I solved the MMO dilemma. The triangle system with DPS, healer and tank obviously doesn't work. Here is finally a system that works perfectly. If applied, this will solve all the issues modern MMOs have.
MMO triangle
I solved the MMO dilemma. The triangle system with DPS, healer and tank obviously doesn't work. Here is finally a system that works perfectly. If applied, this will solve all the issues modern MMOs have.
LFG 4 dps need healer.
adding more roles doesn't fix it
It does because a party consists out of 5 people, and having a special unique role for each member of the party will make the gameplay balanced for everyone
>now have to wait three times as long for dungeon queues since everyone just wants to play dps and not one of the FOUR sissy support roles
no thanks, even tank and healer should be unnecessary in regular 5 man content.
Ok, you have no tank or you have no healer, how will your party proceed?
Utilize buffer
Bursting everything to death before it can hit us
If the game is designed to work like that, then it can work. Everyone has potions, done.
It's boring, but it can definitely work.
worst idea of em all, in a good system not having a tank would be an interesting way of playing the game.
>in a good system not having a tank would be an interesting way of playing the game
well, every part of that sentence is a matter of opinion
in any system, not playing in an optimal way can be "interesting"
In a good system where your party would be build from different roles, different amounts of different roles would be an valid way to play the game and the optimal party composition would change constantly depending on updates, meta, level, enemies, ect. For example, a tank is useless if enemy melts its armor.
>invite bruisers who can self-heal
>invite one or two assassins to make fights go faster
>Here is finally a system that works perfectly. If applied, this will solve all the issues modern MMOs have.
How would having more roles make the game more fun? How does it make grouping and queue times better when you're supposed to need 5 different roles and instead you have 5 player characters who all chose DPS? Now instead of waiting 20 minutes to find one tank which almost nobody wants to play we can wait 40 minutes to make sure we have a support, tank, healer, and tactician too. All of which better be fun to play and somehow have the needed amount of player population at that level.
>having a special unique role for each member of the party will make the gameplay balanced for everyone
It will give a niche to every different role on the team, but it will mean requiring those roles, punishing people for playing what they want. It will make the game imbalanced by it's very nature as more differences will likely create more imbalances. This system now has more roles that depend on and influence each other. Even worse each role has people that you cannot do your job unless the person helping you allows you to do things. You cannot do good DPS without getting buffs and the enemy being debuffed for you. You cannot tank unless you get buffed and healed. Your buffs are useless unless your teammate uses them appropriately at the right times (and buffing DPS by 50% doesn't do much if the DPS is already terribly low).
If done well it's a lot of work to not change much. Debuff and buff classes just help contribute indirectly to the trinity. They help do more damage, reduce enemy damage, and heal.
How will this be more fun? How will this fit what players want and fantasize about playing as? How will groups be able to know right then and there if a player is doing their job correctly with debuffs and buffs? How do you solve the balance challenges to this? How does this scale up for larger parties or work with parties who don't have certain roles?
The 'strategist' and buffer only serve to improve party damage and survival, both roles which can be baked into direct dps or tank/healer.
If they are unfun roles then party dynamic and ease of grouping are also affected.
It's not a "dilemma" just because you didn't get it
In reality it's common sense and it's already been solved
>4 roles
Conflict between healer and support role
>5,6 roles
You have two DPS, and then you have 2 supports on top of that. It doesn't work this way. Every role should be inherently unique
>Conflict between healer and support role
uh... no? what do you think supports do?
>what do you think supports do?
They heal
you're a moron then
Take league of legends for example
Half of the supports there have some sort of healing ability or at least a shield
>Take league of legends for example
no I won't
league isn't an MMO dumbass
League is massive
League is multiplayer
League is online
League is MMO
>5v5 is massive
you're moronic
There's only 10 players in a game at a time and the map is small. That isn't massive.
imagine if MMOs had item building. god help us
Support roles, as the name implies, are there to fit certain specific party needs. In a party where your tank is a Paladin, a healing Bard, a defensive Druid, or some other healing support classes would be redundant. In that case, classes like Thief, Red Mage, buff Bard, Ranger, Archer, etc can be used to CC, boost other characters' abilities or debuff/cripple enemies.
Note we're talking about "roles" and not "classes". Some classes are able to fit different roles in a group.
They do what the healers are supposed to be doing.
The more you branch out, the more you nerf an archetype. Suddenly, tank/healers that used to buff and CC lost their skills for a fourth class, for nothing.
That's why the trio is the best design.
5 roles
Tank
Single target dps
Area dps
Healer/support
Tard wrangler (tank but moves your teammates instead of enemies)
>Tard Wrangler
This would be the most frustrating role known to man
Play Garrosh in HotS. Tossing Allie’s is fricking wonderful. Piss me off and I personally feed you to enemy.
The problem with Tard Wrangler is it’d pull in your average internet moderator level 1 inch peen.
Number 1 is PSO2. And it was glorious.
ftfy
Replace it all with tanks and you have a group paradigm with some testosterone
If by tank you mean dps with high health then yeah I agree.
At 6 roles, if you're gonna have 2 dps and 2 support, at that point why not separate it into magic/melee dps and magic/melee tank? That way you have 2 types of dps and tank and 2 types of support (healer support and buff/debuff support)
Because at that point matchmaking can get cumbersome. It's almost TF2 highlander now.
6 is not a prime number so having 6 roles is against the nature itself
Healer is a shit role. The line should be tank and dps.
Also, DPS (Area), DPS (sustain), DPS (burst), Healer (Party), Healer(Focused), Tank (multi-target), Tank (Single target)....
dps is a shit role. The line should be healer and tank.
"Specialists" and "supporters" only work when the encounters and levels are designed with them in mind
>Dungeon
>Traps can be detected and avoided by a role
>Trash groups can be avoided by sneaking
>Boss mechanics can be blocked/weakened
if you really want to ditch the triangle, come up with a system that doesn't use hp
HP doesn't cause the triangle, aggro mechanics does.
Each role in the triangle is directly associated with a particular direction hp numbers are to move in. The tank is the only role that is related to aggro mechanics and that's only insofar as a matter of control over which friendly hp number is moving in any direction at all.
