It depends on what the game is trying to achieve. Some games are better fit to a trinity system, some are better fit toward a hybrid (or something else entirely). I don't feel there's one system that's best for all games, they all have their place (audience) be it turn-based, FPS, TPS, Trinity, etc...
For every minute you are angry , you lose 60 seconds of happiness."-Emerson
Originally posted by Latronus I've never liked the trinity. It's completely unrealistic, yeah I know, realism in a fantasy game??? Combat is chaotic. Having a person basically hurling insults while everyone else beats the hell outta a mob is unimaginative mechanics. The trinity forces an order where none should exist. I think GW2s approach is a step in the right direction. The combat is somewhat chaotic like it should be and if the players are selfish and don't work together then failure is an option just as in real combat. People are resistant to change and since this is a change, many won't like it and can't accept that they have to do something besides, throw insults, heal or DPS to the max. /shrug.
The way I've always looked at it is, who can take more damage a guy in plate armor or a guy in robes? If you're wearing plate armor and a friend is in robes, would you not try and get attention off of your friend? I guess it's all in how you look at it...
For every minute you are angry , you lose 60 seconds of happiness."-Emerson
Ya I'm all for the trinity but only in dungeons/groups etc. I think having a way to solo stuff outside of groups is a better idea. Like I love to tank, but I don't like to solo with a tank. And I don't mean just gear, I'd like to see pure trinity "modes" you can select shen running stuff. Maybe something like your shield does X amount of damage when solo and X amount of threat when grouped, I dunno.
I'm not yet convinced MMOs need the trinity, although after playing GW2 for several months, I certainly see the limitations of GW2's particular implementation of a combat system that attempts to deviate from the traditional trinity setup. I'd be lying if I said I haven't found myself missing traditional roles from time to time, where you actually know what the other classes are bringing to the table and you can feel their impact from pull to pull.
The biggest thing I find myself missing are those moments of memorable heroism, where you make a spectacular play and everyone knows it. They thank you. They cheer in vent. They at least acknowledge it in some form. "Holy shit! That was amazing!" In 5 months, that hasn't happened to me once in GW2's PvE, and there's not a dungeon wing I haven't completed. I mean there are plays to be made. It's just that between the spell-effect firework display, kiting, dodging, and lack of hard CC, everything's just a little too chaotic for everyone to notice with the other 4 party members are doing. You can try to heal and drop a water field on someone, but chances are they'll just run out of it because they're in nervous twitch flight mode.
The mechanics they have bosses perform also seem to be limited in the absence of the trinity. Some fights involve strategic uses of the environment and are basically simple puzzles, and that's awesome--I wouldn't mind seeing this aspect become more elaborated--but those fights are largely independent of the combat system. They would work like that regardless of the type of combat the game had.
Originally posted by Latronus I've never liked the trinity. It's completely unrealistic, yeah I know, realism in a fantasy game??? Combat is chaotic. Having a person basically hurling insults while everyone else beats the hell outta a mob is unimaginative mechanics. The trinity forces an order where none should exist. I think GW2s approach is a step in the right direction. The combat is somewhat chaotic like it should be and if the players are selfish and don't work together then failure is an option just as in real combat. People are resistant to change and since this is a change, many won't like it and can't accept that they have to do something besides, throw insults, heal or DPS to the max. /shrug.
The way I've always looked at it is, who can take more damage a guy in plate armor or a guy in robes? If you're wearing plate armor and a friend is in robes, would you not try and get attention off of your friend? I guess it's all in how you look at it...
i can see this but thats still how non trinity systems usually work.. guy with plate can take more hits and tries to get in the way to take some hits or control the fight.. in a trinity i find the aggro mechanic silly as you can watch mobs walk past a whole slew of easy pickins squishy players and b-line right to a taunting tank... then like kuppa said above i MUCH prefer seeing looking for "one" more than having to sit and wait for tank/healer specifically
I angered the clerk in a clothing shop today. She asked me what size I was and I said actual, because I am not to scale. I like vending machines 'cause snacks are better when they fall. If I buy a candy bar at a store, oftentimes, I will drop it... so that it achieves its maximum flavor potential. --Mitch Hedberg
Originally posted by Latronus I've never liked the trinity. It's completely unrealistic, yeah I know, realism in a fantasy game??? Combat is chaotic. Having a person basically hurling insults while everyone else beats the hell outta a mob is unimaginative mechanics. The trinity forces an order where none should exist. I think GW2s approach is a step in the right direction. The combat is somewhat chaotic like it should be and if the players are selfish and don't work together then failure is an option just as in real combat. People are resistant to change and since this is a change, many won't like it and can't accept that they have to do something besides, throw insults, heal or DPS to the max. /shrug.
