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Does any one else miss dedicated class roles?
tixylix
Member UncommonPosts: 1,288
It seems like these days all the classes just kind of blend into one, they all sort of do the same thing but with little twists on things. I just find it so boring now because fights never have any strategy to them, you're all playing the same role now. I was always a dedicated healer and in modern MMOs my role is either gone or very limited to the point is is boring. I don't like the simplification of the hotkey bars, you'll only have like 8 skills in modern MMOs, there is nothing to manage there. I miss the days when I'd have like 8 bars full of skills, some might even have several of the same skill but just different levels. So much strategy went into being a healer and making sure I'm doing the right thing at the right time. Now I just find things to be so simple that they're dull...
I WoW did classes right, they were all so unique and fun to play and they had talent trees which could give you wildly different roles. It mean I could completely change my play session depending on what class I picked. Sadly though these days with GW2 or The Elder Scrolls Online for example, the classes all just feel the same, if I switched between them, it is barely any different. It is like they've switched all classes to do everything but be the master of none. What I found with WoW is because they were all so unique and dedicated in certain play styles, it made the most diverse class in the game (the Druid) feel so unique too. I guess these modern MMOs are like if all the classes were druids but some are better at a cat, some are better at the bear etc, the skills are just tweaked a bit.
I just think the Holy Trinity is needed and I want my skills back! I want to have to think in an MMO again, I don't want to just be spamming the same few healing spells I have because there is barely any variety there.
I really don't get with The Elder Scrolls Online is why they didn't just do it like Skyrim, where you have that skill wheel thing and you chose the skills you wanted like a proper Sandbox game. At least that way we would have been able to create proper roles for ourselves that we actually want to play, instead of being needlessly restricted to the boring classes it does have. I don't get why they even exist, that is Elder Scrolls like..
Comments
You are contradicting yourself. You can't have free skill choice AND very defined class roles. Not to mention in ESO if there aren't any defined roles it is because no one wants to play one. The game gives you all the tools necessary to make a very defined role for your character. If every character you make feels the same it is because you are making them all the same way. each skill is unique and when morphing gives you choices. For example.. when a nightblade skill morphs it gives you the choice of more dmg output or a healing ability. Those are two different roles. you just have to pick. I guarantee you that not everyone will pick dmg and not everyone will pick healing.
Skill choice is yours and yours alone. If you decide to make all ur character's dps.. you can't blame the devs.. If you decide to make all ur characters healers.. you still can't blame the devs. If you believe that the healing skills aren't very effective or efficient that is very understandable, but to say there aren't any class roles in a game that lets you pick your role is just fallacy.
I had fun once, it was terrible.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Combat_medic
Buuut im not missing them since they were never gone.
Sure some companys can try to claim that theres no healing on tanking or aggro in the world but thats their problem.
So, did ESO have a successful launch? Yes, yes it did.By Ryan Getchell on April 02, 2014.
**On the radar: http://www.cyberpunk.net/ **
D3 is not a MMORPG. If you want to see an MMORPG look at ESO, Wildstar, LOTRO, TOR. D3 is a local co op game even though it requires you to be online. The reason the classes have any kind of interesting ability is because it is not an MMO. I could say Dead Island is an MMO, but it's not and it has more interesting skills then any current MMOs as well.
It doesn't have to be one or the other. What you seem to have issue with is forced group makeups, not the roles themselves. There's no reason you can't have a system that has roles but lacks the tank-healer-dps structure. City of Heroes was a good example of this - you could make just about any setup work if everyone in the group was good.
not a MMORPG, close enough for me.
May be MMO should learn from Dead Island and other Sp games to have more interesting skills. I don't see why those cannot be implemented in a MMO, particularly inside an instance.
If they would have used the skills and abilities from Skyrim in ESO (or something closer) I would probably have enjoyed it a lot more. For once I agree with you on something. Single player games do have better skills and abilities to use in combat these days. So do coop games.
The OP is absolutely correct in all statements. Once a developer spends the money to investigate thee rampant succession of MMO failures to retain paying customer they will learn the root cause is diverging from traditional trinity role playing.
