"There is no aggro system" is, to me, a nonsense statement. There is an aggro system. Any roleplaying game with multiple targets has an aggro system. "Roll 1d4 and attack whichever character comes up" is an aggro system. "Attack whichever PC the DM chooses" is an aggro system (and one of my favorites). More realisticly, "Attack whoever is closest" is an aggro system.
What TESO is probably getting at is that they're not going to tell anybody what the system is for determining aggro, much like GW2 did. I'm not going to get into the merits and flaws of that undertaking, but ultimately I feel like all of the anti-trinity chanting and hand-waving is a smokescreen for obfuscating a fundamental game mechanic that is, whether the player can see it or not, still ultimately deterministic. That doesn't mean there's no element of chance involved (i.e., it might not be 100% reproduceable), but there are factors involved in TESO that determine who is getting attacked by a mob just like there are in GW2.
The difference between these efforts and games like EQ, FFXI, etc., is that ZeniMax and ANet decided to try to keep the player from figuring out how to control aggro. This hasn't worked in GW2, and I think due to the resilience, resources, and wisdom of the crowds involved, I don't think it'll work in TESO either. Instead it will result in a demarcation between the haves (those who figured out how to reliably game the system) and the have-nots (those who didn't), just as it did in GW2.
Now maybe they'll come out and explain what the mechanics are for determining enmity in TESO--I hope they do--but even if they don't, there are going to be formulae involved in determining when and on whom mobs aggro. Maybe it will be simple (whoever is closest), and maybe it will be complicated (2% chance to target a healer who has done >4% damage in the last 4 seconds if hate hasn't been reset due to a hate-resetting-event in the last 12 seconds, else 2% chance to target a non-healer who is within 30 units and has not experienced any hit point change since the last hate-resetting-event, but only if server time is between 0:00 and 4:00 on even numbered weekdays ... ), but it will be something. There will be rules involved. If the company really wants to completely randomize aggro, well, they can do that, but it makes for combat that seems less like fantasy adventure and more like a survival clusterfuck.
There are some legitimate criticisms of the "trinity," but there are also a lot of criticisms that arise out of the way the system has been implemented in the past. They have a lot more to do with the environment that supported the trinity than the actual paradigm itself, and those are the ones that make me struggle to understand how developers--the people who are supposed to be doing their due diligence learning this stuff--are latching onto the anti-trinity bastion without actually addressing the underlying problems. So, treatise time.
1. Legitimate Complaint: "It's not realistic."
That's fair in some instances and unfair in others. I feel like where the trinity is most harmful is when developers fail to exercise creativity when it comes to conjuring realistic mechanics and labels for the way players control aggro. Taunt. Really? Say something bad about a monster's mother, and he'll attack you instead of the guy raining fire on him. That's a little problematic since a lot of these monsters don't speak your language, and even non-verbal cues will only get you so far. Giving a cockatrice the finger isn't going to have much impact on its disposition.
Furthermore, a character with high intelligence, even if he does understand your language and gestures, is probably at least potentially smart enough to know better anyway. To be fair, some games have taken this into account in various places, and I'll grant that, at least later in its development, EQ, for example, was good about creating encounters (but certainly not all of them) where taunting as aggro-generation wasn't a primary strategy.
Moreover, games like WOW have made some strides replacing the old-fashioned taunt mechanic with more dynamic systems. A monster is going to hate you more if you make him more vulnerable to attacks than if you swear at him, for instance.
On this issue, while I will concede that the rigidity of traditional aggro mechanics might be somewhat unrealistic, I wholeheartedly believe that, especially for more intelligent mobs, it is an artifact of AI more than of immersion. The AI has very specific rules in WOW, for example, about how much value is attached to any given action. That's why things like threat-meter work.
Compare that to PVP, and you'll realize that in PVP, in any game, you're assigning threat levels to opponents when you have a choice on whom you're going to attack. In a game like WOW, for example, you're asking things like "Can I get to the healer? If I can, I want to kill the healer. What if I can't? Well can I out-dps his heals on this squishy guy in front of me? Is he even healing this guy?" The only difference between you and the AI mechanic for the game you're playing is that you're smarter than it is, so you make more intelligent choices. You're still abiding by rules. As for less intelligent mobs, well, frankly, they need rules too. Take a critical look at the film The Grey. Aside from the fact that we love to see people torn apart by wolves, it's worth asking from an academic perspective if these wolves have rules about how they hunt. A canine biologist/zoologist would tell you that, albeit perhaps in a loose sense, they do. So should the wolves in my video games.
Ultimately, I think the end result here is that an aggro system should be realistic in the context in which it exists. That is, it should attempt to simulate, to the best of the technology's abilities, the kind of decision a player in the mob's position would make. Taunt should go, but the tank should be able to do something--I don't really know what--that would make a player decide it's worth killing him rather than the healer or nuker.
2. Illegitimate Complaint: "I should be able to play what I want--not be forced to play something to fit a role."
This is something that ANet trumpeted as support for its profession design, and if I'm being honest, I'll admit that during development I was right there in the throng with the rest of them cheering on the innovation. It sounded like a good idea at the time. Hell, it still sounds like a good idea.
The problem is that freedom in choosing a class and party roles aren't mutually exclusive from a design stand-point, and I feel like GW2 did its players a disservice by adopting an everyone-is-a-tank-and-no-one-is-a-tank approach. The approach is problematic because it accepts as a minor premise of its design something that isn't necessarily true. It looks like this (abstractly): "No one should be required for a group. Rogue types can't hold aggro. Thus, no one should have to hold aggro to join a group." [And repeat for every class. I'm not a studied logician, though, so if somebody wants to clean this up using a more correct statement of the arguments, please feel free.]
Wait! Why couldn't you just have given your thieves a way to get, hold, or dump aggro (preferably all three)? The answer is probably that doing that for every profession would have trivialized group content due to the party's ability to move damage spikes among members at will. That's something that's very easy to design around, though. If you don't believe me, you've never run instances in WOW with two warriors, two druids, and a paladin. Better yet, go level in EQ with a ranger tank. [Yes, I realize these examples are pretty limited in their application.]
The point is that not being able to play what you want due to group dynamic demands is a product of class design--not aggro design. "I don't want to tank, ergo no one should have to tank" doesn't really work, though, does it? The mob is going to be beating on someone. Unless you're kiting. ... I like kiting.
I much prefer a system in which "control" to use GW2's re-terming of it, is something that is clearly transparent for players, and an aspect of it should be attracting or repelling enmity.