Literally every videogame ever uses HP. Mario has 1hp and then 2hp when he gets a shroom.
HP can never be avoided in video games.
how much Hp does sonic have?
Imagine a mmo where whenever you get hit, you have to run around collecting your rings
Sonic without rings or shield: 1 hp
Sonic with any amount of rings OR shield: 2 hp
Sonic with any amount of rings AND shield: 3 hp
it's not that difficult anon
Monster hunter already solved the mmo issue. Everyone is dps and nobody tanks. You can have a healer if you want but it's dumb.
>strategist class is played by the most amount of morons imaginable
>game becomes insufferable
Lol, please dont give but ummm akshually redditor types anything but anal rape and a shotgun blast to the face
The issue is party size. If the max party size is 5, and you have a healer, a tank, a buffer and a debuffer... who the frick is going to deal damage, just one guy?
Lineage 2 worked more or less this way, but had a party size of 9. And the most min-max way to play was to invite the buffer, get the buffs, kick him for a DPS, invite him again after 30 minutes to re-buff, repeat.
Ragnarok Online has a max party size of 12, and depending on what you were doing there were other "roles" as well like the puller.
Another huge issue is, how do we make buffers and supports fun to play? No one wants to play a class that buffs everyone and then is fricking useless for 60 minutes or however long the buffs last. No one wants to play a class that has to re-buff everyone every 5 minutes either.
In Ragnarok Online for example, the main buffer was a Paladin who just stood still with an AoE aura thing on the ground. That's it, you could go AFK.
>who the frick is going to deal damage, just one guy?
Everyone does damage. The DPS is just more damage oriented than the other ones. DPS is generally the mage/ranger type that does big bursts of damage but needs protection to unleash it.
So you invented modern MMOs, where everyone is a DPS with different flavours?
With "debuffer" I meant what I assume OP means with "tactician," someone with CCs and other negative status effects for enemies.
___
My point was, there's nothing wrong with the trinity. It works, everyone understands it, and it's easy to design an entire game around it. And then you can slap some utility here and there: a healer with debuffs, a tank with CCs, a DPS with buffs and so on. That's basically how WoW works, they solved the ""trinity issue"" by removing Support and Strategist, and spreading what would've been their spells to everyone else.
Designing a game with more than these three roles is so much, much harder. I'm not saying it's impossible, but harder. How do you make a pure buffer as fun as other classes? It may work in theory, but if no human being wants to play the b***h class, what's the point?
That's for example where Overwatch failed in my opinion. They made tanks, they made healers... but everyone wants to play DPS because that's what's fun. It's a FPS, I want to click on heads, not stand on a choke point with Reinhardt for 20 minutes until we win the game.
And that's an issue League of Legends solved: no one wanted to play Support because they had zero income, you were nothing more than a ward bot. So they added a million different sources of gold (and catch-up exp), so now Supports can buy items as well. In theory, the game balance doesn't make any sense: why the frick is that guy so strong if he didn't touch a single creep?! But in practice, I don't want to kill myself anymore if I'm stuck playing the b***h role for that game.
Minute-to-minute gameplay is much more important than any theoretical gigabrain analysis on how the game -should- work.
>My point was, there's nothing wrong with the trinity. It works, everyone understands it, and it's easy to design an entire game around it. And then you can slap some utility here and there: a healer with debuffs, a tank with CCs, a DPS with buffs and so on. That's basically how WoW works, they solved the ""trinity issue"" by removing Support and Strategist, and spreading what would've been their spells to everyone else.
Wow doesn't work because you always have 10 people playing DPS per 1 healer and 1 tank. Whether in PvP or in PvE. The only place it's balanced is raiding, but in M+ and arena the system falls apart
Healers are super easy to find these days. Only tanks are rare: not because of the role itself, but because they have to do everything a DPS does + lead the group + manage aggro + not die or the entire party wipes.
If they made dungeons even more linear* (no different paths, no "the optimal way to play is to skip this and that and also that". You just go on a straight line and kill whatever's in front of you) and removed aggro as a mechanic (you hit a mob once, it's glued to you forever), waaay more people would play tank. But then WoW players would b***h about it.
Also, interrupts should be a DPS-only mechanic.
*Imo, they should better differentiate between M+ dungeons (extremely linear, designed to be as repeatable as possible) and "exploration" dungeons (way bigger, many different paths, puzzles, secret bosses, roleplay sections...).
Nowadays they try to do a little bit of both, so they dungeons kinda suck for M+, but also suck for people who want "vanilla style" dungeons.
Overwatch tanks are just bulkier DPSes now anyway. All their shields got nerfed and their offensive abilities got buffed
>a buffer and a debuffer
Supports can do boths. Their rotations would be to cast debuffs, dots and do some damage during fights, whille buffing the party when necessery.
I love buffing and playing support and can full well picture a game where the buff/support can cast short duration buffs, doing debuffing on teammates and weakening/demobilizing enemies, etc.
Maybe placing beacons on the ground in a certain pattern/structure to do certain rituals requiring teammates to pull off or that when you cast certain crtical buffs you pull a ton of aggro and your allies has to protect you.
The dilema of no one being DPS is easily solved by just having everyone do DPS or not designing encounter mechanics around a DPS race.
The way current MMO design has "solved" this is by making everyone a DPS and then just removing everything in a players kit that does not increase their DPS or directly keep themselves or others in their party alive. GW2 and XIV are two large examples of this and they both suffer from stale gameplay as a result since the only way you are able to interact with any npc or PC in the game is by directly affecting their HP bar with only a few minor nods thrown towards old design sensebillities by giving each play kit 1 or 2 ways to crowd control but then never giving players anything to use these abillities on.
IMO, the correct way of solving for this dilema is by just removing most DPS checks in the game and just designing player kits around being unique rather than designing them around meeting arbitrary number solving. With this in mind, doing "MAD DEEPS!" can still be a part of the game without invalidating other playstyles since players will eventually gravitate towards clearing content as fast as they can no matter how you design your game, this means that "going fast" is its own reward.
