It's easy to break up the rpg holy trinity, you just have to expand the win conditions rather than trying to force a new role into the same narriw system.
>class that pseudo-independently pursues a huge boost with a low success rate, like the seeker from Harry potter
>class that fights some sort of terrain based battle against the boss's or enemy teams terrain effects
>class that stacks effects to increase the rewards of the fight, rather than ending it faster
>class that sets up resource pipelines to feed the actual fighters (maybe too close to healer, but what if they're necessary for attacks to happen at all, rather than just buffing them?)
If RPGs, and especially MMOs, were less hellbent on having actually doing, healing, slowing, and boosting damage as the only possible actions, the trinity wouldn't exist or make things feel so formulaic.
If I can bonk the enemy on the head, why would I want to run around giving handjobs? No thanks, I'd rather do something direct, relevant and effective with my time.
MMOs are the best case for it. If you can complete some sort of challenge to double the loot the party gets, you'll be the most popular member of the team. In single player games, it's more like a way to flex on the game by forgoing a fighting party member slot in favor of bigger rewards, like the thief from final fantasy tactics but more so. But the game has to be designed from the ground up for this stuff, it won't work bolted on top of WoW or whatever
You could give those abilities to existing classes and raise gameplay variety.
Then those abilities will be competing for space with what the classes are already supposed to do. But this post was prompted by years of YouTube videos and forum posts about how intractable a problem it is to make a game that expands the holy trinity
>But this post was prompted by years of YouTube videos and forum posts about how intractable a problem it is to make a game that expands the holy trinity
Ah okay. I don't personally see an issue with archetypes, and I wouldn't force in extra roles with implementation that could potentially harm the existing roles. Not worth it.
I think the main people find unsatisfying about it is that the predominant trinity cuts out crowd control in favor of just walking the tank out front and parking him. I disliked that about Pillars of Eternity, you just set up your micro and then all your guys blast blast blast. The older dnd games had a lot more weakness exploiting and expenditure of resources in the way spells worked.
It's probably more about balancing, like making those weakness spells more effective and necessary. You can squeeze out more depth and variety from the basics. Debuffer should be as valuable as a direct damager, just in indirect ways.
Dragon Age: Origins had satisfying debuff spells, their value was significant and had additional status effects, and had to be chosen based on the enemy type. They could also complement both magic and melee allies.
Dofus and Wakfu have challenges, each fight randomly rolls 2 bonus requirements like "don't heal others" or "kill this enemy last" or "stay close to an ally for the whole fight" that award bonus exp and loot when completed.
Here's some example classes based on this idea
>a soul-hacker class that can convert an enemy into a permanent servant at a very low chance of success. For MMOs, keeping this class alive long enough to capture raid bosses would be a huge achievement for guilds.
>merchant/gambler class that has to deploy buffs and debuffs that all effect only the loot calculation, and has to develop stacks and macros to do this optimally
>coup de grace class with a special category of bosses that can't be killed completely unless their ability has been given time to charge or has procced on the boss enough times
>astrologer class with like 100 different minor debuffs they can apply. The right combination will snowball into a huge debuff or kill the boss outright but they have to work out which one it is through some complex calculations related to the stars or whatever which change all the time
Literally attempted in FFXIV, fell directly on face because people were too lazy and moronic to manage this, and they didn't want to debug it either.
I liked it and was all fired up but found the idea got gutted before I even got there to play it.
Instead you need simple abilities that can combo on each other, 5-6 tops, and more importantly detailed enemy AI that can respond to all of it and frick with the party.
GW1 had the right idea on that, shame they scrapped it all for moron adhd players that think weapon swapping is good, and those kind of pseud long string DPS combos that make people feel like they're playing something engaging. MMOs can frick right off a cliff with that shit.
DD2 has detailed enemy ai, it will be time for all devs to take better notes as it rakes in cash.
This is the real reason why MMORPGs will never break from the holy trinity. MMO players as a whole are just too moronic to be expected to do anything more complicated than park their character in place and press their pattern of keys over and over. If devs ever try anything new it will end up with a bunch of people b***hing until they roll it back.
I feel there's a larger issue. MMOs are build around multiplayer grinding the same fight setup over and over. This forces you to adopt strats that are not RNG reliant, or to play repeatedly hoping for a better RNG. The former is why some "metas" emerge, the latter is what parsers are chasing.
Astro was turbo cancaids for anyone trying to get "good" runs of bosses, which only matters to those specifically doing the MMO parsing thing, because before every fight you had to draw and redraw until you got exactly the "optimal" setup of card/spread/sleeve for the opener. Once you've pulled you're at the mercy of RNG, but some groups would sit there for 4-5 minutes waiting on the optimal draw setup for their astro before a pull.
>For the uninitiated: parsing is uploading your combat logs to websites that parse them into human-readable graphs, demonstrating that your group killed X boss in Y time, and that you personally did the 5th most personal DPS of any member of your class on that boss.
>It is people seeking to inflate their own DPS to the ideal point to "win" at parsing that most chase the dumb top end shit in MMO combat.
Every fight should be modelled on pvp tbh.