The solution to this problem isn't doing away with tanking. It's broadening the scope of tanking (and healing), so that every class has a way of managing aggro in a way that is meaningful, and doing the same thing with healing. GW2 would have been a better game if Thieves could ninja tank, Warriors could armor shred (and gain enmity for it), Mesmers could clone tank (reliably), Elementalists could perma-kite while holding threat, Rangers could pet tank, Engineers could reverse kite (by using knockback, not fear), Guardians could heal-tank, and Necromancers could drain tank. Instead, all of those things gain a little aggro, sometimes, and always inconsistently, leaving players to rely on a combination of gimmicks, the downed state, and chance (and sometimes exploits) to control the flow of combat, to say nothing of the game's general damage mitigation problems in dungeons. Nothing could be less heroic than depending on being flat on your ass to manage aggro.
This isn't a cry to tear GW2 a new one, though. That game has enough criticism to be lobbied at it, and I feel like this conversation needs to be broader. As I said, I don't want to get into a full evaluation of the game's pros and cons when it comes to aggros, because beside the fact that I'm speaking in very general terms, it's just unnecessary for the point at large--that point being that playing the class you want doesn't mean that all roles, and the trinity, go the way of the dodo.
3. Illegitimate Complaint: "If the trinity exists, I will always be LFG."
This is a corollary to the last and, like the prior grievance, while valid under current game design paradigms, isn't a product of the trinity's existence as it is weighted class design. To use FFXI as an example (my favorite MMO of all time): in FFXI, when I played (Zilart era), there were three valid tank jobs (assuming proper sub-jobs and depending on your level), PLD, WAR, and NIN. There were four valid healing jobs (almost always subbed WHM, depending on your level), WHM, SMN, BRD, and RDM. There were two valid crack-dealing jobs (mana regen, which was necessary), RDM and BRD. And then there were seven or eight DPS jobs, DRG, DRK, SAM, THF, RNG, BLM, MNK, and sometimes BST. Trouble is, in a party for most levels, you needed one tank, one healer, one crack dealer, and three DPS. You can do the math on supply and demand and see where the trouble comes in.
The result was that it was very rare to find a Pally or a White Mage looking for a group, while Dragoons were a dime a dozen. If you're not familiar with FFXI, if you have any experience with the dungeon finder in WOW you can see the same situation. Queue up as a DPS class and check your time, then queue as a healer or tank. Same shit, different game.
Put plainly, this disparity is a result of the disparity in healing and tanking classes (or specs, if you're talking WOW) compared to DPS. There's just always more DPS. Always has been. The reasoning is probably (I assume; nobody invites me to game design meetings) something like "Well they need three DPS for every tank, so we should make more DPS classes." That doesn't account for the tanking scarcity problem, though, and that's a problem you fix by re-balancing the ratio of tank-capable and heal-capable classes to dps-only classes. More importantly, you rebalance it in such a way that players aren't feeling strong-armed, as in complaint number 2. An example of good design I can offer here is WAR's Disciple of Khaine (a melee healer).
Finally, it's worth remembering that, unfortunately, sometimes you're just going to be LFG. Tank, healer, DPS, or whatever your preferred role, sometimes you're going to be LFG, and as GW2 has shown us, you don't need a trinity for that, holy or otherwise. People will find reasons to be exclusionary whether the game mechanics offer them or not, and that's part of playing games in an online space.
Closing Remarks
If TESO adopts a "you can't reliably control aggro" scheme, it will be unfortunate because I don't think it will accomplish anything. I think it's fair to say that, regardless of anyone's position on the trinity, what we all want are more immersive, realistic, engaging game mechanics and environments. Some companies are now concluding that that means the trinity is dead, but I think that's a confusion about player demand, and to be honest, I'm not sure I would have been able to make that conclusion if I had not played GW2 myself and seen what a non-trinity system actually looked like (and concluded I didn't like it at all on that front).
The trinity exists in the medium because that's the way the medium evolved (there's a good post somewhere about MUDs and the evolution of the systems, but I don't have the link), and I feel like for the medium to continue to evolve, the systems supporting it have to also evolve. But their evolution doesn't mean extinction, and I'd go so far as to say that if you're going to do away with the trinity, you must supply a functional alternative, because combat in MMO's is deterministic. That's the nature of it; you're playing a video game, and it has rules. The rules don't have to be one way or another, but they have to be applied consistently in order for the game to be fair, and, to the best of a developer's ability, they need to be implemented in a way that attempts to simulate real-world threat-assessment by people and in nature. This is not an exact science, but it is a science, and there's nothing less realistic than a battle plan that amounts to, "Attack any old thing."
Now, sure, we don't have any ecological or military basis for determining how threatening anyone or anything should perceive a person shooting fire from his fingertips, but there are actual rules for strategy and tactics. We know or can discover, in a given situation, between a shoulder-fired rocket launcher and a tank (an actual tank, not some guy with a shield), which is a higher priority target and why. That's real world aggro, and it's something that can be simulated by an AI--and should be. That's not to suggest we have the technology to design a mob AI that can make the same calculations and account for all the circumstantial variables in the way that a battlefield commander can, but we can make an effort.
Moreover, it's absolutely possible to design, balance, and implement game systems that allow players to have a broad range of access to classes and roles in a way that doesn't limit access to content, doesn't shoehorn players into playing things for reasons other than personal desire, and still preserves a system of enmity management that makes sense. That's the way forward. The trinity isn't lazy design; it's conventional design. Abandoning aggro management altogether is lazy; progressing it to the next generation of MMOs is hard. But it's also worthwhile.
It's just you can't in games like wow, which was a bad example with the pvp bit. Other games let you tank in pvp through damage reduction on enemies, crowd control, collision detection and blocking / deflecting attacks on team mates.
There is no reason why pve tanking can't work the same way.
Now will there be rules to who mobs attack, sure, but hopefully they tie with the supposedly better mob ai. So that pack of wolves just attack the nearest Target, that angry troll goes for who hit him hardest, that crafty vampire goes for the healer etc..
Also its not necessarily healers that need to worry with no agro table. Get your self in a position where you have los to your team mates but not to the pve mob and you should be able to heal for fun.
It's dps who will need to be on their toes more as they need los to the mob which means the mob has line of sight on them too. Will need to keep moving so the tank is between you and the mob or the mob is within tanks cc range, might even need to drag mob to a corner if it chases you so gank cam wedge it in with collision detection.
But its entirely possible to make pve encounters work with no agro table, while keeping a trinity and not having a rez, rez, rez battle of attrition like gw2. Gw1 does this, eve does this, war does this on several encounters, so does aoc.
I found a doorway, stood in it, and blocked anyone getting past me by not moving.
The guys behind me used ranged on the enemy but they didn't have to worry about melee attacks, the enemy couldn't get to them.
That to me is a perfect agro system. get in a fight, use the terrain to your benefit.
