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If the trinity were to expand ...
azmundai
Member UncommonPosts: 1,419
what other roles would it expand to and how would content be designed to accommodate those roles?
I realize there are a lot of people that don't like the trinity .. and the need to have roles and I appreciate that. Please be mature enough to appreciate that there is at least 1 person in the world that actually thinks they are a good thing. This post isn't about why I think they are a good thing .. I am just curious what other roles you think might work.
Regenerator:
What would it be like if mana/energy/etc were more finite and for more difficult encounters you needed someone in your group to cast regenerating buffs and spells? This would essentially be a healer for your mana/energy/etc bar.
Magic/Physical tanks:
What if tanking was broken into 2 roles. 1 for traditional warrior style mechanics and another where the clothies were the tanks. This has kinda been done before but not on a gamewide scale. That demon in SSC could be tanked by a warlock. Having played a traditional meatshield for most of TBC I found that fight to be quite interesting to tank along side a warlock. I remember mage-tanking the imps after broodlord in BWL too .. that was a blast 
and kite tanking the frost vulnerable mobs after the first drake .. man I miss that instance.
Buffer:
Basically vanilla wow shaman/paladin .. cleanse bot. This is a tough one. How can this be made into a more fun role overall? It's implementation in early wow is one of the things that to me .. ruined the idea of expanding roles. It was just boring as hell according to all the palys I knew back then.
Crowd Control:
I think this is easy enough to make cool. There are plenty of fights that use CC in many MMOs ..
Pullers:
pulling mobs, picking off runners
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How does it all play out?
The first thought is there would need to be encounters that didn't require a tank. Easy enough really. Think SOA in SWTOR without the tanking phase. Also fights that didnt require healers. Not sure how that would work.
Regenerators become a problem really fast .. as you would likely need one for every fight just like healers .. how do you prevent the need for this? Short fights, lots of mobility (buffer could have mobility buffs)
Anyway ... any other ideas?
LFD tools are great for cramming people into content, but quality > quantity.
I am, usually on the sandbox .. more "hardcore" side of things, but I also do just want to have fun. So lighten up already 
Comments
I got this one!!
Yea ok so, in DAoC (I know i know i reference DAoC a lot) you had druids/clerics/shamans, those were the 3 main buffers for each faction...
What made these buffers playable?
Buff shears...
So they are able to place these buffs on their allies yea? Why not be able to strip them from your enemies? It's kind of like a debuff, but instead of it being on a timer it completely shears that buff off said player....
Just a thought, i mean that would make the buffers job much more tedious, not only trying to shear your enemies, but keeping your important buffs on the right people...
Plus if you give them a small amount of support, like a 10 sec root, or something small, but could come in handy, maybe a small grp heal? not anything that's zomg win, but something that can take the ease off the main healers... Can't have dps though, cause then they'd be the all in one class...
Just sayin... Think about it.
The "Youtube Pro": Someone who watches video's on said subject, and obviously has a full understanding of what is being said about such subject.
well wow shaman had purge, but yea that is definitely something to consider.
I think the defacto 2nd roll for any class should be dps .. or maybe that is something that can be chosen by the player .. but I think toons that are all but completely devoid of DPS .. will be a little too niche. while I loathe soloing .. I cant see a game being completely devoid of it. granted, early MMO healers were weak dps and more difficult to level .. and there are some of us that were fine with that, and even relished in it a little .. so yea .. stuff to think about.
I can see an interesting synergy .. what if the more you buff your friends, the more powerful your purge becomes? So you buff buff buff buff (but rebuffing someone with > 50% of it's buff time left doesnt stack a charge so you actually have to buff unbuffed players to get the purge stack. And then you purge and you purge 3-5 things.
LFD tools are great for cramming people into content, but quality > quantity.
I am, usually on the sandbox .. more "hardcore" side of things, but I also do just want to have fun. So lighten up already
I actually think that the trinity has been dumbed down in the current "WoW-era." In EQ, the "trinity" actually had four necessary roles:
Tank, Healer, DPS, and CC
CC was just as vital as the "main" trinity later on in the game, and there was an entire class dedicated to it (Enchanter).
Anyway, if you define a "trinity system" as a system wherein players must take different specialized roles in order to succeed in combat...then I would personally not want the trinity to expand. Expanding the trinity would mean more specialization, which would mean that each player gets stuck in a narrower niche.
For example, healers right now can flash heal, shield, regenerate, buff, etc... But if you expand the "trinity" to have roles like "regenerator" and "buffer." Then you would have classes or specs devoted solely to a subset of what a healer used to be able to do.
Now I am totally in favor of adding different kinds of abilities to the game, but I would not want to make the narrow niche that trinity classes are put into even narrower.