Well, without holy trinity, everybody throws insults, unfortunately at each other
The trinity creates responsibility. No one likes to be his fault when the party dies.
Unrealistic? Compared to what? In a war, every entity has its clear role. You won't see an army pushing with the artillery in the front row.
In my opinion it depends how well implemented it is.
Even tought i love to tank in all mmos, i respect what GW tryed to do.
Both sides have its pros and cons obviously.
That being said is always hard to have the perfect balance were you can be a good do it all , or a specialised role.
The main problem with specialised role is people only wants those roles(wich by my play style is completly fine) but then comes the problems of avaliability of those classes needed.
Then you have on the other side the do it all classes, were no1 have a defined role and the meaning for partying decays after a while.
I think there are on the same game the 2 cases.
take ffxi and ffxiv for example.
FFXI did the trinity flawlesly , not taling bout the game , but before it became easy , everyclass had their good and cons, missions were one class prevailed over others, etc etc.
Apart from the dificulty/grindy type ffxi was on its days , the concept they had was basic, classes were unique and served their porpouse every now and then , even the so called nerfed classes.
Then you have the initial FFXIV( yea whatever they re-booting , but lets take a look at classed as they were)
Do it all in any class so badly inplemented that almost was imposible to determine what exactly was the point of being one class or the other.
So that brings me back to my first statement.
All it matters is how it is implemented, and obviously it is easier(not easy) to have a better group based game with the holy trinity than with a do it all classes,
especially when it comes to PVE and strategy based groups ,
Well to be fair to NOT having the trinity, GW2 did a pretty poor job at implimenting it. It 'lacks' the trinity and yet forces on its own trinity (which is just the old trinity in its rawest form, Support (Healer basically of sorts), CC (Tank Essencially), Damage)
Still, even if it was done right I'd almost assume that it would end up trivializing content in order to fit all group styles. Its quite hard to cut out the trinity when you want to support group dynamics and specially if you want to fill everyones 'desires' in terms of what they want to play. The trinity itself exists because it fits in with play styles of people and allows for more group dynamics. You can modify and work around the trinity into your own forms (for example games like Aion or Rift takes on a "Tank, Healer, Damage, Support" type format with support usually providing suppliment heals and/or buffs/debuffs that boost the group). Its NOT a bad thing, its all about adapting and chaning up the way it functions in order to make each role feel unique and different.
The way I've always looked at it is, who can take more damage a guy in plate armor or a guy in robes? If you're wearing plate armor and a friend is in robes, would you not try and get attention off of your friend? I guess it's all in how you look at it...
i can see this but thats still how non trinity systems usually work.. guy with plate can take more hits and tries to get in the way to take some hits or control the fight.. in a trinity i find the aggro mechanic silly as you can watch mobs walk past a whole slew of easy pickins squishy players and b-line right to a taunting tank... then like kuppa said above i MUCH prefer seeing looking for "one" more than having to sit and wait for tank/healer specifically
Of course the waiting game can be frustrating, this is usually a symptom of having too few class choices IMO, this was never really a problem in a game like SWG with it's skill based profession system. However in games with class based progression, there needs to be a good amount of options, vanguard is a good example of it done right. AOC wasn't too bad either as each base class had a few options for loadout and combat style.
For every minute you are angry , you lose 60 seconds of happiness."-Emerson
Originally posted by Latronus I've never liked the trinity. It's completely unrealistic, yeah I know, realism in a fantasy game??? Combat is chaotic. Having a person basically hurling insults while everyone else beats the hell outta a mob is unimaginative mechanics. The trinity forces an order where none should exist. I think GW2s approach is a step in the right direction. The combat is somewhat chaotic like it should be and if the players are selfish and don't work together then failure is an option just as in real combat. People are resistant to change and since this is a change, many won't like it and can't accept that they have to do something besides, throw insults, heal or DPS to the max. /shrug.