It works like that too in World of Tanks. Get into a good position and you can fire on an enemy from relative safety. Use flanking to deal extra damage.
basically I hope that when the enemy see us, they see the big guy with the big sword first and attack. Then slowly they realise that the guy is getting healed and there are others about flanking them. The warrior can then do things like slow, knockback, trip, physically block their movement, stun etc all to ensure the fight stays where they want it and to make sure others can do their thing.
I think that GW2 was a great experiement that proved that dungeons without the trinity usually resemble the running of the bulls.
If in 1982 we played with the current mentality, we would have burned down all the pac man games since the red ghost was clearly OP. Instead we just got better at the game.
I loved how it workd in DDO. That to me is a perfect agro system. get in a fight, use the terrain to your benefit.
In an all-instanced system, it is often workable. In an open world, there are still opportunities for this, but also alot of "every man for himself" moments. Someone mentioned the original GW and Eve as no-aggro table games. To me these are not good examples. When one first started up GW, you were confronted with the choice of four emo beta-male classes and one 'roidy jock in the Warrior. Many of us chose Warrior and quickly discovered a gimpy dps class that usually ended up taking one or more running skills because while there were a few occasions where you could block or use terrian, most of the time your were chasing down a mob going after you clothies who is running around in circles.
EvE's not a particularly good example either because pve is its weakest aspect. Pve is basically mining where the asteroids happen to move and shoot back. A group had one tactic--let your biggest/tankiest ship go in first and wait for him to tell the rest of the group it was safe to come in. After that, it was every man for himself.
I played Everquest and loved the game. When I read about how the combat mechanics are really and how despised it was and how things have changed and how the holy trinity is defined I guess those of us who actually played the earlier games can look back with rose tinited lenses. I do not recall it being this bad and I played a wizard. Granted over the years I have drifted to healer classes but I actually played a dps then.
You know when things are broken down to numbers and mechanics it really kills the game for me. I also do not know what about GW 2 made me think the game lacked an identity for me as a class. I was just one in a crowd of persons not a role really in an event. I could never really look back and claim a role or pivot nothing to make me want to be proud. That is what I miss about games that take away roles. I can look back at FFXI and really remember moments in groups where as a Red mage I did something that turned the tide of a fight. In everquest where I saved everyone in my group with an evac or prevented the cleric from dying with a root. No moment I can pin down in GW 2 though even WoW had it . That is what I think games with no roles do they make everyone generic.
I am an EQ player from ages ago and loved the group mechanics of that game, you could manipulate any encounter to suit the group no mater how many people or what classes you had. of course if you had Tank, Heals DPS it could be done in a straight forward manner but if you take away both your Tank and Healer and inserted a CC say an enchanter then you could come up with a new formula to kill the mob/s. without ever needing a tank or healer but you had to play smart. I think the trinity pisses people off because in new games if you dont have it your going to struggle with any hard encounter. So in my opinion the issue isnt having the trinity in the game its what other classes can do when you DONT have the trinity. And the answer to this I think is not to make other classes able to tank / heal its to enable CC skills relevant to their class, Roots, Mez, Charm, Fear, Stun etc etc...
One thing i am not likeing as much with the MMO's i played recently is that everyone seems to desire to do the biggest damage possible and this is killing the finesse of MMO playing, especially just dumping AOE damage... since big damage AOE skills are given to most classes these days the job of an CC class has diminished. I would really like to see the skill of a crowd controller brought back to the game. Not only the skill of the CC'r but the group as well, cause if you have ever played EQ in a dungeon group with a ton of Adds controlled by a chanter and then your Wiz drops an AOE bomb you know what is going to happen next... This style of play also brings a little bit more converstation back to an MMO as you truly have to work together calling out adds as they arrive and a tank actually yelling instructions as he moves from mob to mob, when you just have a group full of people trying to out DPS each other its so silent and in my opinion boring as S#!T...
excuse my typing i am rushing this through at work...
GW2 didn't get rid of the trinity. It got rid of each character being stuck in a static trinity-based role. Once a tank, always a tank. How boring is that?
This. There are tanking and healing skills in GW2 and you can use them on nearly every class.
But to be succesfull you have to use them in conjunction with your other skills. On your warrior you might one moment be mitigating damage at the forefront of battle, at the other moment you might pull back and shout heal your party up only to take out your crossbow and aoe a group of incoming mobs. It's far more engaging then the static boring systems like you have in WoW and EQ and while some of the boss encounters it can still use some refinement and polish, this method is clearly the way of the future and I for one am happy to see that ESO is going the same way. This news made the game a lot more interesting for me.
I would rather the game be like Runescape, a fully immersive world but with ZERO classes except with the free combat system which would use aiming and much less powers than stupid WoW. -.-
Change your thoughts and you change your world. -
Norman Vincent Peale
The trinity was not removed from GW2, they just made everyone a tank, everyone a healer, and everyone a damage dealer.
At any time someone is fulfilling one of those roles. That is not "removal".
Not to mention, of the like 5 classes I played, each and everyone had skills that I could choose, both passive and nonpassive, that would make me either a better tank, healr, or damage dealer.
Even arena net said that the classes were designed so that you COULD be a tank, healer, or DD, but were not locked into that role if you didn't want to always play that way.
They did the exaxct same thing Trion did, but how you play doesn't drastically change depending on the role you take up like you do in Rift.
I guess my copy of GW2 was broken, bunch of guys here seem to have played a completely different game than I did.
Also, people will do the same thing in TESO they do in Rift. If your class is best suited to heal, you'll be expected to heal, which is what everyone expected my cleric to do. If you're best suited to tank, they'll expect you to tank, which everyone expected my warrior and in certian cases my rogue, to do. If you're class is the best DD then you'll be expected to do that, which is what everryone expected my mage to do, even though he was the only class I LIKED healing with.
Unless they homaginzie all the classes down to one class with different names, effects and very suttle differences in play style, just like GW2. Which aftrer playing 5 classes in that game it dawned on me, that every ranged class felt the same, and every melee class felt the same. My magicy guy felt just like my archer guy, and my pet magic guy felt a lot like my pet archer guy. Rogue felt pretty much the same as the warrior type class I tried.
I feel like some developers have the same mentallity that's overrun youth sports. No tryouts, everyone plays, evenyone gets an award, and no scores are kept.
Gaming AI has yet to reach a point that they can get rid of the trinity. Either they'll have it in, and try to cover it up as much as possible (GW2) or they'll make things arbitrarilly difficult to cover it up, ( a single person will be fighting packs of mobs as apposed to just one or two. )
The only reason they do this is because it makes it easier to find a group if you can change your role, and it's easier to balance if everyone does the same damge, healing, and mitiagion.
2. I have been anti trinity since I played Asherons Call and saw that the need for it is just plain not there and is nothing more than a crutch meant to make every character some minor aspect of a larger group instead of it being a group of HEROES. An adventurer is supposed to be able to survive out in the wild, not be reliant on so many others.
