Originally posted by Quirhid The instances have nothing to do with the trinity. Instances are a way to present content without it disrupting other players or other players disrupting you (or your group). They also offer a chance to present customized and challenging content, because when the number of players entering and their level is dictated: You cannot simply steamroll through it with a zerg or out-levelled characters.
You don't need instances for that.
Raid Mob X is sitting in zone Y.
1) It cannot be attacked by anyone not in a raid.
2) One engagement at a time.
3) It can be engaged by anyone in the raid without a lockout simply by attacking it, assuming it is not already engaged by a separate raid. If anyone in the raid has lockouts, they're immediately autokicked from the raid and the mob is engaged.
4) On engagement, the mob polls the number of people in the raid and calculates its HP off the number of people and/or their average tier. It then recalculates its HP and damage for an expected difficulty. If needbe, it recalculates that of its minions(either generated, or already spawned), if there are any.
5) A mob is defeated when the conditions for victory have been met. When this happens, appropriate loot is made available to the members of the raid. Either actual items to be rolled on, or participation currency/reward for each member who participated. Appropriate lockouts for that mob are calculated.
6) A raid is killed when there are no more people in the raid left alive. When this happens, the mob and its minions(if there are any), reset to their previous positions and each person is given a lockout of 1 hour.
7) A raid who has engaged a mob may not heal or buff outside that raid, or receive heals or buffs from outside that raid.
8) A raid who has engaged a mob event has agro on all mobs of that event, and will have no agro on anything that does not comprise the event.
9) Anybody not in the raid of an engaged target will have no effect on the raid target mobs that are engaged, nor will they be effected by the mobs being killed. Mobs will furthermore ignore any ground spells they have cast.
10) There should be an option in settings that will hide any person not in a raid that has engaged a mob to reduce screen clutter.
Instances do it better, and are a far more elegant solution than what you've just described. You don't address difficulty properly either: the scaling method you propose is extremely clumsy. Merely amping up HP and damage (or adding more minions) is not a acceptable way to increase challenge, come on!
I skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been-Wayne Gretzky
You should blog and share more videos like that about the game design when you run across them.
You think so?
Always felt like forum posts were close enough to blogging for me, but without the sort of bloated sense of self-worth that plagues blog posts. I also have a strange tendency to never start a thread (~7k posts here, but I bet I've started fewer than 20 threads myself; more like 10, I'd guess, and more than half of those are forum bugs haha.)
I do collect quite a few of these sorts of articles when I find them, and tend to almost always work the best ones into forum posts (like Sirlin's excellent definitions of game balance and game depth. Granted, recently I chose not to use his definition in a post about game depth because I noticed it was oddly limited to "multiplayer games" and "strategically interesting". My definition of game depth is a bit more all-encompassing, since it applies to all games (not just multiplayer) and measures how long it takes to master the game (which includes strategy and twitch aspects.))
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
in GW1 the melee classes are tanks. Since you are up close and meleeing like a traditional tank. It draws attention especially if you are a nuker. same rule applied. in GW1 melee fighters = tanks. in PvE melee fighters = tanks.
OK, I'm gonna do something I haven't done before and say that, having played GW1 for two years, attended a number of PvP tournaments and events, won the 2005 European Championship, placed 6th in the 2006 World Championship that GW1's melee fighters are not tanks.
Only way they're going to get attention from "the nukers" is if they over-extend themselves beyond their protection/healing line's casting range. And that would be true to any character in the team.
Melee fighter is just a character that applies its abilities in melee range. Most often they are pressure, burst damage, and/or control. What makes tank "a tank" is the ability soak massive amounts of damage and the ability to manipulate mob AI through taunts and such.
There is no similar role in PvP - not against opponents with half a brain.
I skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been-Wayne Gretzky
Originally posted by Quirhid The instances have nothing to do with the trinity. Instances are a way to present content without it disrupting other players or other players disrupting you (or your group). They also offer a chance to present customized and challenging content, because when the number of players entering and their level is dictated: You cannot simply steamroll through it with a zerg or out-levelled characters.
You don't need instances for that.
Raid Mob X is sitting in zone Y.
1) It cannot be attacked by anyone not in a raid.
2) One engagement at a time.
3) It can be engaged by anyone in the raid without a lockout simply by attacking it, assuming it is not already engaged by a separate raid. If anyone in the raid has lockouts, they're immediately autokicked from the raid and the mob is engaged.
4) On engagement, the mob polls the number of people in the raid and calculates its HP off the number of people and/or their average tier. It then recalculates its HP and damage for an expected difficulty. If needbe, it recalculates that of its minions(either generated, or already spawned), if there are any.
5) A mob is defeated when the conditions for victory have been met. When this happens, appropriate loot is made available to the members of the raid. Either actual items to be rolled on, or participation currency/reward for each member who participated. Appropriate lockouts for that mob are calculated.
6) A raid is killed when there are no more people in the raid left alive. When this happens, the mob and its minions(if there are any), reset to their previous positions and each person is given a lockout of 1 hour.
7) A raid who has engaged a mob may not heal or buff outside that raid, or receive heals or buffs from outside that raid.
8) A raid who has engaged a mob event has agro on all mobs of that event, and will have no agro on anything that does not comprise the event.