>me playing wrath
>my 4 person party is designed with two tanks:
>demon fire/water melee kineticist with some ranged aoe for fun
>mounted tandem executioner hunter
Two supports:
>heal and buff focused only angelfire cleric
>grenadier alchemist
Most fights things are tanked and die since the tanks also put out a ton of dps. It's more interesting when the rudimentary AI breaks out and goes for the squishy healers. That's when I have to reposition, everyone start teleporting on the demon etc.
The trinity came about in the first place because it encouraged EQ1 turnstile farming while people shot the shit.
People don't want to shoot the shit in mmos anymore because a bajillion digital and discord distractions compete with the time. The mmo must be made engaging at every moment, and not through guitar hero moronic dps strings like in wow where you can't look up from your keyboard, but actually engaging enemy ai all the time. This way you no longer have your fluff healer classes that are just carried all the time etc. everyone is known for their skill level and builds a rep on their ability and not just interchangeable classes.
AI is king, procgen is the up and coming underdeveloped prince.
QED
you can easily get rid of the holy trinity in as many ways as you like, like just deleting healing from the game, removing any sort of time pressure (e.g. rage timers), or making aggro totally random. it exists because people enjoy it, it aligns with the adventuring party fantasy we have all had instilled in our heads. notice how there are many games out there where the trinity doesn't exist. devs have to go out of their way to put it into the game.
Pretty much. Having played MMOs where trinity doesn't exist, those three roles just feel the most impactful and satisfying.
My choice for trinity is based not on stupid roles, but on nature of combat and mankind. That is 3 essences - body, mind and spirit. Muscles, Brain and Soul.
You see, the thing is, classes are the optimally way to play. These archetypes make Sense.
Even in games without classes, metas are eventually created and this "Trinity" arises naturally.
That said, doesnt this trinity lack a Magic user?
>That said, doesnt this trinity lack a Magic user?
Technically speaking, magic is yet just another way to attack or heal.
let's breakdown the trinity and try to expand it and maybe try to brainstorm from there
>tanks
evade tanks, dodge tanks, aggro-redirect tanks, tanks that mess up enemy ai, tanks that can reposition everyone and teammates, tanks that play a qte minigame? tank that summons chaff/adds to tank for him?
>dps
burst, dots, long combo minigames, dps class synergies with other dps (like poisoning a bleeding enemy will make it deadlier), specialty/favored enemy dps, dps that target/disable enemy body parts
>heal
burst heal, dot heal, shields, control healer,
support healer that has very weak heals but give powerful buffs, healers that heal by dealing dps/sacrifice their own life? psuedo healer class that skips the encounter entirely (like scouting ahead) thus saving everyone health
now the problem is gamers don't like complexity and having to rely/trust other people to accomplish something is not feasible this 2024 so instead you get tab targeted skills that don't require brainpower tbh
Or just replace it with a trio of better options. Stealth, Traps, Status Effects, and Environmental Kills have always been favorite aspects of mine in games. Feeling like you "outwitted the system", even when it was the true intention all along is why I'm attracted to ImSims and meme builds in regular RPGs.
This is an mmo thing and it's gay just like that genre. Imagine 2/3 archetypes not being able to attack lol
Why would you change something that ain't broken?
>all these pseuds talking about game design like they have any ability to comprehend and expand upon these ideas
pitiful, as someone who actually takes part in the creation of video games, the way you people talk about them is pathetic.
>and there I was, on Ganker, making a stand for how perfect MMOs are in 2024
I don't quite get how you would act so proud of this, but then again, I work in a different tech industry where we have to make things keep working at large scale or we don't eat. There's not this failing upwards thing populated by a lot of underemployed gig couch surfers that can just implode their industry with nepotism, political boondoggles, internal bacchanals, then reapply and get shuffled around under the likes of Bobby Kotick. It's a stable industry supporting families etc.
what are you even talking about, im just critizing morons that say shit like “body parts would be cool for dps” or like OP said “le classes that fight some sort of le terrain based battle!?” completely moronic and vapid statements from morons that can barely even manage the ability to PLAY a game let alone make one.
>There's not this failing upwards thing populated by a lot of underemployed gig couch surfers
That sounds great, how do I get in on that?
>There's not this failing upwards thing populated by a lot of underemployed gig couch surfers that can just implode their industry with nepotism, political boondoggles, internal bacchanals, then reapply and get shuffled around under the likes of Bobby Kotick
I hope you're not talking about gayman, because that's exactly what it is
The holy trinity only exists because MMO's removed the other roles that required more player interaction/communication to make them easier for normalgays to play.
the best way to fix this in mmos is just make everyone a hybrid, dps/support(maybe split between offence/defense) dps/healer dps/tank and NO specialization whatsoever, allow people to perform the roles as needed/desired
it wasn't really until wow that dedicated support roles were removed, probably because people found them boring and didn't play them even when they were overpowered
There's no reason a tank can't be a DPS (actually it'd be illogical if that wasn't the case), nor does a DPS need be so frail that it needs to hide behind a tank. Conversely, healing in combat is dumb as frick.