More than past time to end the crutch the MMORPG industry has been on since the mid 90s.
I hope we shall crush...in its birth the aristocracy of our moneyed corporations, which dare already to challenge our government to a trial of strength and bid defiance to the laws of our country." ~Thomes Jefferson
2. I have been anti trinity since I played Asherons Call and saw that the need for it is just plain not there and is nothing more than a crutch meant to make every character some minor aspect of a larger group instead of it being a group of HEROES. An adventurer is supposed to be able to survive out in the wild, not be reliant on so many others.
More than past time to end the crutch the MMORPG industry has been on since the mid 90s.
Make everyone feel like Heroes, that's the trick. Lets make everyone feel special in their own perky personalized world. Sure worked with Swtor, GW2, AoC, etc. People become so englufed by the "me me me" surrounding their personal storylines that they forget how to interact as a community. When close friends quit, many are left alone in shallow game worlds. Those who start from level 1 solo, play the whole game solo, stuck in solo quest line instances for most of their journey to max level. Upon reaching max level many, like me, feel no need to continue. You reached the end by yourself. You, the Hero, have overcame whatever huge obstacle you needed to overcome..by yourself. What more could really be out there? is it even really worth it?
The "90s" MMORPGs you mention were mostly successful because they knew how to utilize the "M" in MASSIVELY. You felt like a HERO because you were able to overcome epic circumstances in an epic surrounding with an epic group of friends.
As far as the trinity goes, the majority of MMO players actually enjoy playing some sort of group role. The GW2 experiment is proof of this. Customization is fine, give people the option to switch from healer to tank to dps, etc, but make the roles themselves actually mean something in the game world. Gear rewards are great, but people feel more rewarded by working successfully as a team. Without the holy trinity, you feel no real sense of this.
I don't know if it's been mentioned elsewhere, but did anyone see the group event bosses in the Brisban Wildlands called "The Sinister Triad"? They have three guys, and under their names where it says what they do, one says Heals, one says Tanks, and the other says Deals Damage...
I laughed out loud when the "Tank" made me lose control of my character and run towards her. A great little poke at the holy trinity I thought, but I can imagine that some people got mad about it. Someone always does.
As far as the trinity goes, the majority of MMO players actually enjoy playing some sort of group role. The GW2 experiment is proof of this. Customization is fine, give people the option to switch from healer to tank to dps, etc, but make the roles themselves actually mean something in the game world. Gear rewards are great, but people feel more rewarded by working successfully as a team. Without the holy trinity, you feel no real sense of this.
No, YOU feel no real sense of this. I don't need a decade old mechanic to enjoy a game, a friend and I took turns getting within range of a champion mob and though it took 10 minutes, by doing so we were able to successfully manipulate the unique hate system in the game and take it down without having some kind of artificial taunt or mass heal. If anything, I've never felt MORE important in a team. There was no fake panic button to rely on, and I personally enjoy it. I'll play a good trinity game again if one ever releases, but the break I'm taking with GW2 has been nothing short of a breath of fresh air.
Dear OP, there are tons of trinity-based MMOs out there. Take your pick. A non-trinity based game isn't an automatic fail, no matter how much you feel you got screwed over as a tank. Yeah, that's right, you're no longer the special one. Everyone gets their moment ni the sun.
When I read they were going to release an elder scroll online, I thought it was a great idea...
Now, reading a bit on the left and right, I came to learn that the game WON'T have an aggro system. Seriously, after GW2 failfest I don't understand why company still try to go that way. Even in GW2 high end players were recreating a holy trinity by using game gimmicks, which was far from being fun let me add.
Being a tank in every game that I play (single player too when I can...), this is simply a big fun killer for me. The holy trinity is nothing but efficient tactic.
I don't know, make the game not REQUIRE holy trinity, why not give it a try... But simply DENYING this aspect by not having aggro system at all is just wrong from my point of view.
I will probably try the game nonetheless, but my hopes for this game went from high to underground with this.
Doin't remember any elder scrolls game having a agro system from arena to skyrim.
SO basically they aren't picking up every two bit MMO systems and stuffing it into elder scrolls. Good for them Myabe they'll make a game alittle less MMO'ishy (read Wow clone). Will it work out foir the better? To early to say. Otherwise since mages, healers, and rogues in the game can wear heavy (plate) armor if they want theres alot less reason to say oh we need a tank to hold agro because the mage is squishy.
I'd say your thinking inside the box and can't see the outside
Holy Trinity mecanic is such a sleeping pill, It's so dumb easy.
Tank press his 3-4 aggro skills so the boss keeps facing him, rangers do dps while the healer standing in the back drinking some beer and pop of heals here and there.
Yes I know you holy trinity crowd will prolly shoot me down for making it sound so simple but in reality it IS THAT simple when you are in farming mode for dungeons.
Without holy trinity you have to think, see what the rest in your group are doing, move around to good position ect.
As far as the trinity goes, the majority of MMO players actually enjoy playing some sort of group role. The GW2 experiment is proof of this. Customization is fine, give people the option to switch from healer to tank to dps, etc, but make the roles themselves actually mean something in the game world. Gear rewards are great, but people feel more rewarded by working successfully as a team. Without the holy trinity, you feel no real sense of this.
No, YOU feel no real sense of this. I don't need a decade old mechanic to enjoy a game, a friend and I took turns getting within range of a champion mob and though it took 10 minutes, by doing so we were able to successfully manipulate the unique hate system in the game and take it down without having some kind of artificial taunt or mass heal.
Sounds like an awfully epic encounter. Bravo. Try duoing Xegony from EQ1, scaled to an appropriate level, then get back to me. Sure the trinity is a dated mechanic, but I can assure you and anyone else bashing it..you are the minority.
No, YOU feel no real sense of this. I don't need a decade old mechanic to enjoy a game, a friend and I took turns getting within range of a champion mob and though it took 10 minutes, by doing so we were able to successfully manipulate the unique hate system in the game and take it down without having some kind of artificial taunt or mass heal. If anything, I've never felt MORE important in a team. There was no fake panic button to rely on, and I personally enjoy it. I'll play a good trinity game again if one ever releases, but the break I'm taking with GW2 has been nothing short of a breath of fresh air.
Its pretty obvious a huge amount of people have this feeling lol... Running in and out of range for 10 mins doesnt sound very exciting or interesting to me, it kinda makes me never want to play GW2 lol if thats what the going tactic is... the mechanics of the mob must be very umm.. dull. And since when did a mass heal become a bad part of mmo wouldnt that be an indication that your in a tough encounter and having to work hard to win?? No lets have everyone heal themselves so we can just play a single player syle game with a bunch of clones next to us we dont have to think about...
When I read they were going to release an elder scroll online, I thought it was a great idea...