The largest problem with my suggestion is that in every game that has some sort of economy or vertical progression that is influenced by players, going fast will always end up being the best way to play (hence more DPS=faster kills) since that is the only way a player can maximize the enjoyment of their own playtime. This would mean that developers needs to come up with a way to indirectly reward players without turning the progression part of the game into an infinite treadmill
>this will solve all the issues modern MMOs have
How exactly will this solve people having 24/7 access to external tools, calculators, guides, videos, add-ons, and pro streamers in order to optimize any sort of fun, adventure, or enjoyment out of their game of Team Simon Says?
i.e. why wasn't Classic, TBCC, or Wrath Classic fun when the only meaningful in-game change was the players?
Just turn tanks into bruisers so they can still have semi-relevant damage, and turn healers/support into utility DPS with buffs/debuffs and healing.
You don't need to re-invent the triangle, you just need to give some damage to everyone.
MOBAs will teach you that people will sacrifice raw DPS, for fun/other usefulness
that's literally gw1. warriors had consistent dps but could slot in more survivability or CC. almost all more traditional DPS oriented classes out of i THINK assassins had forms of utility. could spec elementalists into hardcore burst, CC, DPS, or anything in between, and there was even a class that existed purely as a weird ass utility class that also did damage through debuffs that weren't dots. monk could be a more traditional healer, focus more on buffs to increase survivability, or dip into a number of other classes to tailor your shit to what you wanted to do
gw1 to this day had THE most fun and varied high level content in an mmo i've ever seen, and the best pvp mmo. only mmo i've ever stopped playing without it leaving a bad taste in my mouth, too
I've always wished a support role in MMO. Classes like the old Shaman and "DPS" Druids in Classic WoW would fit that nicely, I think.
Ffxi had a bunch bard, red mage, dancer, and more. The problem with support is that you end up needing a debuffer/ buffer for every mechanic now and the gameplays suffers for it.
The holy trinity is not based in stereotypes, it's in the realities of gameplay. Ground down to their most basic, the two things you do in an MMORPG are deal damage and take damage. The DPS exists obviously in that dealing damage to mobs and bosses is the way you make them take damage until they're defeated. It stands to reason the challenge comes from their ability to do the opposite; which means the ability to keep that damage from defeating yourself or teammates another layer of complexity, hence the Healer. With aggro mechanics deciding deterministically who will be attacked, an additional specialization becomes available in that, if a few teammates can survive being attacked by more enemies or take more hits from a boss, they can be healed and leave the DPS available to focus on dealing damage, additionally allowing them to specialize in stats and equipment for said purpose. This is, in a nutshell, why this trifecta has naturally formed.
Tanks: I keep the party alive to clear content by being able to take more damage and keep damage on me.
Healers: I keep the party alive to clear content by undoing damage that has been done to them and specifically keeping the Tank alive.
DPS: I help the party clear content by doing the damage necessary to kill enemies.
Without a completely different gameplay paradigm, you can't "fix" it any more than you can "fix" gravity.
Except nothing about the holy trinity is organic, as evidenced by every single player game where you don't need a healer or a tank to survive a combat encounter and the player always takes on what is essentially the DPS role. Damage mitigation and recovery can easily be turned into a skill-based factor in either an action-based framework (dodging, blocking, positioning) or an RPG-based framework (defensive and healing skills made available to all classes). The strict holy trinity is completely absent from early tabletop and video game RPG systems and only has crept in after it was introduced in MMOs.
The trinity exists because women and homosexual males want to make bars go up instead of down, and the tank role exists because narcissistic control freak want to be primi inter pares and like they are taking charge of things because they are the ones the big dragon looks at. It has been a self-perpetuating and self-fulfilling system ever since because games are designed around the trinity (if damage is unpreventable and so large in magnitude that it is unsurvivable unless your class skillset allows you to, you are forced to take along tanks and healers), not because it naturally forms from first principles.
>The strict holy trinity is completely absent from early tabletop and video game RPG systems and only has crept in after it was introduced in MMOs.
This is not at all true. Early tabletop absolutely had roles. if you consider the classic 4 person "warrior, cleric, theif, mage", each class had a distinct role. The warrior was the frontliner (tank) to absorb big hits. The cleric was the healer. The thief was the utility class for locks/traps. The mage was the one that did crowd control and stuff.
MMOs did not invent the idea of strict roles. Tanks and healers were around before then
Depending on how early we're talking, this quickly stopped being true.
Warriors often had a high, stable damage output that didn't rely on anything.
Clerics were often tanky and against certain enemy types also had great damage and utility.
Thief classes often had insane burst damage but would rely on party members to help them set it up.
And mages were often just broken as frick and could do everything equally well or better than any other class.
Mages were hard mode until you leveled if your talking early pen and paper. But if you survived? Easily the best class.
You have never played a tabletop RPG made before 2010. Warriors were more well-suited to taking hits, but had no means of ensuring they were targeted, necessitating other classes to use defensive measures (protection spells etc.) or position themselves away from danger; they were also prime damage dealers since they did not have to spent expendable resources to do so, and early games even generally favored them in terms of raw numbers unless multiple targets were involved.
Healing from spells was extremely limited, and was only required to get rid of the equivalent of permanently debilitating status effects; it was expected that everybody had healing potions at the ready to maintain their HP by themselves. The utility role could also be taken by the wizard with the proper spell selection. The only truly unique rolewas crowd control, and that is usually more of an optimization question rather than a question of necessity. You can still kill 20 goblins just by attacking one after another with your sword, it's just slower and more dangerous than launching a fireball or putting them all to sleep first.
Sure, different classes had different talents, but that's why I said *strict* trinity. You literally cannot do on-level content in a trinity MMO without bringing the trinity because it is specifically designed that way. You could easily run a tabletop session with no rogue or no wizard, even pre-made modules. Did you have a harder time than with one? Absolutely. Was the game designed to be literally unwinnable without one? Hell no.
And the same is true for early videogames. You can play FF1 with four Fighters or Thieves just fine because the entire game isn't designed so that it collapses in on itself when there's no one spamming heal spells or aggro generation moves every round.