9) Anybody not in the raid of an engaged target will have no effect on the raid target mobs that are engaged, nor will they be effected by the mobs being killed. Mobs will furthermore ignore any ground spells they have cast.
10) There should be an option in settings that will hide any person not in a raid that has engaged a mob to reduce screen clutter.
Instances do it better, and are a far more elegant solution than what you've just described. You don't address difficulty properly either: the scaling method you propose is extremely clumsy. Merely amping up HP and damage (or adding more minions) is not a acceptable way to increase challenge, come on!
Other guilds can't laugh when you wipe, or congratulate you on a win.. if locked up behind an instance. People can also see who on your team performs, and who is failsauce. And really, its a more social experience. And you forget the levelless aspect to this EQN. You should be able to predict relative DPS of build types and tiering as to how good they'll be for tuning, so a raid with poor builds, strategy, execution, and synergy between classes will wipe to a mob that a team with great builds, strategy, execution and synergy dispatches fairly easily. Either way.. I used raid mob in my example.. you could substitute raid event.. with all the shenanigans that implies.
And it would take care of a lot of problems of the past as it pertains to non-instanced events.
There has been a need to make a thread like this for a long time made by an OP that isn't afraid to tell it like it is.
The Trinity is DEAD folks. It has been dead for a while but no one has been willing to touch its' rotten corpse and give it a proper burial.
If you have really been paying attention to the industry you would understand the writing has been on the wall for a long time. Consider that it takes 3 to 5 years make a new AAA MMO. Now also consider that RIFT was the last game that truly embraced the trinity and that was already a couple years ago. Since then the games have either been weak trinity or no trinity at all. Look at GW2, TSW, TERA, SWTOR, Never Winter, FFXIV, etc none of these games are really about the trinity. Now look at all the future releases EQ-Next, Archage, Black Desert, ESO, etc no trinity. You are going to be hard pressed to find another post-RIFT MMO with trinity.
The reason for this paradigm shift away from the trinity is WoW. World of Warcraft may not have invented the trinity but they perfected it to an art. Nobody does trinity better than WoW. The trinity represents the very core of what WoW is but a simplified game of tanks, dps, and heals. The trinity and WoW are as inseparable as mechanics and game play. The trinity is primarily responsible for two types of encounters found in WoW. The encounter is either Turn'N Burn or so scripted you have to literally jump through hoops and rings to beat it. This is all because of the trinity being the core feature of WoW. One cannot make a game that is not a WoW clone and still include the trinity. Any MMO that had the trinity would be a WoW clone by default. Everyone knows by now you can't beat WoW at its' own game and it is foolish to even try. In order to avoid the WoW-clone trap that has cost the industry billions of dollars the development studios are going to avoid the trinity like the plague from now on.
This is not opinion but analysis of FACT. The trinity is done D-E-D dead. It doesn't matter how much you whine or disbelieve it won't change a thing. This is going to be just like F2P conversions all over again. Some people looked at the facts and saw it coming while others were caught off guard because they were in denial thinking it could never happen. Then those in denial woke up one day and all the subs were gone except WoW and EVE. That is how the trinity burial will play out. People are going to be taken for a ride weather they like it or not because it is already in the pipeline and can't be reversed. This won't effect older games but It is going to be years and years before any studio considers spending millions on a new RIFT style trinity game or WoW clone.
The other guy is referred to as a tank...a F**KING TANK!... yea i'm way WAY more worried about this Tank guy the mages seem to run towards for safety...called TANK. LOL
lol yeah.... just ignore the casters that rain meteors on your ass. and the healers... NOT
the most basic tactic is to kill the squishiest first and if its trinity its usualy healers and other casters. WABAM all of the sudden only tanks are left and they no longer have the help from healers and they die alot faster
There has been a need to make a thread like this for a long time made by an OP that isn't afraid to tell it like it is. The Trinity is DEAD folks. It has been dead for a while but no one has been willing to touch its' rotten corpse and give it a proper burial. If you have really been paying attention to the industry you would understand the writing has been on the wall for a long time. Consider that it takes 3 to 5 years make a new AAA MMO. Now also consider that RIFT was the last game that truly embraced the trinity and that was already a couple years ago. Since then the games have either been weak trinity or no trinity at all. Look at GW2, TSW, TERA, SWTOR, Never Winter, FFXIV, etc none of these games are really about the trinity. Now look at all the future releases EQ-Next, Archage, Black Desert, ESO, etc no trinity. You are going to be hard pressed to find another post-RIFT MMO with trinity. The reason for this paradigm shift away from the trinity is WoW. World of Warcraft may not have invented the trinity but they perfected it to an art. Nobody does trinity better than WoW. The trinity represents the very core of what WoW is but a simplified game of tanks, dps, and heals. The trinity and WoW are as inseparable as mechanics and game play. The trinity is primarily responsible for two types of encounters found in WoW. The encounter is either Turn'N Burn or so scripted you have to literally jump through hoops and rings to beat it. This is all because of the trinity being the core feature of WoW. One cannot make a game that is not a WoW clone and still include the trinity. Any MMO that had the trinity would be a WoW clone by default. Everyone knows by now you can't beat WoW at its' own game and it is foolish to even try. In order to avoid the WoW-clone trap that has cost the industry billions of dollars the development studios are going to avoid the trinity like the plague from now on. This is not opinion but analysis of FACT. The trinity is done D-E-D dead. It doesn't matter how much you whine or disbelieve it won't change a thing. This is going to be just like F2P conversions all over again. Some people looked at the facts and saw it coming while others were caught off guard because they were in denial thinking it could never happen. Then those in denial woke up one day and all the subs were gone except WoW and EVE. That is how the trinity burial will play out. People are going to be taken for a ride weather they like it or not because it is already in the pipeline and can't be reversed. This won't effect older games but It is going to be years and years before any studio considers spending millions on a new RIFT style trinity game or WoW clone. Bookmark this post.