Now, reading a bit on the left and right, I came to learn that the game WON'T have an aggro system. Seriously, after GW2 failfest I don't understand why company still try to go that way. Even in GW2 high end players were recreating a holy trinity by using game gimmicks, which was far from being fun let me add.
Being a tank in every game that I play (single player too when I can...), this is simply a big fun killer for me. The holy trinity is nothing but efficient tactic.
I don't know, make the game not REQUIRE holy trinity, why not give it a try... But simply DENYING this aspect by not having aggro system at all is just wrong from my point of view.
I will probably try the game nonetheless, but my hopes for this game went from high to underground with this.
The trinity and aggro system will slowly work it's way out of mmos. As time goes on and AI gets better do you really think AI controlled mobs and bosses should be responding the same stupid way they have been for 10, 20, 30 years? Eventually it will get to the point of AI approaching human like levels. So boss and mobs fight will be like PvP rather than drone like PvE battles like it is now. Can you imagine if we built our computers to stay dumb, or playing Chessmaster 3000 at a sub kindergarten level all the time? Do you guys really think that mmos should be made that way forever?
I hear all this smack talk about challenge but ooooh no don't take away our retarded ass handicap in the process. But we want to be challenged! OOOOh but don't make the raid boss actually think with any real intelligence! Ask anyone here if they got the chance to play the role of a raid boss who would they kill first? Only the dense ones would attack the guy with the most hp and the thickest armor first. As other genres constantly improve AI ememies, we are stuck in this rut of trying to keep them dumb but pretty. Yeaaah don't make'em too smart, we don't want them actually winning now do we?
Time to pick guys challenge or tradition? You can't have it both ways...
"Small minds talk about people, average minds talk about events, great minds talk about ideas."
Comments
"There is no aggro system" is, to me, a nonsense statement. There is an aggro system. Any roleplaying game with multiple targets has an aggro system. "Roll 1d4 and attack whichever character comes up" is an aggro system. "Attack whichever PC the DM chooses" is an aggro system (and one of my favorites). More realisticly, "Attack whoever is closest" is an aggro system.
What TESO is probably getting at is that they're not going to tell anybody what the system is for determining aggro, much like GW2 did. I'm not going to get into the merits and flaws of that undertaking, but ultimately I feel like all of the anti-trinity chanting and hand-waving is a smokescreen for obfuscating a fundamental game mechanic that is, whether the player can see it or not, still ultimately deterministic. That doesn't mean there's no element of chance involved (i.e., it might not be 100% reproduceable), but there are factors involved in TESO that determine who is getting attacked by a mob just like there are in GW2.
The difference between these efforts and games like EQ, FFXI, etc., is that ZeniMax and ANet decided to try to keep the player from figuring out how to control aggro. This hasn't worked in GW2, and I think due to the resilience, resources, and wisdom of the crowds involved, I don't think it'll work in TESO either. Instead it will result in a demarcation between the haves (those who figured out how to reliably game the system) and the have-nots (those who didn't), just as it did in GW2.
Now maybe they'll come out and explain what the mechanics are for determining enmity in TESO--I hope they do--but even if they don't, there are going to be formulae involved in determining when and on whom mobs aggro. Maybe it will be simple (whoever is closest), and maybe it will be complicated (2% chance to target a healer who has done >4% damage in the last 4 seconds if hate hasn't been reset due to a hate-resetting-event in the last 12 seconds, else 2% chance to target a non-healer who is within 30 units and has not experienced any hit point change since the last hate-resetting-event, but only if server time is between 0:00 and 4:00 on even numbered weekdays ... ), but it will be something. There will be rules involved. If the company really wants to completely randomize aggro, well, they can do that, but it makes for combat that seems less like fantasy adventure and more like a survival clusterfuck.
There are some legitimate criticisms of the "trinity," but there are also a lot of criticisms that arise out of the way the system has been implemented in the past. They have a lot more to do with the environment that supported the trinity than the actual paradigm itself, and those are the ones that make me struggle to understand how developers--the people who are supposed to be doing their due diligence learning this stuff--are latching onto the anti-trinity bastion without actually addressing the underlying problems. So, treatise time.
1. Legitimate Complaint: "It's not realistic."
That's fair in some instances and unfair in others. I feel like where the trinity is most harmful is when developers fail to exercise creativity when it comes to conjuring realistic mechanics and labels for the way players control aggro. Taunt. Really? Say something bad about a monster's mother, and he'll attack you instead of the guy raining fire on him. That's a little problematic since a lot of these monsters don't speak your language, and even non-verbal cues will only get you so far. Giving a cockatrice the finger isn't going to have much impact on its disposition.
Furthermore, a character with high intelligence, even if he does understand your language and gestures, is probably at least potentially smart enough to know better anyway. To be fair, some games have taken this into account in various places, and I'll grant that, at least later in its development, EQ, for example, was good about creating encounters (but certainly not all of them) where taunting as aggro-generation wasn't a primary strategy.
Moreover, games like WOW have made some strides replacing the old-fashioned taunt mechanic with more dynamic systems. A monster is going to hate you more if you make him more vulnerable to attacks than if you swear at him, for instance.
On this issue, while I will concede that the rigidity of traditional aggro mechanics might be somewhat unrealistic, I wholeheartedly believe that, especially for more intelligent mobs, it is an artifact of AI more than of immersion. The AI has very specific rules in WOW, for example, about how much value is attached to any given action. That's why things like threat-meter work.
Compare that to PVP, and you'll realize that in PVP, in any game, you're assigning threat levels to opponents when you have a choice on whom you're going to attack. In a game like WOW, for example, you're asking things like "Can I get to the healer? If I can, I want to kill the healer. What if I can't? Well can I out-dps his heals on this squishy guy in front of me? Is he even healing this guy?" The only difference between you and the AI mechanic for the game you're playing is that you're smarter than it is, so you make more intelligent choices. You're still abiding by rules. As for less intelligent mobs, well, frankly, they need rules too. Take a critical look at the film The Grey. Aside from the fact that we love to see people torn apart by wolves, it's worth asking from an academic perspective if these wolves have rules about how they hunt. A canine biologist/zoologist would tell you that, albeit perhaps in a loose sense, they do. So should the wolves in my video games.
Ultimately, I think the end result here is that an aggro system should be realistic in the context in which it exists. That is, it should attempt to simulate, to the best of the technology's abilities, the kind of decision a player in the mob's position would make. Taunt should go, but the tank should be able to do something--I don't really know what--that would make a player decide it's worth killing him rather than the healer or nuker.
2. Illegitimate Complaint: "I should be able to play what I want--not be forced to play something to fit a role."
This is something that ANet trumpeted as support for its profession design, and if I'm being honest, I'll admit that during development I was right there in the throng with the rest of them cheering on the innovation. It sounded like a good idea at the time. Hell, it still sounds like a good idea.