The way I've always looked at it is, who can take more damage a guy in plate armor or a guy in robes? If you're wearing plate armor and a friend is in robes, would you not try and get attention off of your friend? I guess it's all in how you look at it...
Haha, I know what you are saying but in "reality" getting a fireball to the face will probably hurt with or with out armor. Besides, if the guy in robes is just a random schmuck that I joined up with to kill a monster to get it's loot, then I would probably care less if he got beat on. That just means less loot I will have to split. I would also be thinking on why he decided to wear robes instead of armor.
As far as I know, D&D/Wizards of the Coast were the ones who decided wizards can't wear armor in games probably becuase that's how Tolkien described Gandalf. The funny thing is though, at least as far as I can remember, D&D didn't even have a trinity system. Sure there has been a "taunt" skill for the longest time in D&D, but it was not designed to grab agro but just to lower a creature's defenses.
I'd go back and copy/paste all the times I said initially people would flock to it but it would eventually die but I'm lazy.
This was bound to happen. Most people want dedicated roles. I want to play a healer, GW2 didn't let me with it's system. They made a horrible mistake and unless they introduce a healer down the road and fix their game and admit what they did was stupid thast game's population will continue to fall.
Yah, I'm ready for the flames from the fan boys, but I don't care. They messed up and I, along with many others, called it well before the game was released. It's only going to go downhill for GW2. The population is hemoraging.
The way I've always looked at it is, who can take more damage a guy in plate armor or a guy in robes? If you're wearing plate armor and a friend is in robes, would you not try and get attention off of your friend? I guess it's all in how you look at it...
Haha, I know what you are saying but in "reality" getting a fireball to the face will probably hurt with or with out armor. Besides, if the guy in robes is just a random schmuck that I joined up with to kill a monster to get it's loot, then I would probably care less if he got beat on. That just means less loot I will have to split. I would also be thinking on why he decided to wear robes instead of armor.
As far as I know, D&D/Wizards of the Coast were the ones who decided wizards can't wear armor in games probably becuase that's how Tolkien described Gandalf. The funny thing is though, at least as far as I can remember, D&D didn't even have a trinity system. Sure there has been a "taunt" skill for the longest time in D&D, but it was designed to grab agro but just to lower a creature's defenses.
ROFl..
For every minute you are angry , you lose 60 seconds of happiness."-Emerson
The way I've always looked at it is, who can take more damage a guy in plate armor or a guy in robes? If you're wearing plate armor and a friend is in robes, would you not try and get attention off of your friend? I guess it's all in how you look at it...
i can see this but thats still how non trinity systems usually work.. guy with plate can take more hits and tries to get in the way to take some hits or control the fight.. in a trinity i find the aggro mechanic silly as you can watch mobs walk past a whole slew of easy pickins squishy players and b-line right to a taunting tank... then like kuppa said above i MUCH prefer seeing looking for "one" more than having to sit and wait for tank/healer specifically
Of course the waiting game can be frustrating, this is usually a symptom of having too few class choices IMO, this was never really a problem in a game like SWG with it's skill based profession system. However in games with class based progression, there needs to be a good amount of options, vanguard is a good example of it done right. AOC wasn't too bad either as each base class had a few options for loadout and combat style.
true how the classes are spread really has a huge impact.. with Rift it wasn't too bad because every class could take on multiple roles.. i just really dislike when I game pigeon holes you into a single role and you have no way to either spec out or have a dual role type build.
I angered the clerk in a clothing shop today. She asked me what size I was and I said actual, because I am not to scale. I like vending machines 'cause snacks are better when they fall. If I buy a candy bar at a store, oftentimes, I will drop it... so that it achieves its maximum flavor potential. --Mitch Hedberg
No, I would like to see more games with an alternative to the holy trinity. I don't think GW2 combat model offered the best alternative. Most of the issues in GW2 were because 99% of mmos use the trinity and gamers had trouble with the learning curve and gamers are adverse to change. I like GW2 for many of its features. I would say the combat being what I liked the least.
true how the classes are spread really has a huge impact.. with Rift it wasn't too bad because every class could take on multiple roles.. i just really dislike when I game pigeon holes you into a single role and you have no way to either spec out or have a dual role type build.
Agreed, there's nothing that has me dropping a game faster than having limited options with classes.