Are you team Azeroth, team Tyria, or team Jacob?
At this point I just think that traditional tanking is incredibly condescending to players and while trinity makes grouping easy it makes combat formulaic, predictable and unavoidably boring.
I skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been -Wayne Gretzky
Creslin
well id kinda think this better in another thread, but here goes. The main problem I see now is that dps out number healers/tanks way more than 3 to 2. It probably more like 5 to 1, or higher.
by adding more roles, and essentially taking DPS out of the trinity and saying everyone's defacto 2nd role is dps, well my hope would be that everyone has to fill another role ~15-20% of the time, but everyone gets to dps sometimes too.
whether it is possible to work .. who knows.
LFD tools are great for cramming people into content, but quality > quantity.
I am, usually on the sandbox .. more "hardcore" side of things, but I also do just want to have fun. So lighten up already
Just knocking off a list.
Tanks
Off tanks (wouldn't cut it as main tank but can pull aggro off of back line)
Magic DPS (effective against heavily armored)
Melee DPS (effective against mobs resistant to magic)
Heals (actually 2 types, bursty and mana efficient)
Off heals (heal over time that augment normal healing)
Buffers Regenerators (usually healers or off healers)
Pullers (also used to pick off runners)
Creslin pretty much summed up my take on this.
The trinity, to me, was introduced post-WOW, when the role definitions were really condensed and the mechanics were made more mainstream and simple and just added different flavors to the roles to try to add more diversity.
I was one of the people used to four primary roles:
Was about to post the same thing. I played an Enchanter and Healer back in the early EQ days and it was impossible to log in on my Enchanter and not be bombarded by party invites. I think they were wanted more than the Healers. Not only for their CC but Breeze as well!
You just didn't party without an Enchanter, or in the least nothing serious without one.
Ever since the days of EQ, AC, UO and FFXI ~ MMOs have been getting so dumbed down and simplified. At least ANet have the balls & boobs that no one else have and are finally attempting to change things up for the better with GW2. I long for the elder days of MMO, but in all honesty as I've gotten older, the thought of spending 14-20hr days playing as I used to just isn't possible for me anymore so i welcome the more streamlined MMOs, just wish they'd all do something more than copy WoW...heh
XAPGames
thanks!
Pullers .. duh
LFD tools are great for cramming people into content, but quality > quantity.
I am, usually on the sandbox .. more "hardcore" side of things, but I also do just want to have fun. So lighten up already
It seems to me that DAOC had it all, not only the 4 mentioned areas, but a subclass of support called speeders, who were vital to not only increase movement speed tremendously, but in the case of Albion could do CC, DPS, remove CC and a host of other great utility things.
But then again, DAOC party size was 8 (and they considered making it 10 at one time I've heard) so there was plenty of room for someone of most any role except stealthers....they brought so little utility to the group, people let them join out of sympathy more than anything else.
I really loved the specialization and variety that DAOC provided, and outside of perhaps the EQ titles and some other older titles nothing in the modern era (post WOW) has come close.
I know, I'm in a minority, seems we've almost reached the point with omni-classing with GW2 having people perform all functions and roles themselves more or less.
"True friends stab you in the front." | Oscar Wilde
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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
Edited my previous reply to... look at what EQ did.
To expand the trinity would mean you would need to make monsters and AI a bit more intelligent/unforgiving.
I would like to see CC/Debuffs/Puller oriented classes like back in EQ, but those classes were largely necessary due to the difficulty of monsters and pulling back then, especially with regards to CC/debuffers.
Same thing with pulling, aggro has largely been simplified to a simple circle around the mob. It would need to be expanded/reverted back to Everquest or FFXI behavior to make a puller class really worth having.
I dont think a puller could be a valid role in todays games, or a fun one. If you needed an individual mob to be controlled you could have one ranged dps kite it, or CC it if available, or even burst it down depending on the fight and group composition. Ranged dps could also get to them if they are running away with minor positioning alterations, which likely wouldn't happen often.
Played-Everything
Playing-LoL
CC died the same way. In early WoW a 4 pull wasn't survivable without sap or sheep unless the group was over powered. If an add walked in, that was a crisis. Although the skills didn't go away, they became useless in normal leveling dungeons. Last time through the norm appears to be pull 2 groups of 4 so the OP AOE can burn them down.
I always liked CC, it gave a character a sense of being useful.
Actually the trinnity had no DPS in it, the EQ trinity was Tank, heal, crowd controll.. those 3 where required in every serious group, the other spots where filled with anything goes/ or classes that could add something besides DPS. (pullers for example)
Best MMO experiences : EQ(PvE), DAoC(PvP), WoW(total package) LOTRO (worldfeel) GW2 (Artstyle and animations and worlddesign) SWTOR (Story immersion) TSW (story) ESO (character advancement)
The 'HOLY TRINITY' in EQ is Warrior, Cleric, Enchanter. Tank, Healer, CC. DPS was never considered part of the trinity in EQ, its what you filled your group out with.