The problem is that freedom in choosing a class and party roles aren't mutually exclusive from a design stand-point, and I feel like GW2 did its players a disservice by adopting an everyone-is-a-tank-and-no-one-is-a-tank approach. The approach is problematic because it accepts as a minor premise of its design something that isn't necessarily true. It looks like this (abstractly): "No one should be required for a group. Rogue types can't hold aggro. Thus, no one should have to hold aggro to join a group." [And repeat for every class. I'm not a studied logician, though, so if somebody wants to clean this up using a more correct statement of the arguments, please feel free.]
Wait! Why couldn't you just have given your thieves a way to get, hold, or dump aggro (preferably all three)? The answer is probably that doing that for every profession would have trivialized group content due to the party's ability to move damage spikes among members at will. That's something that's very easy to design around, though. If you don't believe me, you've never run instances in WOW with two warriors, two druids, and a paladin. Better yet, go level in EQ with a ranger tank. [Yes, I realize these examples are pretty limited in their application.]
The point is that not being able to play what you want due to group dynamic demands is a product of class design--not aggro design. "I don't want to tank, ergo no one should have to tank" doesn't really work, though, does it? The mob is going to be beating on someone. Unless you're kiting. ... I like kiting.
I much prefer a system in which "control" to use GW2's re-terming of it, is something that is clearly transparent for players, and an aspect of it should be attracting or repelling enmity.
The solution to this problem isn't doing away with tanking. It's broadening the scope of tanking (and healing), so that every class has a way of managing aggro in a way that is meaningful, and doing the same thing with healing. GW2 would have been a better game if Thieves could ninja tank, Warriors could armor shred (and gain enmity for it), Mesmers could clone tank (reliably), Elementalists could perma-kite while holding threat, Rangers could pet tank, Engineers could reverse kite (by using knockback, not fear), Guardians could heal-tank, and Necromancers could drain tank. Instead, all of those things gain a little aggro, sometimes, and always inconsistently, leaving players to rely on a combination of gimmicks, the downed state, and chance (and sometimes exploits) to control the flow of combat, to say nothing of the game's general damage mitigation problems in dungeons. Nothing could be less heroic than depending on being flat on your ass to manage aggro.
This isn't a cry to tear GW2 a new one, though. That game has enough criticism to be lobbied at it, and I feel like this conversation needs to be broader. As I said, I don't want to get into a full evaluation of the game's pros and cons when it comes to aggros, because beside the fact that I'm speaking in very general terms, it's just unnecessary for the point at large--that point being that playing the class you want doesn't mean that all roles, and the trinity, go the way of the dodo.
3. Illegitimate Complaint: "If the trinity exists, I will always be LFG."
This is a corollary to the last and, like the prior grievance, while valid under current game design paradigms, isn't a product of the trinity's existence as it is weighted class design. To use FFXI as an example (my favorite MMO of all time): in FFXI, when I played (Zilart era), there were three valid tank jobs (assuming proper sub-jobs and depending on your level), PLD, WAR, and NIN. There were four valid healing jobs (almost always subbed WHM, depending on your level), WHM, SMN, BRD, and RDM. There were two valid crack-dealing jobs (mana regen, which was necessary), RDM and BRD. And then there were seven or eight DPS jobs, DRG, DRK, SAM, THF, RNG, BLM, MNK, and sometimes BST. Trouble is, in a party for most levels, you needed one tank, one healer, one crack dealer, and three DPS. You can do the math on supply and demand and see where the trouble comes in.
The result was that it was very rare to find a Pally or a White Mage looking for a group, while Dragoons were a dime a dozen. If you're not familiar with FFXI, if you have any experience with the dungeon finder in WOW you can see the same situation. Queue up as a DPS class and check your time, then queue as a healer or tank. Same shit, different game.
Put plainly, this disparity is a result of the disparity in healing and tanking classes (or specs, if you're talking WOW) compared to DPS. There's just always more DPS. Always has been. The reasoning is probably (I assume; nobody invites me to game design meetings) something like "Well they need three DPS for every tank, so we should make more DPS classes." That doesn't account for the tanking scarcity problem, though, and that's a problem you fix by re-balancing the ratio of tank-capable and heal-capable classes to dps-only classes. More importantly, you rebalance it in such a way that players aren't feeling strong-armed, as in complaint number 2. An example of good design I can offer here is WAR's Disciple of Khaine (a melee healer).
Finally, it's worth remembering that, unfortunately, sometimes you're just going to be LFG. Tank, healer, DPS, or whatever your preferred role, sometimes you're going to be LFG, and as GW2 has shown us, you don't need a trinity for that, holy or otherwise. People will find reasons to be exclusionary whether the game mechanics offer them or not, and that's part of playing games in an online space.
Closing Remarks
If TESO adopts a "you can't reliably control aggro" scheme, it will be unfortunate because I don't think it will accomplish anything. I think it's fair to say that, regardless of anyone's position on the trinity, what we all want are more immersive, realistic, engaging game mechanics and environments. Some companies are now concluding that that means the trinity is dead, but I think that's a confusion about player demand, and to be honest, I'm not sure I would have been able to make that conclusion if I had not played GW2 myself and seen what a non-trinity system actually looked like (and concluded I didn't like it at all on that front).
The trinity exists in the medium because that's the way the medium evolved (there's a good post somewhere about MUDs and the evolution of the systems, but I don't have the link), and I feel like for the medium to continue to evolve, the systems supporting it have to also evolve. But their evolution doesn't mean extinction, and I'd go so far as to say that if you're going to do away with the trinity, you must supply a functional alternative, because combat in MMO's is deterministic. That's the nature of it; you're playing a video game, and it has rules. The rules don't have to be one way or another, but they have to be applied consistently in order for the game to be fair, and, to the best of a developer's ability, they need to be implemented in a way that attempts to simulate real-world threat-assessment by people and in nature. This is not an exact science, but it is a science, and there's nothing less realistic than a battle plan that amounts to, "Attack any old thing."
Now, sure, we don't have any ecological or military basis for determining how threatening anyone or anything should perceive a person shooting fire from his fingertips, but there are actual rules for strategy and tactics. We know or can discover, in a given situation, between a shoulder-fired rocket launcher and a tank (an actual tank, not some guy with a shield), which is a higher priority target and why. That's real world aggro, and it's something that can be simulated by an AI--and should be. That's not to suggest we have the technology to design a mob AI that can make the same calculations and account for all the circumstantial variables in the way that a battlefield commander can, but we can make an effort.
Moreover, it's absolutely possible to design, balance, and implement game systems that allow players to have a broad range of access to classes and roles in a way that doesn't limit access to content, doesn't shoehorn players into playing things for reasons other than personal desire, and still preserves a system of enmity management that makes sense. That's the way forward. The trinity isn't lazy design; it's conventional design. Abandoning aggro management altogether is lazy; progressing it to the next generation of MMOs is hard. But it's also worthwhile.