For every minute you are angry , you lose 60 seconds of happiness."-Emerson
I'm not yet convinced MMOs need the trinity, although after playing GW2 for several months, I certainly see the limitations of GW2's particular implementation of a combat system that attempts to deviate from the traditional trinity setup.
It's been pointed out before, but none of the commenters seem to get it,( and it's funny because they criticize game developers for not being able to think outside of the box), the holy trinity originally was not tank/heal/dps. It was Tank, Heal, crowd control (which is another form of damage mitigation).
When the term was invented the DPS was assumed... you needed DPS + the holy trinity (or rather, the holy trinity, plus 3 more fillers). You also wanted some other things like buffers, and snarers - but the trinity was the start of the group, and you filled in the remainder with the best that you could.
You can make it the four horsemen, or whatever, by just making more necessary combat mechanics and giving them to more classes.
Certain content in EQ required someone to snare monsters - so it adventure in that area, you needed a snarer, plus the "holy trinity". Or you could do outdoor areas where monsters were single pulled, and an enchanter was not required, so you could just tank and heal your way to experience. In the same area, you could also "quad kite" four monsters at once with snare effects, and more than one player could group up to do this.
The problem was that they didn't balance the content... the majority of the content, the dungeon content, which had the best expereince (until later expansions) and the best loot was indoor content, which required enchanters (crowd control) and someone to stand next to the mobs and smack them.
Had EQ not done this design - had the best experience and loot been in outdoor regions that was dominated by Druids, Mages and Necromancers - the "holy trinity" may never have come into popular use.
So one way to fix it, is to balance your content so that it requires a diverse combination of groups to beat.
Make a dungeon where unstunnable monsters come in pairs, so you need two tanks and crowd control doesn't work. Make outdoor areas where the monsters regenerate hit points so quickly that you need 3 DPS on them to kill them - and then put the best Tank and Healer loot on those mobs so that the tanks and healers will ask the DPS to help them, rather than the inverse.
---------------------------------
As to what a couple other people say about "roleplaying not being about playing roles". That's actually character playing. Combat based RPG's have always had roles, and they're fun. Emotes and gestures are nifty and all, but the cool mechanic of these games is playing a combat role, and doing it well.
Originally posted by mikuniman No, I would like to see more games with an alternative to the holy trinity. I don't think GW2 combat model offered the best alternative. Most of the issues in GW2 were because 99% of mmos use the trinity and gamers had trouble with the learning curve and gamers are adverse to change. I like GW2 for many of its features. I would say the combat being what I liked the least.
No offense, but this makes no sense. If WoW was your first MMORPG, no one would have liked it because they didn't have any experience with the combat mechanics. Their entire player base would have been 1 million people from EQ and DAOC (who wouldn't have liked those games).
People didn't like GW2 because its combat was a mess, and your actions didn't have any impact on the world. GW2's combat is sort of like Jazz. Some people really love it, but in the end mpst, people like more structured music (and all jazz fans are convinced that Jazz is the best music there is).
the holy trinity promotes teamwork, something I feel is lacking in a big way on a large scale that MMO's need to really capture that MMO feel.
WAR, despite its flaws had a great large scale teamwork feel. If that game had 3 factions I would still be playing it today.
WoW Vanilla..... you were what you were, and thats all people expected you to be. You teamed up with people to actually get somewhere in raiding. Now you are everything, and unless you want raiding epics.. which are useless anywhere but raiding, and raiding is small scale anyway... everything in wow is small scale now....... *sigh*
I am done playing MMO's without a holy trinity. I want real consequences to my class choices, i want real consequences to my spec choices. I want real guilds again that rely on every member.
The lack of the holy trinity is the main reason I logged off last night and do not plan on coming back...I enjoy playing a healer and really making that class click in whatever mmo I play...GW2 was fun for a while, but I miss my defined role.
GW2's trinity less setup is a good start but I'd like to see it improved upon further. I do not want to go back to the trinity at all.
GW2 has shown its a popular idea so you can expect to see it more in future MMO's.
I do belive WildStar will follow the mechanics to a degree of GW2 so I do hope that if this is the case then yes by all means we could be seeing less and less of trinity.
Wildstar will most definitely be using the Holy Trinity.
the holy trinity promotes teamwork, something I feel is lacking in a big way on a large scale that MMO's need to really capture that MMO feel.