Console game mechanics can not hold paying MMORPG customer. This is proven by the flood of gamers leaving games with these mechanics. Regardless of your wants, the industry is seeing other wise in numbers of paying customers who support non-trinity game mechanics.
Until someone starts paying for non-trinity, you can’t expect to see a future in it.Boy: Why can't I talk to Him?
Mom: We don't talk to Priests.
As if it could exist, without being payed for.
F2P means you get what you paid for. Pay nothing, get nothing.
Even telemarketers wouldn't think that.
It costs money to play. Therefore P2W.
Then why don't we talk about that?
I found that there are many types of interesting and fun skills missing from "proper" MMO games.
1) physical effects like the slow time in D3, or collision based effects like caging, and walls.
2) Environment related effects like you can pull a sentry out of a window and drop him to his death (many stealth games).
3) Hacking & reprogram cameras and robots (like in Deus Ex). Charming is in some MMO .. so it is not unheard of .. but none does it to the extend as in Deus Ex or similar games.
4) Vision effects. Like the night vision goggle in Splinter Cell games.
and i don't think any of these are technically impossible. Particularly anything that can be done in D3 should be technically possible in a MMO instance because D3 is a online only game anyway.
Dedicated healer for 10 years here.
Last game i had fun with was RIft...
The healer usually had the hardest job. I never liked playing healer because if you miss timed you heal it meant someone was dead and then everyone would be blaming you.
The way it is now in MMOs generally requires very little strategy. Everyone is DPS. They just do DPS in a different way. Yes some can heal a bit, but usually the heals are pretty weak at best.
Actually Everquest had slow and haste spells. They didn't slow everything down, but they did slow and haste individual characters. Slow Time as it is in Diablo is very similar to Slow Time in D&D 2nd edition. It also appeared in Baldur's Gate which used the same spell. The reason you wont see a spell like that or anything interesting in an MMO these days is balance. The subject that this thread is about. It's why the skills and abilities in current MMOs are so bland.
I REALLY REALLY REALLY miss class roles where everyone in the group needed to perform a different role to insure success and if one person failed, your chance of success significantly decreased.
This issue is that MMOs have gone mainstream. No longer are the majority of MMO players old table top or pen and paper RPG guys. Back then we were all used to different roles. You needed a stealthy guy, a tank, a healer, dedicated CC, buffers, etc... to round out a group and we understood that from years of classic RPG styles. Now you have kids coming to MMOs from other genres that lack roles and more importantly cooperation. Naturally devs give the majority what they want and the original MMO guys have become the significant minority now. Just the way it is. This is why I choose to hold out hope for niche games made by classic devs like Pantheon, SotA, and Camelot unchained. Though I don't know what roles SotA is really going to have.
If I want a world in which people can purchase success and power with cash, I'll play Real Life. Keep Virtual Worlds Virtual!
That is just one example. The difference is that slow/haste spell works only on targets (even WoW has a slow spell for the mage). In D3, the effect is that there is a bubble of "slow time" and everything caught inside is slowed, even projectiles ... that effect is never implemented in a MMO.
But i am not talking about just slow-time, but also other physical type effects like walls, rotating bombs, a large group of mobs that block your way, vortex that can suck you to some place (which i think may be done in WoW before in a fight).
May be balance is the problem. If so, the solution is just balance like D3 ... have rough equivalent dps for the classes, and don't balance cc and physical effects. And make the game pure pve.
"I don't give a sh*t what other people say. I play what I like and I'll pay to do it too!" - SerialMMOist
That's what the slow time spell did in D&D 2nd edition and in Baldur's Gate as well. The reason it was single target in Everquest and WoW is because an AOE slow time spell would be too powerful. The problem is MMOs are games where you fight single mobs. You don't fight mass amounts of mobs at one time. I'm not sure if that would be a good mechanic for MMOs. Not even many single player games use that type of mechanic. Pretty much all that you mentioned above would require a game where you fight against a large amount of mobs. I'm not saying it can't be done, but I'm not sure if it would be a good direction to take.