Curious post.....I've played TERA, TSW, and SWTOR and I would have sworn the trinity was firmly in place for all 3 of those titles, at least for the dungeon based content. I suspect it will be strong in FFXIV, TESO, and Wildstar as well. Maybe we have a different understanding of what the term trinity actually means?
I don't think it is a dead as you seem to want to believe.
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
There has been a need to make a thread like this for a long time made by an OP that isn't afraid to tell it like it is.
The Trinity is DEAD folks. It has been dead for a while but no one has been willing to touch its' rotten corpse and give it a proper burial.
Look at GW2, TSW, TERA, SWTOR, Never Winter, FFXIV, etc none of these games are really about the trinity. Now look at all the future releases EQ-Next, Archage, Black Desert, ESO, etc no trinity. You are going to be hard pressed to find another post-RIFT MMO with trinity.
tsw, tera , swtor, never winter, ffxiv all have trinity (tank heal and dps)
Curious post.....I've played TERA, TSW, and SWTOR and I would have sworn the trinity was firmly in place for all 3 of those titles, at least for the dungeon based content. I suspect it will be strong in FFXIV, TESO, and Wildstar as well. Maybe we have a different understanding of what the term trinity actually means? I don't think it is a dead as you seem to want to believe.
I have to agree.
I skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been-Wayne Gretzky
The reason for this paradigm shift away from the trinity is WoW. World of Warcraft may not have invented the trinity but they perfected it to an art. Nobody does trinity better than WoW. The trinity represents the very core of what WoW is but a simplified game of tanks, dps, and heals.
That's funny, the holy trinity in EQ was Warrior, Cleric, Enchanter. With the Enchanter providing the crowd control that allowed the dps to do its thing. But the third leg was never dps until WoW.
its just a lazy excuse of a teamwork, "DO THIS, YOUR ROLE IS THIS YOU DUMB MONKEY"
yeah sure i can tolerate the trinity as a teamwork tactic to a point but making the combat(and the game) so that its all about the TRINITY is ridiculous and stupid
when trinity chooses and determines all your skills and gameplay something is very wrong
well yeah sure maybe at some point it was required because of the dull targeting system (WoW) but not anymore, when there is real action combat and only tactic they can use is the trinity something is very wrong.
Open trinity is the future, give players the choice to use the trinity as a tactic but dont force it down their throats this way the AI on mobs can have some variety instead of what its now
make me a mob that targets the easiest to kill players first.
other thing is where dungeons and raids are limited to only players or parties that only consist of certain type of players. the hell is this? i dont need a babysitter
and comparing this to reality is stupid yeah military personel all have their roles and tasks they have to do but atleast it was their choice to take on that role and even medieval Archers had a short sword or a dagger for close range.
mmorpg trinity= "im a ranger i dont know how to do that"
'you can only move pieces diagonally on the board - ugh!'"
Seriously though, I am not seeing how combat dynamics necessitate anything external to combat systems mechanically speaking, and your argument doesn't show that. What is to stop someone from making a trinity mmo with no levels or instances? Nothing. WoW doing it is says nothing about the trinity on its own.
The trinity and instances are the only way to provide a valid challenge to players and guilds where they can compare their skill with each other. And since humans enjoy competition, the trinity and its player capped instances will never disappear.
Cooperative games are for one kind of audience, and competitive games are for other kind of audience. Or maybe the same person can enjoy both cooperative and competitive, depending on their mood. But that also means that no matter what, there will always be thirst for trinity, at least until they create another model of RPG where the roles are different, but also very defined, specific and necessary in order to success at competitive level.
My opinion is my own. I respect all other opinions and views equally, but keep in mind that my opinion will always be the best for me. That's why it's my opinion.
Why is this discussion in yet ANOTHER thread and still going on? Let the kiddiez devolve into their 2 or 3 FOTM builds and go zerging. Let them find out that whether they call it a taunt or a shield bash, that it's still at its core the very same mechanic that achieves the same goal. You wanna stand in front of a mob and 'block it from the other party members'? Guess what? You're TANKING. I'll be in TESO, you guys can keep the cartoons and Smedley inspired dreams of zero substance.
There has been a need to make a thread like this for a long time made by an OP that isn't afraid to tell it like it is.
The Trinity is DEAD folks. It has been dead for a while but no one has been willing to touch its' rotten corpse and give it a proper burial.