WAR, despite its flaws had a great large scale teamwork feel. If that game had 3 factions I would still be playing it today.
WoW Vanilla..... you were what you were, and thats all people expected you to be. You teamed up with people to actually get somewhere in raiding. Now you are everything, and unless you want raiding epics.. which are useless anywhere but raiding, and raiding is small scale anyway... everything in wow is small scale now....... *sigh*
I am done playing MMO's without a holy trinity. I want real consequences to my class choices, i want real consequences to my spec choices. I want real guilds again that rely on every member.
to me non holy trinity promotes "more" teamwork depending how the combat is setup.. when you have set roles and everyone knows there role it turns into auto pilot mode and you basically just follow your role and it really doesn't change ever. With a bit more chaos thrown into the mix and everyone needing to play mutliple roles in a single encounter it not only encourages more teamwork it actually requires people to really know how to play in various roles to complete objectives. Just preference i suppose but after playing both i prefer the non set roles as it adds more variety to the encounters imho, especially when running the same dungeon multiple times.
I angered the clerk in a clothing shop today. She asked me what size I was and I said actual, because I am not to scale. I like vending machines 'cause snacks are better when they fall. If I buy a candy bar at a store, oftentimes, I will drop it... so that it achieves its maximum flavor potential. --Mitch Hedberg
My problem with gw 2 is that it is not a good implementation of the no holy trinity idea. I think City of X did it way better and people were still able to have clear roles which is the main reason it fails in gw 2.
Comments
For every minute you are angry , you lose 60 seconds of happiness."-Emerson
The way I've always looked at it is, who can take more damage a guy in plate armor or a guy in robes? If you're wearing plate armor and a friend is in robes, would you not try and get attention off of your friend? I guess it's all in how you look at it...
For every minute you are angry , you lose 60 seconds of happiness."-Emerson
Ya I'm all for the trinity but only in dungeons/groups etc. I think having a way to solo stuff outside of groups is a better idea. Like I love to tank, but I don't like to solo with a tank. And I don't mean just gear, I'd like to see pure trinity "modes" you can select shen running stuff. Maybe something like your shield does X amount of damage when solo and X amount of threat when grouped, I dunno.
I'm not yet convinced MMOs need the trinity, although after playing GW2 for several months, I certainly see the limitations of GW2's particular implementation of a combat system that attempts to deviate from the traditional trinity setup. I'd be lying if I said I haven't found myself missing traditional roles from time to time, where you actually know what the other classes are bringing to the table and you can feel their impact from pull to pull.
The biggest thing I find myself missing are those moments of memorable heroism, where you make a spectacular play and everyone knows it. They thank you. They cheer in vent. They at least acknowledge it in some form. "Holy shit! That was amazing!" In 5 months, that hasn't happened to me once in GW2's PvE, and there's not a dungeon wing I haven't completed. I mean there are plays to be made. It's just that between the spell-effect firework display, kiting, dodging, and lack of hard CC, everything's just a little too chaotic for everyone to notice with the other 4 party members are doing. You can try to heal and drop a water field on someone, but chances are they'll just run out of it because they're in nervous twitch flight mode.
The mechanics they have bosses perform also seem to be limited in the absence of the trinity. Some fights involve strategic uses of the environment and are basically simple puzzles, and that's awesome--I wouldn't mind seeing this aspect become more elaborated--but those fights are largely independent of the combat system. They would work like that regardless of the type of combat the game had.
i can see this but thats still how non trinity systems usually work.. guy with plate can take more hits and tries to get in the way to take some hits or control the fight.. in a trinity i find the aggro mechanic silly as you can watch mobs walk past a whole slew of easy pickins squishy players and b-line right to a taunting tank... then like kuppa said above i MUCH prefer seeing looking for "one" more than having to sit and wait for tank/healer specifically
I angered the clerk in a clothing shop today. She asked me what size I was and I said actual, because I am not to scale. I like vending machines 'cause snacks are better when they fall. If I buy a candy bar at a store, oftentimes, I will drop it... so that it achieves its maximum flavor potential. --Mitch Hedberg
Well, without holy trinity, everybody throws insults, unfortunately at each other
The trinity creates responsibility. No one likes to be his fault when the party dies.
Unrealistic? Compared to what? In a war, every entity has its clear role. You won't see an army pushing with the artillery in the front row.