>Except nothing about the holy trinity is organic
Gather three random people and give them an objective. Watch the strongest go forward, the smartest step behind and tell the others what to do, and the most adaptive help the strongest to achieve what the smartest is trying to do
Role division is extremely organic, and it will work in any scenario. Tabletop campaigns were built with the idea of role division in mind. This is before computers.
Problem is, this isn't what players want anymore. They all want to be the most awesome person with big dick damage who can do everything extremely well.
If you tell people their class has a specialization it is good at, but also many things it is downright bad at, they'll get angry at you and even call the game shit.
The average player demands to be a master of all trades and absolutely cannot stand it if another class is better than them at something.
The average player is average for a reason. Also, this was the case since MMOs were invented, it's not like it was any different 20 years ago. Healers were always the least picked classes in almost every game. That's not really a problem.
DDO, for example, makes every role matter so much, that every good player in its role feels it has a big dick after a successful stage.
>The average player demands
The average player is an utter moron and he is in no position to demand anything. He will strictly follow guides and belittle/gatekeep anyone who doesn't follow said guides. See m+ community in WoW.
Except old mmos had that and it was shit. Stuff like dedicated CC, buff or debuffer classes were required for high level content but almost no one played them because they were absolute ass to level up. It was basically like the lack of tank/heals that modern games suffer but even worse. There's a reason Blizzard gave every class in WoW a viable dps spec. That solves the problem of getting people to play classes, but also opens up its own problem of now everyone just wants to dps even if they could fill another role. Because sitting in the back casting buffs on your friends just isn't as satisfying to most people as hitting the enemy and seeing BIG NUMBERS come up.
>dedicated CC
this is an Asian thing, where roles never mattered
I prefer classic established systems, we don't need more
What is the function of Tactician there?, what does it add to the party?
So like imagine you have a special ability to analyze opponents and give notifications and orders to your teammates (like move there, move here), and also have special abilities to extend your view (for example to look from the top and from afar).
So you can give your teammates orders and warnings when the boss will use the ability etc. Basically instead of addons in wow you have a specially designed role for that.
That sounds like something your typical support would do. It's redundant to have 2 supports instead of 2 DPSs.
Sounds like something you would do simply by being in a voice call, not as a whole ass class.
>a theoretic game that inherently avoids throw typical information at you
>enemies with a formation and tactics system that can be as simple as "we're switching to ranged and deal more ranged damage" or "we're gonna do some phalanx shit and become harder to kill", each of these formations have an invisible tell that only Tacticians can see and relay
>Tacticians reveal enemy health, allied MP/cooldown pool, large wipey attacks, formation changes, mini-map coverage (or even a mini-map at all) to teammates
>Can either be a boring debilitating ninja/trapper or a boring guy with a longbow/precision rifle
TL;DR just cut out and delegate basic HUD info to the typical Ranger-esque classes
Tactician could be playing their own little game off to the side and influencing what's going on in the battle.
Imagine going into a standard raid in WoW or FF but the game you're playing looks more like a moba than an mmo. You can see the whole battle and command several minions, drops buffs on the ground, set traps, kill adds, capture areas, etc.
we get it, you like LoL, why are you here talking about MMOs? they're clearly not made for you
I don't even play mobas. But I think mmo's need to do something different and adding moba or rts mechanics would be fun and interesting.
Pure healers are boring and that's why nobody plays them. Healing should be just as much about AVOIDING damage rather than just restoring health, be it through debuffs, crowd control, defensive abilities or damage to kill the enemies faster. As such, games should be designed in a way where healing is not a constant necessity and people don't fricking die instantly when they're not getting healed for 1 second.
Healers should be drainers: when they attack the foe, a % of the damage they deal is restored to the healer as HP. When the healer takes a hit, its teammates are healed. Healer can also choose to sap HP from dps to give to tank and viceversa, or voluntarily off itself to full heal/resurrect one of the other 2.
Healers have the image of cute holy priestesses associated to them but in reality they'd work much better if they were butthole necromancers.
Unrelated to the thread but revelations is a super cool book. I never knew the bible could actually be fun to read
Get rid of healers, only exists so monkies can selfsatisfy.
The real solution break ranged and melee apart completely
The real solution is to ditch healer and tank and only have attack and support roles and then design the gameplay around different class combos.
OP, you need to understand the concept of flexible classes. Roles are not predefined within a group. They establish depending on the group itself. Sure, parties can optimize and LFG with specific classes that fit their own. But this doesn't matter some classes aren't, by design, able to play as different roles.
For example. In a group of 4 melee party members, A Knight can be the tank, a Paladin the healer, a Monk the support, and a Berserker the DPS.
Yet all of them are thrown in the DPS category, traditionally.
What would a Tactician do ingame?
Scream very loudly on teamspeak.
Ooh what if instead of being a gay shot caller you actually just played an rts with your teammates being heros. Like you were microing mooks around, while they actually were doing mmo stuff. I could see myself doing that, sounds fun. maybe like DoW2, where you have preset dudes going in. Now im sad this isnt a thing
>Now im sad this isnt a thing
I miss natural selection 2
I learned of it too late. I would totally play the shit out of a tactician in an mmo. Not to talk to people, but to micro all the objectives that players don’t usually want to do. Im imagining like breaking the gaols in Titan or focusing mobs in WoW so your teammates can get work done. Id worry healers would waste time on them, but if its like squad based you could have a munchkin squad thats self sustaining.
RTS mechanics need to be in more games tbh. Im sure theres issues with it but i like when games do wacky shit
WoW or other MMOs should unironically experiment with a Tactician role and disable combat addons. Tactician gets all the info and can set up markers or arrows for the whole raid group.
Theyd have to nerf the content, because IIRC they designed it with all that addon stuff in mind. Would be cool though, the only problem is what kind of loot would they get. If they had mooks to order around you can design for that, if its just the raid leaders job then if hes really good at it he would never have a chance to actually play his class lol
Most raid leaders play BM Hunter or an easy rotation class anyway
Holy trinity isn't a cause it's a symptom of the cause. The cause is shit game play that requires the holy trinity otherwise it collapses into an unplayable mess.
The only way to fix or remove the holy trinity is to change the basic combat to something that isn't tab targeted shit.