If you have really been paying attention to the industry you would understand the writing has been on the wall for a long time. Consider that it takes 3 to 5 years make a new AAA MMO. Now also consider that RIFT was the last game that truly embraced the trinity and that was already a couple years ago. Since then the games have either been weak trinity or no trinity at all. Look at GW2, TSW, TERA, SWTOR, Never Winter, FFXIV, etc none of these games are really about the trinity. Now look at all the future releases EQ-Next, Archage, Black Desert, ESO, etc no trinity. You are going to be hard pressed to find another post-RIFT MMO with trinity.
The reason for this paradigm shift away from the trinity is WoW. World of Warcraft may not have invented the trinity but they perfected it to an art. Nobody does trinity better than WoW. The trinity represents the very core of what WoW is but a simplified game of tanks, dps, and heals. The trinity and WoW are as inseparable as mechanics and game play. The trinity is primarily responsible for two types of encounters found in WoW. The encounter is either Turn'N Burn or so scripted you have to literally jump through hoops and rings to beat it. This is all because of the trinity being the core feature of WoW. One cannot make a game that is not a WoW clone and still include the trinity. Any MMO that had the trinity would be a WoW clone by default. Everyone knows by now you can't beat WoW at its' own game and it is foolish to even try. In order to avoid the WoW-clone trap that has cost the industry billions of dollars the development studios are going to avoid the trinity like the plague from now on.
This is not opinion but analysis of FACT. The trinity is done D-E-D dead. It doesn't matter how much you whine or disbelieve it won't change a thing. This is going to be just like F2P conversions all over again. Some people looked at the facts and saw it coming while others were caught off guard because they were in denial thinking it could never happen. Then those in denial woke up one day and all the subs were gone except WoW and EVE. That is how the trinity burial will play out. People are going to be taken for a ride weather they like it or not because it is already in the pipeline and can't be reversed. This won't effect older games but It is going to be years and years before any studio considers spending millions on a new RIFT style trinity game or WoW clone.
Bookmark this post.
People are wrong on the internet all the time, why would I choose your post to bookmark?
As others have mentioned, the trinity is used all the time still so it's nowhere close to dead.
Specific versions of the trinity may fade in and out. But at its core, the trinity is about using specialization to enhance teamplay. And that's eternal -- it's just not something players are going to get bored of.
And even as specific versions of the trinity fade in and out, fundamentally most forms of the trinity will end up using some form of the same roles (tanking/mitigation/CC, healing/recovery, and damage.) Because they're basically just a step more detailed than the more universal over-concept of specializing either attack (damage) or defense (tanking, mitigation, CC, and healing.)
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
Trinity cannot survive if you have bad developers that don't know how to use it properly.
All you have to do is look at real life,people like organized and structured in EVERY aspect of life.That is what a Trinity system does.So by saying Trinity does not work is no good,is like saying we all operate our daily lives without a clue,which is far from the truth.
This would be like saying..."You know we don't really need a boss or manager,that is an outdated ,old fashioned idea".You ALWAYS need structure and organization,well unless your just jumping in a swimming pool or something,but even then we have life guards to keep things safe and organized.
Even in ancient times,3/4/500 years ago ,they had structure anyone that can think as humans do, understand it and you need it.
IMO developers that don't go trinity are just lazy developers,they don't want to organize a structured system because it takes more work.PLus they seem to like to look for easy ways to market their product by saying things like "we give you choice".Umm NO you don't,the choice is YOU decided on the game design,not us.
The real funny part is how devs will spin it ,like you have MORE or better choice without a Trinity system.NO you don't,you can still go an all out mage group if you want in a Trinity system,so you still have the exact same choice,you can still do whatever you want.
Gaming has to be the laziest form of entertainment on the planet,takes about 1 minute to get up and running.So why is it we hear so much about players not wanting to wait to form an organized group?We in REAL life spend several hours or days in advance organizing a sporting event.So what happens if we have no goalies for pickup hockey games?What happens if nobody wants to play Quarterback?What happens if nobody owns a bat?You always make due and find a way to do what you want,we don't sit around and cry.
The real truth is PR teams like to find ANYTHING they can with THEIR design to spin it like they are doing us some favor.
Never forget 3 mile Island and never trust a government official or company spokesman.
Don't try to equate trinity to any system of specialization. The trinity people refer to, and have grown to despise, is specifically the one with one guy manipulating AI (tank), one guy in charge of defense (healer) and one guy in charge of offense (damage).
There are tons of ways to do specialization that is in no way related to the trinity. In fact, any ability to specialize will lead to distinct party roles. For a simplified FPS example you can have your close quarter specialist (shotguns, SMGs), medium range specialist (assault rifles, machine guns) and long range specialist (sniper rifles). With careful encounter design you can have uses for everyone, and they don't have anything to with the trinity.
Game mechanics also have a significant impact on party roles. In the above example, if you can carry just one gun, your role is defined by your weapon. There may be endless ways to create distinct party roles and it is disheartening to see that some people are confined only to think along the lines of tank-healer-dps or tank-healer-cc (which is only marginally better). Nothing even says there has to be exactly 3 roles, although if grouping requires multiple mandatory roles (like healers and tanks often are), grouping becomes difficult.