In my opinion it depends how well implemented it is.
Even tought i love to tank in all mmos, i respect what GW tryed to do.
Both sides have its pros and cons obviously.
That being said is always hard to have the perfect balance were you can be a good do it all , or a specialised role.
The main problem with specialised role is people only wants those roles(wich by my play style is completly fine) but then comes the problems of avaliability of those classes needed.
Then you have on the other side the do it all classes, were no1 have a defined role and the meaning for partying decays after a while.
I think there are on the same game the 2 cases.
take ffxi and ffxiv for example.
FFXI did the trinity flawlesly , not taling bout the game , but before it became easy , everyclass had their good and cons, missions were one class prevailed over others, etc etc.
Apart from the dificulty/grindy type ffxi was on its days , the concept they had was basic, classes were unique and served their porpouse every now and then , even the so called nerfed classes.
Then you have the initial FFXIV( yea whatever they re-booting , but lets take a look at classed as they were)
Do it all in any class so badly inplemented that almost was imposible to determine what exactly was the point of being one class or the other.
So that brings me back to my first statement.
All it matters is how it is implemented, and obviously it is easier(not easy) to have a better group based game with the holy trinity than with a do it all classes,
especially when it comes to PVE and strategy based groups ,
Well to be fair to NOT having the trinity, GW2 did a pretty poor job at implimenting it. It 'lacks' the trinity and yet forces on its own trinity (which is just the old trinity in its rawest form, Support (Healer basically of sorts), CC (Tank Essencially), Damage)
Still, even if it was done right I'd almost assume that it would end up trivializing content in order to fit all group styles. Its quite hard to cut out the trinity when you want to support group dynamics and specially if you want to fill everyones 'desires' in terms of what they want to play. The trinity itself exists because it fits in with play styles of people and allows for more group dynamics. You can modify and work around the trinity into your own forms (for example games like Aion or Rift takes on a "Tank, Healer, Damage, Support" type format with support usually providing suppliment heals and/or buffs/debuffs that boost the group). Its NOT a bad thing, its all about adapting and chaning up the way it functions in order to make each role feel unique and different.
Of course the waiting game can be frustrating, this is usually a symptom of having too few class choices IMO, this was never really a problem in a game like SWG with it's skill based profession system. However in games with class based progression, there needs to be a good amount of options, vanguard is a good example of it done right. AOC wasn't too bad either as each base class had a few options for loadout and combat style.
For every minute you are angry , you lose 60 seconds of happiness."-Emerson
For me both trinity and gw2-hybrid-system are bad but if i have to choose i would prefer the trinity.
Much better system would be an advanced trinity with more than tank+heal+dps but limited roles per class.
Haha, I know what you are saying but in "reality" getting a fireball to the face will probably hurt with or with out armor. Besides, if the guy in robes is just a random schmuck that I joined up with to kill a monster to get it's loot, then I would probably care less if he got beat on. That just means less loot I will have to split. I would also be thinking on why he decided to wear robes instead of armor.
As far as I know, D&D/Wizards of the Coast were the ones who decided wizards can't wear armor in games probably becuase that's how Tolkien described Gandalf. The funny thing is though, at least as far as I can remember, D&D didn't even have a trinity system. Sure there has been a "taunt" skill for the longest time in D&D, but it was not designed to grab agro but just to lower a creature's defenses.
"If I offended you, you needed it" -Corey Taylor
I'd go back and copy/paste all the times I said initially people would flock to it but it would eventually die but I'm lazy.
This was bound to happen. Most people want dedicated roles. I want to play a healer, GW2 didn't let me with it's system. They made a horrible mistake and unless they introduce a healer down the road and fix their game and admit what they did was stupid thast game's population will continue to fall.
Yah, I'm ready for the flames from the fan boys, but I don't care. They messed up and I, along with many others, called it well before the game was released. It's only going to go downhill for GW2. The population is hemoraging.
ROFl..
For every minute you are angry , you lose 60 seconds of happiness."-Emerson
true how the classes are spread really has a huge impact.. with Rift it wasn't too bad because every class could take on multiple roles.. i just really dislike when I game pigeon holes you into a single role and you have no way to either spec out or have a dual role type build.