>Tank subroles
Lots of health and regen Vampire Tank
Mobility Tank with lots of CC
Mitigation Tank (Tries to mitigate physical or magical damage)
>DPS subroles
Bruiser (Can be melee or ranged, doesn't have extreme high damage, but is forgiving and doesn't explode when you step on fire)
Melee Assassin
Ranged Assassin
Gimmick (Debuff spammer, pet summons, needing to do stupid shit to deal massive damage etc.)
>Support subroles
Main Healer (aoe healing and burst healing)
Pocket Healer who buffs his partner
Utility (Okay heals, provides buffs and other neat things)
>Lots of health and regen Vampire Tank
Fricking love Death Knights.
I played shadowlands M+ and I fricking loved me tank BDK. You literally didn't need a healer. There were times where I soloed bosses myself after team died.
roles, and therefore the r in 'rpg', are the problem themselves. there is no 'fun' in the premise of roles themselves to be tapped. good gameplay is about responsive controls, challenge that rises to meet the skills of the players, and reward feedback loops that increase the degree of freedom that players feel as they progress. 'rpg' consistently means that the game will get quantitatively easier as you play it, that the action of controlling your character itself is not a design priority, and that higher performance means stricter adherence to a predictable sequence of actions (less freedom)
Nah, I get you, gameplay is what makes a game good, that's true.
But roleplaying as a concept is it's own thing. An RPG is a game where you "roleplay". Not a game where you play a role, even thought it could be argued that by definition, everyone playing a game is playing a role. But that semantics argument can lead to statements as "every game is an RPG then".
literally just do what FFXI did
it had 20 classes and they all had their own unique roles they filled.
This, kids today don't realize that MMOs pre-2004 already had this figured out.
The opposite. Old rpgs were simply naive. The incentive forces necessitating the triangle were still present.
>FFXI
>all had their own unique roles they filled
but they didn't? it was damage dealer, tank, healer, support that was basically it. Some classes could do everything like BLU but they generally fit within that framework.
before you talk about roles you need to talk about what the players are actually doing. in what context do these roles matter? dungeons? raids? quests?
If dungeons were allowed to be endurance events of variable obstacles and problem-solving your point would be meaningful, but as it is they are at most iterative small raids before a large boss raid.
Just make everybody viable, but have edge in their own role.
Problem solved.
Tank have slightly more hp and def.
Dps have more damage.
Supports have supporting skills.
You should be able to finish the dungeon even if you have 4 Supports team.
Tanking can be fun
Healing can be fun
Buffing can be fun
Debuffing can be fun
DPSing can be fun
CCing can be fun
Pretty much anything can be fun. The objectives of the group can be more than just "kill shit". Like looking for treasures, deactivating traps, finding shortcuts, capturing enemies, etc. Roles can be defined by more than what they do against enemies. DDO is a great example of these things.
This. The problem isn't the trinity (although there are problems with the trinity). It is the design of the gameplay.
I think the best way to do it is to go PSO / MonHun style with more class freedom/fewer hard restrictions, but design dungeons that aren't just a glorified hallway.
You're running a 5 man dungeon, you have 4 spots, but need to get 1 more player
>If I invite a druid, they can open up the root cavern that creates a short cut to the main floor
>But If I don't invite a death knight, really difficult skeletons will randomly wander into our encounters...
>However, If I would like to invite a rogue. the treasure I would really prefer is is a locked chest...
>etc.
This way, there's a ton of replayability, optional paths, and just more choices. If you're a bad ass M+ guy, you can go deathknight-less for the optional toughness, if you don't have a lot of time you can take the druid to get to the final floor, so on and so on. But this design is "too hardd" for modern mobile game developers, which let's face it, is what video gaming has become.
>Ganker says the trinity is too limiting and stale
>the most common answer in these threads is always "just make everyone DPS"
Yes. But make the gameplay deep and exciting enough that there can be meaningful differences in each class.
The other option, which most people will hate but I think is superior is have specialized classes. If you want to be a fire mage that does insane damage and can melt enemies in 0.1 seconds then good for you. But don't be a little b***h about it when this locks you out of content such as that volcano dungeon where every enemy is immune to fire damage.
I hope you're never in charge of making any game
tactician roles aren't fun.
the triangle exists because those are the only fricking possible roles that can be filled. "support" is just a more convoluted extension of the triangle dynamic
healing should be a post combat interaction. armor should be actual effective protection instead of just damage reduction. every mmo should just copy ddo
>tactician
"Idea guy" is not a party role, lmao
It's not an idea if you have an ability kit based around gathering information about enemy and their abilities
>ability kit based around gathering information about enemy and their abilities
>entire role is useless if one person on the team has been playing for more than a week
amazing
How is it useless if you don't see HP and cooldowns? Tactician can tell when certain ability from boss is about to be cast etc.
>HP
not relevant at all actually, HP bars only have function for keeping track of phase transitions and judging strategy / DPS effectiveness
>cooldowns
visual cues for ability use, like with every other game ever made
the suggestion requires that you make the game fundamentally worse and nonsensical in order to create a class. you are taking away my pillow and blanket and then selling me a Tactical Sleeping Device Package to help me get a night's rest. it's moronic.
>muh class fantasy
I get it and the guy wants tacticians to do more shit other than observing boss abilities and setting up markers.
But the tactician should just be the raid leader with bird view of the boss arena, set up markers and warn about boss abilites. Your job is to lead your raid team of unga bungs to victory without them installing a billion combat addons or fricking DBM with a voice screaming BEWARE BEWARE BEWARE and fricking honk noises.
yeah that sounds way cooler but we are faced with the question others have come up against:
how do you make it fun?
give the tactician a tool that allows him to draw on the map/minimap a pathway, benis, plan or whatever the fricker needs to or wants to draw on the map/minimap.
It would never work, it's complete nonsense. How would this role work in a PUG environment? What happens two weeks after release, when everyone knows the mechanics?
Or maybe mechanics are invisible to everyone except for the Tactician? Not only it would not make any sense (why he's the only one who can see the boss channelling Ultra Mega Explosion?), not only it would make the game worse (seeing the boss channelling Ultra Mega Explosion is fun), but what if he misses a call? Everyone just fricking dies?