Past armies had archers, skirmishers, heavy and light infantry, heavy and light cavalry, artillery. A soccer team has strikers, midfielders, defensemen and a goalkeeper. Military roles are defined by technology, tactics and strategies. Roles in sports are defined by the rules (and tactics within those rules). For instance, you are allowed to throw the ball forward once in American football. Rest of the time you're throwing it backwards, if at all. Hence the role "quarterback".
So when you, Wizardry, say that we experience trinity in our everyday lives, I don't know what the f*** you're talking about. Developers who are not implementing a trinity are anything but lazy! They're trying to do something new, something different. And I swear, I would much rather play a genuinely new game with genuinely new concepts and mechanics rather than a re-skinned version of something old.
If trinity died and I were a malevolent man, I would be there dancing on its grave. But you shouldn't worry, there's enough players to keep it alive for a long, long time still.
I skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been-Wayne Gretzky
Specific versions of the trinity may fade in and out. But at its core, the trinity is about using specialization to enhance teamplay. And that's eternal -- it's just not something players are going to get bored of.
And even as specific versions of the trinity fade in and out, fundamentally most forms of the trinity will end up using some form of the same roles (tanking/mitigation/CC, healing/recovery, and damage.) Because they're basically just a step more detailed than the more universal over-concept of specializing either attack (damage) or defense (tanking, mitigation, CC, and healing.)
That is really the core issue of all that discussion. Noone.. and i say it again, noone is argueing against specializations and different roles. Everyone want different roles, everyone want specialization and different tactics.
And if you would play other games(like RTS) you know that there are a lot of different roles and different kind of specializations possible. And teamwork is build around roles, specialization and tactics utilizing it.
But as already from different people said, we do argue against the holy trintity. And because i can't say it any better:
Originally posted by Quirhid
Don't try to equate trinity to any system of specialization. The trinity people refer to, and have grown to despise, is specifically the one with one guy manipulating AI (tank), one guy in charge of defense (healer) and one guy in charge of offense (damage).
And i will even expand on that. The most troublesome is the faulty taunt mechanic used from the Tank. As i personally played a lot of pvp games(FPS, RTS, MoBA and MMOs) this mechanic worked never against real player, but to say that we do not have different roles or utilize different specialization into different tactics in pvp game is so far off.. beyond good and evil.
And another problem of this holy trinity is that you are more or less doomed to use that one tactic, that one distribution of roles, that you do not have any flexibilty, no tactical reaction, no evolving of tactics, strategy and gameplay. And you render a lot of other classes and roles useless, or reduce them to pure dps... and there is always the one class with the most dps.
Don't try to equate trinity to any system of specialization. The trinity people refer to, and have grown to despise, is specifically the one with one guy manipulating AI (tank), one guy in charge of defense (healer) and one guy in charge of offense (damage).
And i will even expand on that. The most troublesome is the faulty taunt mechanic used from the Tank. As i personally played a lot of pvp games(FPS, RTS, MoBA and MMOs) this mechanic worked never against real player, but to say that we do not have different roles or utilize different specialization into different tactics in pvp game is so far off.. beyond good and evil.
And another problem of this holy trinity is that you are more or less doomed to use that one tactic, that one distribution of roles, that you do not have any flexibilty, no tactical reaction, no evolving of tactics, strategy and gameplay. And you render a lot of other classes and roles useless, or reduce them to pure dps... and there is always the one class with the most dps.
I also have a PvP-heavy background (FPS, MOBA, MMORPG) and I agree fully.
I skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been-Wayne Gretzky
Don't try to equate trinity to any system of specialization. The trinity people refer to, and have grown to despise, is specifically the one with one guy manipulating AI (tank), one guy in charge of defense (healer) and one guy in charge of offense (damage).
And i will even expand on that. The most troublesome is the faulty taunt mechanic used from the Tank. As i personally played a lot of pvp games(FPS, RTS, MoBA and MMOs) this mechanic worked never against real player, but to say that we do not have different roles or utilize different specialization into different tactics in pvp game is so far off.. beyond good and evil.
And another problem of this holy trinity is that you are more or less doomed to use that one tactic, that one distribution of roles, that you do not have any flexibilty, no tactical reaction, no evolving of tactics, strategy and gameplay. And you render a lot of other classes and roles useless, or reduce them to pure dps... and there is always the one class with the most dps.
Dont people miss fighting a really tough boss where everyone performs a critical role in beating him?....Do people really want this genre to be lets wipe out masses of mobs with area effect damage that isnt much challenge? To me MMOs took a huge downturn when playing a role disappeared...For some reason players fell in love with doing tons of damage and not dying in the process.
People are afraid of changes, afraid of the new and afraid the will lost the sense of prestige on being the best tank, dps or healer that if not in that raid nobody would play without them. Fans of the trinity can't see beyond that sense and role. How many guilds disband because the big ass tank did not show up for the raid and their guild could not have more than 2 tanks and the second guys was only a support tank.
Take out the trinity and people will find out another way to play and have fun, humanity is not bound to one option only, we have to evolve and when we do people are afraid of the new.
Guild Wars 2 proves you don't need the trinity. But will it survive? Hell yeah, a lot of people like it and more power to them. So the trinity can survive quite well, it just won't be the only horse in the race.
I've played GW2. I enjoy it. But I will take the trinity over it any day.