EQ was actually a bit more complex than that. A CC wasnt needed with a good puller for instance, but often you would then need a slower. EQ did it right though, 6 man groups. Easier to find a tank or healer for 6 man groups than 5.
I get what you're saying, but I think the problem is that classes in trinity systems are defined by "roles" when they should really be defined by "themes."
What I mean is, most people choose their class based on what they "like," not based on how the class actually functions in a group. You don't hear many people say "I picked hunter because I enjoy fulfilling the DPS role." But you DO hear people say "I picked hunter because I love the pet, and the whole ranger concept."
But the problem is that "hunter" is inextricably tied to the DPS role. You cannot be a hunter and play a more defensive role, you WILL be DPS, and that's that. And I really think this sucks because it limits your options in how you play the game, based on your choice of what kind of "theme" you wanted to play.
And I think this gets even worse when the game forces you to "spec," which basically means you have to push yourself into an even MORE narrow role.
So instead of making classes for "DPS," "Tanking," and "healing...." Why not just make it so just about all classes can fulfill any role in a fight? Is there really any need to narrowly separate classes into these three roles just to make it so everyone HAS to use a single tactic in every fight (tank and spank)?
If every class could fulfill every role, then people would be able to select their classes based on "theme" instead of "role."
In short, I think GW2 has it right
.
Are you team Azeroth, team Tyria, or team Jacob?
The trinity was originally a quintet: Damage, Threat, Control, Support, and Healing.
Developers hated that much balancing, and certain players hated that much complexity, so things became simpler. Heals became primary support, with backup from others. Tanks became primary control in addition to threat management. Buffing became nearly useless in many games; others (wow) took the route of handing out redundant buffs so specific classes were no longer needed.
It'd be nice to see more games that focus on how awesome an uber-buffed or CC_heavy team can operate.
Its a unique way of contributing to a group, and many people loved it. In many ways a puller could e the most important member of a group, because they set the pace. A good Bard was amazing because you could chain pull all day.
... just so you know, you basically portraid the EXACT group make-up that was required for EQ1. Not only was it expanded upon the trinity, but it was the OG of themepark group play.
Monks were dedicated pullers. Chanters were dedicated mana batteries and CC'ers. Shamans were dedicated Buffers/Debuffers with sub-par heals. Bards were a dedicated jack of all trades for these rolls (pulling/buffing/debuffing/CCing). All these rolls were absolutely required to be filled for anything worth doing.
tldr: It's been done and it was awesome.
Well here's my two cents, forgive me if it's been said already, I kinda just skimmed the posts. But shouldn't the idea be to get rid of the trinity? It's good to have a role to play in combat but any system that requires your characted to be confined to that role permanently is a recipe for boredom...right? I was excited to see gw2 going in that direction though I haven't gotten to play any beta so I'm not sure how well they pulled it off but I do believe the idea was right. I personally disliked playing the same roles in combat over and over again.
#TeamVainlash
Why did Marceline's dad eat her fries? I mean...cause she bought them and they were hers...
No, role based combat IMO is an excellent thing. It encourages co-operation, communication, and tactics.
The trick, as you touch on, is to get rid of the enforced roles... give each player the ability to take any that needs taking on the fly.
The only thing that was annoying about the Trinity was searching for the needed class for a million hours. Remove that and you're golden.
I think the core of games is basically damage, damage avoidance/mitigation, and damage repair.
You can chop and dice these roles however you like, but that's what it boils down to.
I think someone figured out that it is alot more fun to be DPS+secondary ability, than to just purely be the secondary ability. In small group play many of the "off" roles bring little to nothing to the party. But...if you divide those abilities up with the primary roles you have fun classes to play.
Are you sure the trinity is responsible for the formulaic, predictable and boring nature of combat?
All you have to do is lower the threshold for drawing aggro and decrease the effectiveness of taunts, and the trinity becomes a much different ball of wax.
Taunting off mobs should take work.
Managing your aggro should be a skill.
Yeah I agree, like I said roles are great to have in combat but you shouldn't be restricted to any one role. I remember as a kid before I even knew what the trinity was, trying to play whatever role I wanted to with whatever class I was using. I was quickly...and rudely corrected which kinda killed the experience for me because I felt limited. I did learn the importance of roles because I found I could never complete much without the trinity but never learned to really love a system that took away some of my freedom. And then again, it taught me to actually play different roles skillfully so it's a love/hate thing for me I guess.
#TeamVainlash
Why did Marceline's dad eat her fries? I mean...cause she bought them and they were hers...