What if he's Russian and all he types is Cвepхмoщный yдap зa тpи ceкyнды, peбятa, бyдьтe гoтoвы иcпoльзoвaть зaщитныe cпocoбнocти? The "Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes" of MMOs, but everyone speaks a different language. Yep, it sound great.
Also, the best raiding guilds in the world already have their own tactician: a guy who doesn't play but watches someone else stream, and makes the calls for the entire raid.
Most MMOs have these abilities. But they are usually attached to classes that can also tank, heal or DPS. A Holy Priest in WoW is a healer with a shitload of healing abilities, but it also can:
-Deal damage with Smite, Holy Fire, Shadow Word: Pain and Shadow Word: Death.
-Prevent allies from taking fall damage with Levitate.
-Reduce enemy aggro range with Mind Soothe.
-AoE fear all enemies with Psychic Scream.
-Dispel debuffs from allies with Purify and Mass Dispel.
-Remove buffs from enemies with Dispel Magic.
-Increase a friendly target's movement speed with Angelic Feather.
-Pull allies from danger with Leap of Faith.
-They can control enemies with Mind Control.
-Massively increase a friendly target's attack speed for X seconds with Power Infusion.
-Recharge mana and reduce the cooldown of defensive abilities for the entire raid with Symbol of Hope.
-The coolest ability in the game https://www.wowdb.com/spells/375901-mindgames .
>How would this role work in a PUG environment?
Not everything has to work with randoms. You yourself said that "best raiding guilds" have their own dedicated shotcaller. Why is that? Because they play in a group familiar with each other. Like all MMOs SHOULD be played, anyway!
>Not only it would not make any sense (why he's the only one who can see the boss channelling Ultra Mega Explosion?)
There could be multiple reasons. Are you talking about lore, or mechanics, or something else? (For example, in Shadowrun, only deckers can access the Matrix, which gives them information the other characters simply cannot have. This is the lore-explanation for their specialized abilities.)
All the people here b***hing about "Tactician" are just too simple minded. Just because WoW - or any other bog-standand high fantasy MMORPG - didn't have a class like that, doesn't mean it couldn't work in other kind of games just fine.
>Not everything has to work with randoms.
So devs have to design an entire class – you still haven't explained what a Tactician does by the way, other than standing still and typing in chat. How is this supposed to be fun exactly? – for 0.0001% of users? Who the frick is ever going to play that game.
>You yourself said that "best raiding guilds" have their own dedicated shotcaller
Yeah, but it's not a class in the game. And it's not needed to beat the content either, they use one because beating the hardest content before anyone else in the world is literally their job. Guess what, the best teams in League of Legends have coaches and analysts, it doesn't mean you need a 10-men supporting staff to have fun in normals with your friends.
>Are you talking about lore, or mechanics, or something else?
A boss starts casting Mega Explosion. In a normal game designed for humans, this would happen:
-The boss raises his hands.
-A giant ball of fire appears above his head.
-The entire arena becomes red with heat.
-The music becomes more intense.
-The boss shouts "Enough with this nonsense! Behold, the true power of the Lord of Flames!
-All the players see this, it's really fricking cool. They move behind pillars, the explosion happens, they did the mechanic correctly, dopamine hits, they can now continue the fight.
In your hypothetical game, this happens:
-The boss starts casting Mega Explosion, no one sees any animation at all except for one guy. Literally no clue anything out of the ordinary is going on.
-"[Group] JohnnyPotato (Tactician): Move behind pillars please" or "[Group] пeниcмeн (Tactician): Двигaйтecь зa кoлoннaми, yблюдки" for our European friends.
-Everyone (those who read chat at least, or understand Russian) moves behind pillars. They stand there for 20 seconds, they still have no clue what's going on.
-After 20 seconds, a random explosion.
-"Uh... I guess we dodged some kind of attack?"
-They can now continue the fight.
>RLs already exist but you can't make an RL class because...
>make the game fundamentally worse and nonsensical
Or, make it more immersive. Which SHOULD be what MMOs are all about.
Not everything has to be explained, like for a baby. But I bet you are one those people who use tons of mods, because games are "unplayable" without crutches and cheats, right?
there is a difference between first principles thinking and "what if we removed health bars from the boss fight :D:D:D"
this reads more like coping for writing a stupid post than it does defending an interesting idea
ur scathing "u dumb" comment is also a bit too forced
>this reads more like
Your message reads more like you never graduated from elementary school.
Learn to type, bozo.
that sentence is grammatically correct
Do you have zero imagination
It can be shit like revealing enemy hp bars, revealing invisible trap locations, showing enemy cast times so people can interrupt their spellcasting, providing a damage buff against the target with their "increased knowledge" etc.
Cmon anon try a little
>like revealing enemy hp bars
this is moronic as already explained
>revealing invisible trap locations
this is called "having a rogue on the team"
>showing enemy cast times so people can interrupt their spellcasting
this is moronic as already explained
>providing a damage buff against the target
oh you mean the Support (Buffer)'s job from the OP? seems a bit redundant
so a raid leader?
More like DBM addon personified
Just make the Tank, Dps, and Healer all attack and make them use their support actions, taunt, and buffs mid fight.
City of heros grouping was kino
>MMO punishes you for not dealing enough damage
Tanks are a role that are not fun.
It's a role which takes all agency(and need to develop intelligence) from the enemy.
There is no aggro ability in chess or go.
When you control an enemy, you should be required to think about it at least a little bit.
The real question is, how do we make a fun game, where every role plays interestingly and feels necessary, yet not in a forced manner.
It's all about general game mechanics.
Tanks can be more than just DMG sponges.
Healers can be more than just UI watchers/
DPS can be more than just number chasers.
Support classes can be more than just buffers that sometimes do damage.
Imagine a game where your tank can actually shield others by physically stepping in the right spot, can also push enemies to carry crippled teammates out nof danger, can also prevent certain enemy area attacks, etc.
A game where your healer needs to rush in to apply bandages to that crippled teammate, while also warding off curses on the tank and other party members.