You mentioned D&D, but really, at its core the trinity goes back WAY farther than that. What is the trinity, at its very core? It's a combat implementation of the specialization and diversification of labor ideals used in economics. By specializing in their respective niches, each member of the group increases their effectiveness, which raises the effectiveness of the group as a whole.
ArenaNet are just bad developers. They ignore one-third of their trinity (control). Please stop using GW2 as an example.
They ignore control? Are you serious? I tend to use a mesmer and rely heavily on control. I also have a lot of abilities that give me control.
If you're going to bash a game, at least learn something about it.
I've played GW2. I enjoy it. But I will take the trinity over it any day.
You mentioned D&D, but really, at its core the trinity goes back WAY farther than that. What is the trinity, at its very core? It's a combat implementation of the specialization and diversification of labor ideals used in economics. By specializing in their respective niches, each member of the group increases their effectiveness, which raises the effectiveness of the group as a whole.
ArenaNet are just bad developers. They ignore one-third of their trinity (control). Please stop using GW2 as an example.
They ignore control? Are you serious? I tend to use a mesmer and rely heavily on control. I also have a lot of abilities that give me control.
If you're going to bash a game, at least learn something about it.
Ok. i did play the mesmer, too. It is even the only class in GW2 i played extensively. But you don't have a lot of control.. at least as i would call them. No root, no mezz, no charming. You do have a lot of illuisons and can trick around with it to increase your surviveability a whole lot even. You do have some random debuff/buffing.. not really focused, because they abonded that one, too. You do have some stuns, rather short duration, but any stun should be limited anyway.
Maybe i miss something, where is the control in the mesmer class? (GW2) GW1 on the other side is a completely different story.
Comments
Instances do it better, and are a far more elegant solution than what you've just described. You don't address difficulty properly either: the scaling method you propose is extremely clumsy. Merely amping up HP and damage (or adding more minions) is not a acceptable way to increase challenge, come on!
I skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been -Wayne Gretzky
You think so?
Always felt like forum posts were close enough to blogging for me, but without the sort of bloated sense of self-worth that plagues blog posts. I also have a strange tendency to never start a thread (~7k posts here, but I bet I've started fewer than 20 threads myself; more like 10, I'd guess, and more than half of those are forum bugs haha.)
I do collect quite a few of these sorts of articles when I find them, and tend to almost always work the best ones into forum posts (like Sirlin's excellent definitions of game balance and game depth. Granted, recently I chose not to use his definition in a post about game depth because I noticed it was oddly limited to "multiplayer games" and "strategically interesting". My definition of game depth is a bit more all-encompassing, since it applies to all games (not just multiplayer) and measures how long it takes to master the game (which includes strategy and twitch aspects.))
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
OK, I'm gonna do something I haven't done before and say that, having played GW1 for two years, attended a number of PvP tournaments and events, won the 2005 European Championship, placed 6th in the 2006 World Championship that GW1's melee fighters are not tanks.
Only way they're going to get attention from "the nukers" is if they over-extend themselves beyond their protection/healing line's casting range. And that would be true to any character in the team.
Melee fighter is just a character that applies its abilities in melee range. Most often they are pressure, burst damage, and/or control. What makes tank "a tank" is the ability soak massive amounts of damage and the ability to manipulate mob AI through taunts and such.
There is no similar role in PvP - not against opponents with half a brain.
I skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been -Wayne Gretzky
Other guilds can't laugh when you wipe, or congratulate you on a win.. if locked up behind an instance. People can also see who on your team performs, and who is failsauce. And really, its a more social experience. And you forget the levelless aspect to this EQN. You should be able to predict relative DPS of build types and tiering as to how good they'll be for tuning, so a raid with poor builds, strategy, execution, and synergy between classes will wipe to a mob that a team with great builds, strategy, execution and synergy dispatches fairly easily. Either way.. I used raid mob in my example.. you could substitute raid event.. with all the shenanigans that implies.
And it would take care of a lot of problems of the past as it pertains to non-instanced events.
There has been a need to make a thread like this for a long time made by an OP that isn't afraid to tell it like it is.
The Trinity is DEAD folks. It has been dead for a while but no one has been willing to touch its' rotten corpse and give it a proper burial.
If you have really been paying attention to the industry you would understand the writing has been on the wall for a long time. Consider that it takes 3 to 5 years make a new AAA MMO. Now also consider that RIFT was the last game that truly embraced the trinity and that was already a couple years ago. Since then the games have either been weak trinity or no trinity at all. Look at GW2, TSW, TERA, SWTOR, Never Winter, FFXIV, etc none of these games are really about the trinity. Now look at all the future releases EQ-Next, Archage, Black Desert, ESO, etc no trinity. You are going to be hard pressed to find another post-RIFT MMO with trinity.