Peace and safety.
YOU CAN TANK WITHOUT AN AGRO TABLE
It's just you can't in games like wow, which was a bad example with the pvp bit. Other games let you tank in pvp through damage reduction on enemies, crowd control, collision detection and blocking / deflecting attacks on team mates.
There is no reason why pve tanking can't work the same way.
Now will there be rules to who mobs attack, sure, but hopefully they tie with the supposedly better mob ai. So that pack of wolves just attack the nearest Target, that angry troll goes for who hit him hardest, that crafty vampire goes for the healer etc..
It's dps who will need to be on their toes more as they need los to the mob which means the mob has line of sight on them too. Will need to keep moving so the tank is between you and the mob or the mob is within tanks cc range, might even need to drag mob to a corner if it chases you so gank cam wedge it in with collision detection.
But its entirely possible to make pve encounters work with no agro table, while keeping a trinity and not having a rez, rez, rez battle of attrition like gw2. Gw1 does this, eve does this, war does this on several encounters, so does aoc.
I loved how it workd in DDO.
I played a Warrior with a big shield.
I found a doorway, stood in it, and blocked anyone getting past me by not moving.
The guys behind me used ranged on the enemy but they didn't have to worry about melee attacks, the enemy couldn't get to them.
That to me is a perfect agro system. get in a fight, use the terrain to your benefit.
It works like that too in World of Tanks. Get into a good position and you can fire on an enemy from relative safety. Use flanking to deal extra damage.
basically I hope that when the enemy see us, they see the big guy with the big sword first and attack. Then slowly they realise that the guy is getting healed and there are others about flanking them. The warrior can then do things like slow, knockback, trip, physically block their movement, stun etc all to ensure the fight stays where they want it and to make sure others can do their thing.
But an agro meter is simple design...
If in 1982 we played with the current mentality, we would have burned down all the pac man games since the red ghost was clearly OP. Instead we just got better at the game.
the real original trinity is tank/heal/CC , not DPS
doing control was more fun and strategic in combats than just shooting mindlessly and looking at your DPS meter...
In an all-instanced system, it is often workable. In an open world, there are still opportunities for this, but also alot of "every man for himself" moments. Someone mentioned the original GW and Eve as no-aggro table games. To me these are not good examples. When one first started up GW, you were confronted with the choice of four emo beta-male classes and one 'roidy jock in the Warrior. Many of us chose Warrior and quickly discovered a gimpy dps class that usually ended up taking one or more running skills because while there were a few occasions where you could block or use terrian, most of the time your were chasing down a mob going after you clothies who is running around in circles.EvE's not a particularly good example either because pve is its weakest aspect. Pve is basically mining where the asteroids happen to move and shoot back. A group had one tactic--let your biggest/tankiest ship go in first and wait for him to tell the rest of the group it was safe to come in. After that, it was every man for himself.
I played Everquest and loved the game. When I read about how the combat mechanics are really and how despised it was and how things have changed and how the holy trinity is defined I guess those of us who actually played the earlier games can look back with rose tinited lenses. I do not recall it being this bad and I played a wizard. Granted over the years I have drifted to healer classes but I actually played a dps then.
You know when things are broken down to numbers and mechanics it really kills the game for me. I also do not know what about GW 2 made me think the game lacked an identity for me as a class. I was just one in a crowd of persons not a role really in an event. I could never really look back and claim a role or pivot nothing to make me want to be proud. That is what I miss about games that take away roles. I can look back at FFXI and really remember moments in groups where as a Red mage I did something that turned the tide of a fight. In everquest where I saved everyone in my group with an evac or prevented the cleric from dying with a root. No moment I can pin down in GW 2 though even WoW had it . That is what I think games with no roles do they make everyone generic.
I am an EQ player from ages ago and loved the group mechanics of that game, you could manipulate any encounter to suit the group no mater how many people or what classes you had. of course if you had Tank, Heals DPS it could be done in a straight forward manner but if you take away both your Tank and Healer and inserted a CC say an enchanter then you could come up with a new formula to kill the mob/s. without ever needing a tank or healer but you had to play smart. I think the trinity pisses people off because in new games if you dont have it your going to struggle with any hard encounter. So in my opinion the issue isnt having the trinity in the game its what other classes can do when you DONT have the trinity. And the answer to this I think is not to make other classes able to tank / heal its to enable CC skills relevant to their class, Roots, Mez, Charm, Fear, Stun etc etc...
One thing i am not likeing as much with the MMO's i played recently is that everyone seems to desire to do the biggest damage possible and this is killing the finesse of MMO playing, especially just dumping AOE damage... since big damage AOE skills are given to most classes these days the job of an CC class has diminished. I would really like to see the skill of a crowd controller brought back to the game. Not only the skill of the CC'r but the group as well, cause if you have ever played EQ in a dungeon group with a ton of Adds controlled by a chanter and then your Wiz drops an AOE bomb you know what is going to happen next... This style of play also brings a little bit more converstation back to an MMO as you truly have to work together calling out adds as they arrive and a tank actually yelling instructions as he moves from mob to mob, when you just have a group full of people trying to out DPS each other its so silent and in my opinion boring as S#!T...
excuse my typing i am rushing this through at work...
This. There are tanking and healing skills in GW2 and you can use them on nearly every class.
But to be succesfull you have to use them in conjunction with your other skills. On your warrior you might one moment be mitigating damage at the forefront of battle, at the other moment you might pull back and shout heal your party up only to take out your crossbow and aoe a group of incoming mobs. It's far more engaging then the static boring systems like you have in WoW and EQ and while some of the boss encounters it can still use some refinement and polish, this method is clearly the way of the future and I for one am happy to see that ESO is going the same way. This news made the game a lot more interesting for me.
I like the trinity. It was a fun idea to consider a game with no trinity, but now that I have tried it, I really don't like the idea of no trinity.
Give me the Tank, the Healer, and the Deepser.
The trinity was not removed from GW2, they just made everyone a tank, everyone a healer, and everyone a damage dealer.
At any time someone is fulfilling one of those roles. That is not "removal".
Not to mention, of the like 5 classes I played, each and everyone had skills that I could choose, both passive and nonpassive, that would make me either a better tank, healr, or damage dealer.
Even arena net said that the classes were designed so that you COULD be a tank, healer, or DD, but were not locked into that role if you didn't want to always play that way.
They did the exaxct same thing Trion did, but how you play doesn't drastically change depending on the role you take up like you do in Rift.
I guess my copy of GW2 was broken, bunch of guys here seem to have played a completely different game than I did.