Where the DPS needs to actually aim his attacks properly, trying to kill enemies that move way faster than him, targeted by the support, who is not only speed buffing the tank so he can escape for a moment to save this teammate, but is also crippling the quickest enemies, by shooting at their legs, only so the DPS can actually reach them before they reach the tank.
If the mechanics are right, and all of that requires some skill to perform, I guarantee you every role can be full of action and feel powerful.
Specialized classes and a large variety of content some classes will be good at while others will be bad at but enough that every class has some things they are good at and bad at.
For example, lets say there is 3 tanks, a paladin, knight and shapeshifting druid.
I'd expect the paladin to be really good at fighting evil enemies, but the less evil an enemy is, the worse the paladin gets to the point that fighting against good aligned enemies would actually be penalized.
Knights might be good at fighting humans and dragons but have no skills designed to help them fight other enemy types.
While the druid knowing a lot about nature might be great at fighting beasts and plants but if they run into enemies that can use poison or fire, they're going to die very quickly.
If you cannot change the gameplay so it makes the trinity unnecessary, then this is the next best step. But people will b***h at it because they all want to be able to do anything regardless of class choice.
But it doesn't need to be problematic. You can have it both ways.
Paladin can choose to use light skills against dark enemies, or just, you know, his mace/sword and just be decent against neutral/good enemies.
Knight and Druid would work the same. A dude with a sword and a gigantic bear are still capable of wrecking shit up. The fact that they are not OPTIMAL against certain enemies shouldn't be an issue, unless you make it out to be. That said, why bother? people are not going to change classes to enter a certain area, and enforcing such grouping limitations sounds like a pain in the ass. A group with a trinity instead of those three specific tanks should be more capable to adapt at any scenario.
The point is specialization. You, like most people don't want to be specialized, you want to be a jack of all trades.
>You, like most people don't want to be specialized, you want to be a jack of all trades.
Uh, no?
And I'm pretty sure most MMO players don't want to be jack of all trades. They are well aware of the concept of min/maxing. You're just assuming people want to be good at everything when they are picking a class that immediatly tells them it's not gonna happen. People want to specialize. The fact that they want to specialize in DPS, is another subject. And I gave my reasoning for that. People want to go DPS because games are designed to be all about killing stuff. If everything in the game is about killing stuff, the most logical choice would be the one that kills stuff faster/better. But the game does not need to be that.
When I talk about specialization, I am talking about it within a specific role. Obviously people who pick a DPS don't expect to be able to tank or heal, but they do expect to be able to DPS equally against any enemy and in any situation.
The specialization I am talking about is the difference between say an assassin and a hunter.
An assassin is someone who kills people, and a hunter is someone who kills animals. There may be a little cross over in these two, but I would not expect an assassin to be good at killing animals, nor would I expect a hunter to be good at killing people, though both should be able to do either.
This is the specialization I am talking about, and players absolutely hate it.
>players absolutely hate it
Well, because it can very easily lead to bad game design
if that kind of specialization is too decisive, then hunters and assassins would never be comfortable playing together, because would do as much as they can to go on activities that they can be better at. Assassins would be killing people and hunters trapping animals, or whatever. Also, what is better for the economy, or character progress? killing animals or people?
That doesn't need to be a problem, though, if the advantage is more subtle, and at the end of the day both can complete those activities on their own.
It really depends on the general gameplay. My point was, that both can actually PLAY differently. Hunters could be good against animals and people because they set up traps. Assassins could be good against people and animals because they can hide and target critical points. The way they do it would be different. Just make animals better at detecting enemies and people better at detecting traps, and there you have an organic way of presenting specialization.
At the end of the day, both of them could work together, anyway.
Again, you do not want specialization. You just want jack of all trade classes that have slightly different methods of achieving the same thing. Which is what most people want.
Yes, an assassin and hunter would normally have very little reason to play together. One will probably spend most of their time in towns and cities and other human settlements killing people. The other will spend most of their time away from humans.
The key here is having a game that facilitates both of these play styles (and many others). Which is another thing most MMOs lack.
>Again, you do not want specialization
*sigh*
what do (you) want?
Specialization, isn't that obvious?
An assassin sneaking in the shadows to slit someones throat makes sense. An assassin sneaking in the shadows to slit a bears throat is stupid because the bear will smell him from a mile away and bears necks are so thick you couldn't slit them with a knife even if you could get close enough to perform the act.
Likewise, I do not expect traps to be that effective against humans because they're not stupid enough to be baited into one while animals are.
What does "specialization" imply in your own words?
Hunter shouldn't be able to kill humans and Assassin shouldn't be able to kill animals?
No. It means an assassin is very good at killing humans but not very good at killing animals (though still capable of doing so) while a hunter is very good at killing animals but not so much at killing people (again, still capable).
It could go further than this, such as a fire mage being powerful but having no effective means to combat enemies with fire resistance or immunity, or a paladin being excellent at fighting evil enemies but being penalized for harming good aligned enemies and so on and so on.
What the frick does specialization mean to you if not something like this?
And where exactly did I imply I don't want any of that?
>That doesn't need to be a problem, though, if the advantage is more subtle, and at the end of the day both can complete those activities on their own.
It really depends on the general gameplay. My point was, that both can actually PLAY differently. Hunters could be good against animals and people because they set up traps. Assassins could be good against people and animals because they can hide and target critical points. The way they do it would be different. Just make animals better at detecting enemies and people better at detecting traps, and there you have an organic way of presenting specialization.
This was my original question:
>how do we make a fun game, where every role plays interestingly and feels necessary, yet not in a forced manner?
And this was my conclussion:
>If the mechanics are right, and all of that requires some skill to perform, I guarantee you every role can be full of action and feel powerful.
I didn't say they all are the same. I literally used "every role", which implies they specialize. Don't see how you got any of that wrong.
You're just trying to tone specialization down to the point you're making things jack of all trades.
Something like a bear or a wolf has such a good sense of smell that as an assassin you could not just hide in the shadows from them. They will smell you from a mile away.
Likewise, if you drop a trap on the floor and put a piece of cheese in it, no human is going to be dumb enough to get caught by this.