The reason for this paradigm shift away from the trinity is WoW. World of Warcraft may not have invented the trinity but they perfected it to an art. Nobody does trinity better than WoW. The trinity represents the very core of what WoW is but a simplified game of tanks, dps, and heals. The trinity and WoW are as inseparable as mechanics and game play. The trinity is primarily responsible for two types of encounters found in WoW. The encounter is either Turn'N Burn or so scripted you have to literally jump through hoops and rings to beat it. This is all because of the trinity being the core feature of WoW. One cannot make a game that is not a WoW clone and still include the trinity. Any MMO that had the trinity would be a WoW clone by default. Everyone knows by now you can't beat WoW at its' own game and it is foolish to even try. In order to avoid the WoW-clone trap that has cost the industry billions of dollars the development studios are going to avoid the trinity like the plague from now on.
This is not opinion but analysis of FACT. The trinity is done D-E-D dead. It doesn't matter how much you whine or disbelieve it won't change a thing. This is going to be just like F2P conversions all over again. Some people looked at the facts and saw it coming while others were caught off guard because they were in denial thinking it could never happen. Then those in denial woke up one day and all the subs were gone except WoW and EVE. That is how the trinity burial will play out. People are going to be taken for a ride weather they like it or not because it is already in the pipeline and can't be reversed. This won't effect older games but It is going to be years and years before any studio considers spending millions on a new RIFT style trinity game or WoW clone.
Bookmark this post.
lol yeah.... just ignore the casters that rain meteors on your ass. and the healers... NOT
the most basic tactic is to kill the squishiest first and if its trinity its usualy healers and other casters. WABAM all of the sudden only tanks are left and they no longer have the help from healers and they die alot faster
Curious post.....I've played TERA, TSW, and SWTOR and I would have sworn the trinity was firmly in place for all 3 of those titles, at least for the dungeon based content. I suspect it will be strong in FFXIV, TESO, and Wildstar as well. Maybe we have a different understanding of what the term trinity actually means?I don't think it is a dead as you seem to want to believe.
"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
tsw, tera , swtor, never winter, ffxiv all have trinity (tank heal and dps)
I have to agree.
I skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been -Wayne Gretzky
That's funny, the holy trinity in EQ was Warrior, Cleric, Enchanter. With the Enchanter providing the crowd control that allowed the dps to do its thing. But the third leg was never dps until WoW.
and my opinion on the whole Trinity,
its just a lazy excuse of a teamwork, "DO THIS, YOUR ROLE IS THIS YOU DUMB MONKEY"
yeah sure i can tolerate the trinity as a teamwork tactic to a point but making the combat(and the game) so that its all about the TRINITY is ridiculous and stupid
when trinity chooses and determines all your skills and gameplay something is very wrong
well yeah sure maybe at some point it was required because of the dull targeting system (WoW) but not anymore, when there is real action combat and only tactic they can use is the trinity something is very wrong.
Open trinity is the future, give players the choice to use the trinity as a tactic but dont force it down their throats this way the AI on mobs can have some variety instead of what its now
make me a mob that targets the easiest to kill players first.
other thing is where dungeons and raids are limited to only players or parties that only consist of certain type of players. the hell is this? i dont need a babysitter
and comparing this to reality is stupid yeah military personel all have their roles and tasks they have to do but atleast it was their choice to take on that role and even medieval Archers had a short sword or a dagger for close range.
mmorpg trinity= "im a ranger i dont know how to do that"
"Why checkers can't survive-
'you can only move pieces diagonally on the board - ugh!'"
Seriously though, I am not seeing how combat dynamics necessitate anything external to combat systems mechanically speaking, and your argument doesn't show that. What is to stop someone from making a trinity mmo with no levels or instances? Nothing. WoW doing it is says nothing about the trinity on its own.
The trinity and instances are the only way to provide a valid challenge to players and guilds where they can compare their skill with each other. And since humans enjoy competition, the trinity and its player capped instances will never disappear.
Cooperative games are for one kind of audience, and competitive games are for other kind of audience. Or maybe the same person can enjoy both cooperative and competitive, depending on their mood. But that also means that no matter what, there will always be thirst for trinity, at least until they create another model of RPG where the roles are different, but also very defined, specific and necessary in order to success at competitive level.
My opinion is my own. I respect all other opinions and views equally, but keep in mind that my opinion will always be the best for me. That's why it's my opinion.
People are wrong on the internet all the time, why would I choose your post to bookmark?
As others have mentioned, the trinity is used all the time still so it's nowhere close to dead.
Specific versions of the trinity may fade in and out. But at its core, the trinity is about using specialization to enhance teamplay. And that's eternal -- it's just not something players are going to get bored of.
And even as specific versions of the trinity fade in and out, fundamentally most forms of the trinity will end up using some form of the same roles (tanking/mitigation/CC, healing/recovery, and damage.) Because they're basically just a step more detailed than the more universal over-concept of specializing either attack (damage) or defense (tanking, mitigation, CC, and healing.)
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
Trinity cannot survive if you have bad developers that don't know how to use it properly.
All you have to do is look at real life,people like organized and structured in EVERY aspect of life.That is what a Trinity system does.So by saying Trinity does not work is no good,is like saying we all operate our daily lives without a clue,which is far from the truth.
This would be like saying..."You know we don't really need a boss or manager,that is an outdated ,old fashioned idea".You ALWAYS need structure and organization,well unless your just jumping in a swimming pool or something,but even then we have life guards to keep things safe and organized.
Even in ancient times,3/4/500 years ago ,they had structure anyone that can think as humans do, understand it and you need it.