I angered the clerk in a clothing shop today. She asked me what size I was and I said actual, because I am not to scale. I like vending machines 'cause snacks are better when they fall. If I buy a candy bar at a store, oftentimes, I will drop it... so that it achieves its maximum flavor potential. --Mitch Hedberg
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Agreed, there's nothing that has me dropping a game faster than having limited options with classes.
For every minute you are angry , you lose 60 seconds of happiness."-Emerson
It's been pointed out before, but none of the commenters seem to get it,( and it's funny because they criticize game developers for not being able to think outside of the box), the holy trinity originally was not tank/heal/dps. It was Tank, Heal, crowd control (which is another form of damage mitigation).
When the term was invented the DPS was assumed... you needed DPS + the holy trinity (or rather, the holy trinity, plus 3 more fillers). You also wanted some other things like buffers, and snarers - but the trinity was the start of the group, and you filled in the remainder with the best that you could.
You can make it the four horsemen, or whatever, by just making more necessary combat mechanics and giving them to more classes.
Certain content in EQ required someone to snare monsters - so it adventure in that area, you needed a snarer, plus the "holy trinity". Or you could do outdoor areas where monsters were single pulled, and an enchanter was not required, so you could just tank and heal your way to experience. In the same area, you could also "quad kite" four monsters at once with snare effects, and more than one player could group up to do this.
The problem was that they didn't balance the content... the majority of the content, the dungeon content, which had the best expereince (until later expansions) and the best loot was indoor content, which required enchanters (crowd control) and someone to stand next to the mobs and smack them.
Had EQ not done this design - had the best experience and loot been in outdoor regions that was dominated by Druids, Mages and Necromancers - the "holy trinity" may never have come into popular use.
So one way to fix it, is to balance your content so that it requires a diverse combination of groups to beat.
Make a dungeon where unstunnable monsters come in pairs, so you need two tanks and crowd control doesn't work. Make outdoor areas where the monsters regenerate hit points so quickly that you need 3 DPS on them to kill them - and then put the best Tank and Healer loot on those mobs so that the tanks and healers will ask the DPS to help them, rather than the inverse.
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As to what a couple other people say about "roleplaying not being about playing roles". That's actually character playing. Combat based RPG's have always had roles, and they're fun. Emotes and gestures are nifty and all, but the cool mechanic of these games is playing a combat role, and doing it well.
No offense, but this makes no sense. If WoW was your first MMORPG, no one would have liked it because they didn't have any experience with the combat mechanics. Their entire player base would have been 1 million people from EQ and DAOC (who wouldn't have liked those games).
People didn't like GW2 because its combat was a mess, and your actions didn't have any impact on the world. GW2's combat is sort of like Jazz. Some people really love it, but in the end mpst, people like more structured music (and all jazz fans are convinced that Jazz is the best music there is).
the holy trinity promotes teamwork, something I feel is lacking in a big way on a large scale that MMO's need to really capture that MMO feel.
WAR, despite its flaws had a great large scale teamwork feel. If that game had 3 factions I would still be playing it today.
WoW Vanilla..... you were what you were, and thats all people expected you to be. You teamed up with people to actually get somewhere in raiding. Now you are everything, and unless you want raiding epics.. which are useless anywhere but raiding, and raiding is small scale anyway... everything in wow is small scale now....... *sigh*
I am done playing MMO's without a holy trinity. I want real consequences to my class choices, i want real consequences to my spec choices. I want real guilds again that rely on every member.
Wildstar will most definitely be using the Holy Trinity.
http://www.gamebreaker.tv/mmorpg/wildstar-groupies/
to me non holy trinity promotes "more" teamwork depending how the combat is setup.. when you have set roles and everyone knows there role it turns into auto pilot mode and you basically just follow your role and it really doesn't change ever. With a bit more chaos thrown into the mix and everyone needing to play mutliple roles in a single encounter it not only encourages more teamwork it actually requires people to really know how to play in various roles to complete objectives. Just preference i suppose but after playing both i prefer the non set roles as it adds more variety to the encounters imho, especially when running the same dungeon multiple times.
I angered the clerk in a clothing shop today. She asked me what size I was and I said actual, because I am not to scale. I like vending machines 'cause snacks are better when they fall. If I buy a candy bar at a store, oftentimes, I will drop it... so that it achieves its maximum flavor potential. --Mitch Hedberg