chance to specialize in a pure damage focus or branch out into support and tanking roles. Yes, long ago in a galaxy far-far away the entire populace consisted of Paladins, Druids and Shaman. Even the pure healing class for each faction is more akin to a Shadow Priest. All in all SWTOR is a fair bid for knocking WoW off it's high-horse. With a huge pre-existing fan base, familiar game mechanics and stepping away from a genre that's been beaten to death SWTOR's biggest hurdle will most likely be living up to it's own hype.
Like the boys at Bioware, Arenanet is also departing from the old Trinity system and taking a similar route it seems. Their objective is to make the roles of tanks and healers obsolete by giving every player a means of getting allies back on their feet and including control and support abilities in every classes kit. There are some key differences between the two; most notably the ability for "dead" players to lash out with a last desperate attack by which if they are able to score a killing blow the will rally back to their feet and rejoin the fray. Though I had a falling out with NCSoft some years back I must admit, well played A-net. Well played indeed.
Finally we come to my most anticipated launch in some time, Funcom's the Secret World. While the list of things they're doing to shake up the MMO scene is quite extensive (which as history shows can really go either way for the public recpetion) I'll try to stay on topic. Are you ready? Every character has access to any of the 500 skills. Instead of levels your XP earns skill points which you use to buy skills. You are limited on the kit that you can have available at any given time but the combinations are endless and you can change up at (almost) any time you desire. They combine this with an equipment system where your wardrobe is purely cosmetic and boast (seemingly with every right) that their game will allow you to truly be exactly the character that you want to be rather than a predestined class. I've played many MMOs in my career and though I haven't played them all, this sounds like a genuinely new approach. If not I can only hope they learned the lessons of the previous failure from which the idea was adopted. There's the obvious concerns of Funcom's track record with launches but hopefully some key staff changes that seperate this product from the ones that came before will also see a stable launch rather than a half finished game hitting the store shelves.
All three games have adjusted content from the norm to offer a challenging yet achievable encounter for single players and groups alike. Be it SWTORs design to make the lack of those roles more forgiving, GW2's skill kits based around crowd control and battle revival or TSW's method by which encounters will advise a number for each role as recommendations for how heavily certain aspects (Tank, Heal, CC, Melee or Ranged) should be weighed when the group, as a whole, is adjusting their kits.
Only time will tell if the decision made by these developers is actually insight or folly but I think the market is ready for this type of change. While the Holy Trinity has been good to us, as responsible gamers we owe it to Tanky, Spanky and especially the desperately under-appreciated Grouphugs McHealbot to let these seasoned veterans retire the tools of their trade and take a well deserved rest in their twilight years.
Author's Note: Yes I know I used reference to WoW a lot despite the fact that they were hardly the first to do... well anything that they did.. but an analogy that 12 million people gets is far more effective than one only understood by 200K+ the 1% of readers willing to Google the reference.
Comments
Kind of a long winded post there. Anyway, from my experience in the SWTOR beta they didn't do away with the trinity at all.
And TSW doesn't really do away with it but the characters are so flexible that anyone can perform that role (no classes anyway there so no assigned role).
First glance at TSW and the developer who was presenting it told his group had a tank, two ranged damage dealers, one melee dmg dealer and a healer. Now, I don't know how many abilities the game has or how flexible it is, it was a huge disappointment for me to see a "tank" in the game with a tanktop no less and freaking sledgehammer. The game has firearms and the "tank" is stuck with a melee weapon.
Sounds like they didn't go too far from the holy trinity afterall. Total disappointment.
I skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been -Wayne Gretzky
yeah I know it's a wall of text and sorry about that but "Everybody can do everything in a bunch of new games" just didn't seem a worth while post, meant to be more of an article.
SWTor doesn't stray far from the pattern to be sure but during Beta Flashpoints groups I was with didn't seem to have too much trouble swapping out a Conculer/Sorcerer (excuse the spelling) for say 2 Damage/Heal classes and still being successful. The they still use the lables but there was no class that was ONLY a meat shield, not class that was ONLY good for healing. In WoW terms there was no pure Prot Warrior or Holy Priest option.
SWTOR sure looks like a trinity game to me. A pick your skills off a list system for The Secret World says nothing about whether it will be a trinity game. Depending on other game mechanics, it could easily force you to either focus on one role or be worthless.
holy trinity is far from dead. imo, it will probably be around for longer than any of us. but have different options to choose is satisfying, indeed.
He's in a tank top cuz that's how he wants to dress at least he wasn't wearing a tutu or wedding dress. He's using a hammer because that's where % block boost and + threat are.
Appearance is purely cosmetic your stats come from elsewhere. The group that they showed was very limited as it's newb character so doesn't have the diversity. In the same preview you can see the "hammer chick" swap out most of her hammer stuff for fireballs and lightning bolts. Obviously an older character would have more options for versatility than one being shown in the first dungeon encounter of the game. Some skills are weapon specific (getting smashed with a hammer = stun, getting slashed with a sword slightly different effect) but just as many are available to any weapon set. You can take the defensive abilities from your hammer guy and use them with a sword and combine those with the ability to throw grenades from the assault rifle set if you wish.
For the focusing one a single role:
If they execute the game design as planned the idea is that different content will require different skills even as a solo character. Some encounters will not be possible if you haven't picked up some CC from somewhere, others will have enemies with 100% immunity to melee/ranged/element so you'll have to switch up a bit to hit them with something that will work. Stuff like that. There's hundreds of hours worth of interview and preview material from the past couple months going into a lot of aspects, far too much to bother trying to sum up or to take a single vid/interview and read between too many lines.
Sorry if this comes off as Fanboi defensive; I'm honestly aiming for clearifying and informative for any who show genuine interest.