IMO developers that don't go trinity are just lazy developers,they don't want to organize a structured system because it takes more work.PLus they seem to like to look for easy ways to market their product by saying things like "we give you choice".Umm NO you don't,the choice is YOU decided on the game design,not us.
The real funny part is how devs will spin it ,like you have MORE or better choice without a Trinity system.NO you don't,you can still go an all out mage group if you want in a Trinity system,so you still have the exact same choice,you can still do whatever you want.
Gaming has to be the laziest form of entertainment on the planet,takes about 1 minute to get up and running.So why is it we hear so much about players not wanting to wait to form an organized group?We in REAL life spend several hours or days in advance organizing a sporting event.So what happens if we have no goalies for pickup hockey games?What happens if nobody wants to play Quarterback?What happens if nobody owns a bat?You always make due and find a way to do what you want,we don't sit around and cry.
The real truth is PR teams like to find ANYTHING they can with THEIR design to spin it like they are doing us some favor.
Never forget 3 mile Island and never trust a government official or company spokesman.
Don't try to equate trinity to any system of specialization. The trinity people refer to, and have grown to despise, is specifically the one with one guy manipulating AI (tank), one guy in charge of defense (healer) and one guy in charge of offense (damage).
There are tons of ways to do specialization that is in no way related to the trinity. In fact, any ability to specialize will lead to distinct party roles. For a simplified FPS example you can have your close quarter specialist (shotguns, SMGs), medium range specialist (assault rifles, machine guns) and long range specialist (sniper rifles). With careful encounter design you can have uses for everyone, and they don't have anything to with the trinity.
Game mechanics also have a significant impact on party roles. In the above example, if you can carry just one gun, your role is defined by your weapon. There may be endless ways to create distinct party roles and it is disheartening to see that some people are confined only to think along the lines of tank-healer-dps or tank-healer-cc (which is only marginally better). Nothing even says there has to be exactly 3 roles, although if grouping requires multiple mandatory roles (like healers and tanks often are), grouping becomes difficult.
Past armies had archers, skirmishers, heavy and light infantry, heavy and light cavalry, artillery. A soccer team has strikers, midfielders, defensemen and a goalkeeper. Military roles are defined by technology, tactics and strategies. Roles in sports are defined by the rules (and tactics within those rules). For instance, you are allowed to throw the ball forward once in American football. Rest of the time you're throwing it backwards, if at all. Hence the role "quarterback".
So when you, Wizardry, say that we experience trinity in our everyday lives, I don't know what the f*** you're talking about. Developers who are not implementing a trinity are anything but lazy! They're trying to do something new, something different. And I swear, I would much rather play a genuinely new game with genuinely new concepts and mechanics rather than a re-skinned version of something old.
If trinity died and I were a malevolent man, I would be there dancing on its grave. But you shouldn't worry, there's enough players to keep it alive for a long, long time still.
I skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been -Wayne Gretzky
That is really the core issue of all that discussion. Noone.. and i say it again, noone is argueing against specializations and different roles. Everyone want different roles, everyone want specialization and different tactics.
And if you would play other games(like RTS) you know that there are a lot of different roles and different kind of specializations possible. And teamwork is build around roles, specialization and tactics utilizing it.
But as already from different people said, we do argue against the holy trintity. And because i can't say it any better:
And i will even expand on that. The most troublesome is the faulty taunt mechanic used from the Tank. As i personally played a lot of pvp games(FPS, RTS, MoBA and MMOs) this mechanic worked never against real player, but to say that we do not have different roles or utilize different specialization into different tactics in pvp game is so far off.. beyond good and evil.
And another problem of this holy trinity is that you are more or less doomed to use that one tactic, that one distribution of roles, that you do not have any flexibilty, no tactical reaction, no evolving of tactics, strategy and gameplay. And you render a lot of other classes and roles useless, or reduce them to pure dps... and there is always the one class with the most dps.
I also have a PvP-heavy background (FPS, MOBA, MMORPG) and I agree fully.
I skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been -Wayne Gretzky
SMH
Philosophy of MMO Game Design
People are afraid of changes, afraid of the new and afraid the will lost the sense of prestige on being the best tank, dps or healer that if not in that raid nobody would play without them. Fans of the trinity can't see beyond that sense and role. How many guilds disband because the big ass tank did not show up for the raid and their guild could not have more than 2 tanks and the second guys was only a support tank.
Take out the trinity and people will find out another way to play and have fun, humanity is not bound to one option only, we have to evolve and when we do people are afraid of the new.
Oderint, dum metuant.
They ignore control? Are you serious? I tend to use a mesmer and rely heavily on control. I also have a lot of abilities that give me control.
If you're going to bash a game, at least learn something about it.
Oderint, dum metuant.
Ok. i did play the mesmer, too. It is even the only class in GW2 i played extensively. But you don't have a lot of control.. at least as i would call them. No root, no mezz, no charming. You do have a lot of illuisons and can trick around with it to increase your surviveability a whole lot even. You do have some random debuff/buffing.. not really focused, because they abonded that one, too. You do have some stuns, rather short duration, but any stun should be limited anyway.
Maybe i miss something, where is the control in the mesmer class? (GW2) GW1 on the other side is a completely different story.