Also, people will do the same thing in TESO they do in Rift. If your class is best suited to heal, you'll be expected to heal, which is what everyone expected my cleric to do. If you're best suited to tank, they'll expect you to tank, which everyone expected my warrior and in certian cases my rogue, to do. If you're class is the best DD then you'll be expected to do that, which is what everryone expected my mage to do, even though he was the only class I LIKED healing with.
Unless they homaginzie all the classes down to one class with different names, effects and very suttle differences in play style, just like GW2. Which aftrer playing 5 classes in that game it dawned on me, that every ranged class felt the same, and every melee class felt the same. My magicy guy felt just like my archer guy, and my pet magic guy felt a lot like my pet archer guy. Rogue felt pretty much the same as the warrior type class I tried.
I feel like some developers have the same mentallity that's overrun youth sports. No tryouts, everyone plays, evenyone gets an award, and no scores are kept.
Gaming AI has yet to reach a point that they can get rid of the trinity. Either they'll have it in, and try to cover it up as much as possible (GW2) or they'll make things arbitrarilly difficult to cover it up, ( a single person will be fighting packs of mobs as apposed to just one or two. )
The only reason they do this is because it makes it easier to find a group if you can change your role, and it's easier to balance if everyone does the same damge, healing, and mitiagion.
1. lolz at the HOLY part.
2. I have been anti trinity since I played Asherons Call and saw that the need for it is just plain not there and is nothing more than a crutch meant to make every character some minor aspect of a larger group instead of it being a group of HEROES. An adventurer is supposed to be able to survive out in the wild, not be reliant on so many others.
More than past time to end the crutch the MMORPG industry has been on since the mid 90s.
I hope we shall crush...in its birth the aristocracy of our moneyed corporations, which dare already to challenge our government to a trial of strength and bid defiance to the laws of our country." ~Thomes Jefferson
Make everyone feel like Heroes, that's the trick. Lets make everyone feel special in their own perky personalized world. Sure worked with Swtor, GW2, AoC, etc. People become so englufed by the "me me me" surrounding their personal storylines that they forget how to interact as a community. When close friends quit, many are left alone in shallow game worlds. Those who start from level 1 solo, play the whole game solo, stuck in solo quest line instances for most of their journey to max level. Upon reaching max level many, like me, feel no need to continue. You reached the end by yourself. You, the Hero, have overcame whatever huge obstacle you needed to overcome..by yourself. What more could really be out there? is it even really worth it?
The "90s" MMORPGs you mention were mostly successful because they knew how to utilize the "M" in MASSIVELY. You felt like a HERO because you were able to overcome epic circumstances in an epic surrounding with an epic group of friends.
As far as the trinity goes, the majority of MMO players actually enjoy playing some sort of group role. The GW2 experiment is proof of this. Customization is fine, give people the option to switch from healer to tank to dps, etc, but make the roles themselves actually mean something in the game world. Gear rewards are great, but people feel more rewarded by working successfully as a team. Without the holy trinity, you feel no real sense of this.
I don't know if it's been mentioned elsewhere, but did anyone see the group event bosses in the Brisban Wildlands called "The Sinister Triad"? They have three guys, and under their names where it says what they do, one says Heals, one says Tanks, and the other says Deals Damage...
I laughed out loud when the "Tank" made me lose control of my character and run towards her. A great little poke at the holy trinity I thought, but I can imagine that some people got mad about it. Someone always does.
No, YOU feel no real sense of this. I don't need a decade old mechanic to enjoy a game, a friend and I took turns getting within range of a champion mob and though it took 10 minutes, by doing so we were able to successfully manipulate the unique hate system in the game and take it down without having some kind of artificial taunt or mass heal. If anything, I've never felt MORE important in a team. There was no fake panic button to rely on, and I personally enjoy it. I'll play a good trinity game again if one ever releases, but the break I'm taking with GW2 has been nothing short of a breath of fresh air.
Doin't remember any elder scrolls game having a agro system from arena to skyrim.
SO basically they aren't picking up every two bit MMO systems and stuffing it into elder scrolls. Good for them Myabe they'll make a game alittle less MMO'ishy (read Wow clone). Will it work out foir the better? To early to say. Otherwise since mages, healers, and rogues in the game can wear heavy (plate) armor if they want theres alot less reason to say oh we need a tank to hold agro because the mage is squishy.
I'd say your thinking inside the box and can't see the outside
Holy Trinity mecanic is such a sleeping pill, It's so dumb easy.
Tank press his 3-4 aggro skills so the boss keeps facing him, rangers do dps while the healer standing in the back drinking some beer and pop of heals here and there.
Yes I know you holy trinity crowd will prolly shoot me down for making it sound so simple but in reality it IS THAT simple when you are in farming mode for dungeons.
Without holy trinity you have to think, see what the rest in your group are doing, move around to good position ect.
If it's not broken, you are not innovating.
aka, undead will attack the closest because the lacking the brain!
a big beast will attack whoever is closest or is pissing it off
and a elemental is smart enough to blast your healer to oblivion!!
Sounds like an awfully epic encounter. Bravo. Try duoing Xegony from EQ1, scaled to an appropriate level, then get back to me. Sure the trinity is a dated mechanic, but I can assure you and anyone else bashing it..you are the minority.
Its pretty obvious a huge amount of people have this feeling lol... Running in and out of range for 10 mins doesnt sound very exciting or interesting to me, it kinda makes me never want to play GW2 lol if thats what the going tactic is... the mechanics of the mob must be very umm.. dull. And since when did a mass heal become a bad part of mmo wouldnt that be an indication that your in a tough encounter and having to work hard to win?? No lets have everyone heal themselves so we can just play a single player syle game with a bunch of clones next to us we dont have to think about...
The trinity and aggro system will slowly work it's way out of mmos. As time goes on and AI gets better do you really think AI controlled mobs and bosses should be responding the same stupid way they have been for 10, 20, 30 years? Eventually it will get to the point of AI approaching human like levels. So boss and mobs fight will be like PvP rather than drone like PvE battles like it is now. Can you imagine if we built our computers to stay dumb, or playing Chessmaster 3000 at a sub kindergarten level all the time? Do you guys really think that mmos should be made that way forever?
I hear all this smack talk about challenge but ooooh no don't take away our retarded ass handicap in the process. But we want to be challenged! OOOOh but don't make the raid boss actually think with any real intelligence! Ask anyone here if they got the chance to play the role of a raid boss who would they kill first? Only the dense ones would attack the guy with the most hp and the thickest armor first. As other genres constantly improve AI ememies, we are stuck in this rut of trying to keep them dumb but pretty. Yeaaah don't make'em too smart, we don't want them actually winning now do we?
Time to pick guys challenge or tradition? You can't have it both ways...
"Small minds talk about people, average minds talk about events, great minds talk about ideas."