If a developer wants to break the trinity, how about simply removing all forms of in-combat healing. No potions, no spells, nothing to protect a character from dieing. Make healing model (to a degree) real world healing -- time, rest, attendents, surgery and medications. It could be done, and done well. The problem might be that the playerbase wouldn't necessarily want to play such a game.
A realistic heaing system would have to rely a lot less on combat. Players would be forced to take a Salvor Hardin approach to gaming -- 'Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent.' (Issac Asimov, The Foundation Trilogy). A game would need a lot of other activities to fill the sheer amounts of time characters are engaged in fighting. This would entail a lot of other systems, social, political, scientific, artistic, athletic, and whatever else the developer could toss in. Combat would be dangerous, since there would be no 10-30 second downtime (at most) to recover health.
Ultimately, such an effort at a realistic healing system would probably be closer to a simulation than a game. But, there's an awful lot of people who buy and play MS Flight Simulator. So, I don't really know if this idea would work or not.
Logic, my dear, merely enables one to be wrong with great authority.
SWTOR is a trinity game; however, so many differant classes can utilize DPS, Tank, and Healer. It allows for a tank to tank, then back off and have another player tank, while the first tank switches to heals or maybe DPS. One can assume a couple differant roles, but its still very much tank, dps, and heal. Some folks can do all 3
It is possible, but is it effective? The way it usually works in Holy Trinity games, extreme specialization and sticking to your role within encounter is superior to changing roles in battle. How does it work in TOR's most difficult encounters?
On the most difficult encounters, and if you know how the combat is going to proceed, the group is going to result to the trinity
If you don't know how the encounters flow, then it is actually pretty nice to be able to adjust to the situation at hand and survive it
I agree. I wish more games relied on adjusting to situation instead of memorizing and reacting to gimmick boss tactics. The only fun part of coordinated trinity combat for me is when things go wrong and you have to improvise your way out.
This is absolute b.s.
You clearly dont have the first clue about what you are talking.
There are 8 classes in SWTOR, each coming with 3 skilltrees. Of these 8 classes, 3 have a skilltree for a full featured tank, and 3 others have a skilltree for a full featured healer. All other skilltrees are various forms of support and damage dealing.
However, you can NOT change your skilltrees on the fly. A SW:TOR tank will be tank until you return to base and reskill them. Same for healers. In fact reskilling will, much like in WoW, require ingame ressources.
A tank can never be a healer or vice versa. Also, there are 2 classes which are stuck on damage dealing, no matter what.
Holy trinity will exist as long as game developers don't create smarter bosses. As long as it's as simple as making the boss hit the guy with the best defense (instead of for example the guy with the best offense), the trinity will exist.
Now imagine if the bosses were made actually "smart" and the players would have to use terrain, their own bodies and other methods to block the boss from killing their glass cannon. They would have to be ready for a target switch at any second, etc.
Of course this would require much more time than designing a tank&spank encounter with bazillion hitpoints and two or three nicely patterned (and predictable) special events which need to be avoided.
Would probably end up being too tough for your average MMO gamer.
Everyone has a good say and the OP would not have been taken seriously if he hadn't sounded intelligent (long-winded). Lucky me I'm bored and will read without skipping, huh? Here's my 2¢ and barely more. Last big game I invested in was RIFT. I got to play their dungeons thrice. That's it. I leveled all the way up and quit with nothing to do and bored. Why? I WANTED my char to be archer/ranger/rogue. I'M SICK OF BEING A TANK OR HEALER!!!
the normal trinity will be around forever
there always have been exceptions with dual classing / switch classing / multiclassing -- but they are not the norm
EQ2 fan sites
The majority want trinity hence fourth there will always be a trinity. You may get a game or two without, to try and cover some untouched bases. Be happy with that. Something for everybody
I'll be watching GW2 carefully to see how well this "new" concept works.
Speaking of that, someone suggested removing all healing. Lineage 1 did that sort of, they replaced the role of healer with potions, everyone carried hundreds of them and fights were frequently decided by who had the most potions in their inventory.
While the game had Warriors, Archers, and mages, everyone was pretty much a DPSer, there were no roles to speak of.
Didn't allow for much creativity for boss fights, pretty much all involved trying to stay alive while burning down its hit points.
"True friends stab you in the front." | Oscar Wilde
"I need to finish" - Christian Wolff: The Accountant
Just trying to live long enough to play a new, released MMORPG, playing New Worlds atm
Fools find no pleasure in understanding but delight in airing their own opinions. Pvbs 18:2, NIV
Don't just play games, inhabit virtual worlds™
"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
GW2 is the only one of them that is flat out removing the "healer" and "tank" completely. You can't target allies, for example, so there are no direct ally heals. Instead of direct healing, you will have a primary self-heal, and you'll (no matter the profession) be able to use skills that have as part of their abiliity a splash type or AoE light healing buff. However, far more important than healing is flat out controlling the enemy so that you and allies don't get hurt much in the first place. So lose the healer, welcome the shared support and control roles that everyone will have in addition to their abilities to deliver the pain. Basically, the trinity is redefined, and everyone is their own self-contained trinity at the same time. You can't be a tank... there's no taunt mechanism, no way to hold and maintain aggro, and no targeted heals to keep you alive while getting pounded. Everyone will need to have an active role in all aspects of combat... there won't be any pure specializing. (Sure, you may build your character to favor support or control, but you won't be able to do only one of those aspects purely.)
So this is really the primary test to see if the MMO world can do without the trinity. With Closed Beta for GW2 beginning tomorrow, it won't be too long before we find out how well it plays out, and if the current crop of WoW-reared MMO folks can adapt and enjoy themselves while doing so.
Oderint, dum metuant.