Yes it is forced, and that is entirely the point of it. To force people to play to their strengths and not expect them to be able to do everything equally as well as everyone else.
>You're just trying to tone specialization down
Are you stupid? We both agree that assassins are better at one thing and hunters at some other thing. How are they jack of all trades? Just because they can do something it doesn't mean they are proficient at it. You point of view leads to bad design. Things and role specialization should come up organically. I gave out game mechanics that make the specialization in both classes work. That makes differences in classes interesting, and doesn't look like an arbitrary limitation. Since some traps can and should work against humans, and hiding from animals is possible after all.
I never said both should be able to do everything. They are better at their own thing. Why are you insisting on this "jack of all trades" bullshit?
Just remove the damage role. Its that simple.
You can keep the triangle system but just have it be
>Healer
>Tank
>Tactician (Debuffer, support, utility etc.)
And then have a typical group comp in your game be an equal balance of 3. morons are always attracted to big numbers, remove the big numbers and give people unique jobs to do that arent mashing buttons and the role choices will fill out more evenly
If queue time reaches 10 minutes, an NPC can fill the missing role(s). It'll be better than some dps player speccing into tank or heal just to skip the queue.
>Normal and Heroic Dungeons
Turned into Story Mode with NPC followers.
>Mythic 0
Turned into normal mode where you play with other people.
>Mythic +
The new Heroic you do with your friends or people with a high trust score.
AYARIEST YOU SON OF A b***h! If you read this I wish you the worst possible pain! I wish you to be skinned alive before dawning in scorching sands! I wish you mercury poisoning along with a prostate cancer! Not only have you deprived numerous party of a healer but you are also the worst tank I have ever seen in all of my MMO carrer, and that include newbies running away from the enemy! And on top of that you dare insta-need EVERY piece of loot? The worlds would only gain from the loss of your life, your parents will rejoice at your death and the compost that will be your dead body will have more value than you as an individual.
There is no solution. As long as the game revolves around healthbars the trinity is the only system that can exist. Everything you can do in such a game is either:
>Make the enemy healthbar go down
>Make the friendly healthbars go up
>Stop the friendly healthbars going down
Everything in regards to buffing, debuffing, CCing is just one step removed from one of those 3 things and doesn't feel as impactful, which is why they are always consolidated into one of the other roles. Tanks also CC, healers also buff, damage dealers also debuff.
All melee should be able to tank, all ranged should be able to dps
And all mages should be able to heal?
instead of
tank
dps
support
what if we had
tank/dps
tank/support
dps/support
what makes you think it has to be one or the other, anon? hybrid classes are the majority in most role-based MMOs
DCUO has every class given the ability to switch (out of combat) between two roles one of which is always DPS. So you have:
DPS/Tank
DPS/Healer
DPS/Controller
They still found that it was tricky to always find enough people of any given role for content. So they added roleless buffs meaning if you lacked a certain role your group got a buff to help you out. This unfortunately was bad for balance and you'd just often end up with a group of all DPS who can absolutely burn enemies down and your whole group are now tanky and regenerating.
hmmm what if in each party there was a player actively trying to harm his team
the harder he makes it the better the rewards for every one at the end
a class where the idea is to get the party through by the skin of their teeth rather than have all raids be minmaxed boring ez shit
That would be very cool, but in reality would be instantly and totally subverted either by people trolling or boosting. Finding enough people to act in good faith to support a large game using that mechanic would be almost impossible.
Hell getting a decent command in battlefield shooter games was also impossible.
yeah it would probably just devolve into clown players in SS13 but I feel like there a kernel of an idea there
I guess you could imagine it as a endgame additional difficulty option, your party going into a raid could hire a DPS to actively hunt you down and wound you and depending on his performance both your party and him would receive rewards at the end
>pentagon
gem
less people play healers and tanks because they are harder and have more responsibility. if they were as easy as DPS more people would play them. people dont like the extra responsibility though.
>people dont like the extra responsibility though
That's not entirely right. It can be seen as a responsability because in most parties, there is only one healer, or one tank, while everyone else is DPS. But it's not the reason why people don't pick those roles. After all, people love feeling they are carrying their teammates. No, people don't like those roles because games are mostly about killing stuff in the first place. See this:
MMOs are for completely degenerated souls.
the hell does a strategist do in a fight
because that's just a buffer
unless you mean literally someone who doesn't fight and just tells the others what to do because that is the stupidest idea possible in an actual game
>and just tells the others what to do because that is the stupidest idea possible in an actual game
You lack imagination
tell me then anon
MMOs don't need more roles, they need less roles, at least for combat. Very few people actually want to play support/tank roles and that's fine because it's possible to design combat encounters where you need strategy and coordination without relying on a fixed combat role system. The combat itself just has to evolve to become less scripted, more action oriented and skillbased.
The social and life roles you have outside combat is arguably more important, like which professions you have, your ranking within your guild etc. Lots more can be done on that front.
What makes strategist different to buffer? Why would I want to play a buff class?
It's just a fancy word for support. Any class that is neither dps, tank or healer is a support.
And what exactly is wrong with tank/healer/dps?
You know those roles don't exist arbitrarily, even in games that don't have explicit tanks and healers people will force themselves into those paradigms because it's what works.
NTA but building a game around it leads to boring uninspired combat encounters, it's better if it happens organically without explicit roles determining exactly how you should play.
In Rocket League for example you have an attacker, defender and a support that passes the ball but you're never locked into any of your roles, you constantly rotate depending on the situation. Games should be designed more like that.
>In Rocket League
kek
Did it never occur to you that the holy trinity exists outside of MMOs as well? It's a concept that can be applied to most types of games.
no, because it's about defined roles, which are only present in MMOs or other RPGs
You don't have "an attacker, a defender and a support" in RL.
Yes you do, if you're in a war and provide cover fire so your squad can move forward then you're playing a support role while they're attacking, if you're in a tank you're literally a tank, or maybe you're defending a bunker. It's just basic coordination and strategy, RPGs just isolated and abstracted these roles and built games around an already well known concept.
You don't understand the difference between the concept of defined roles versus assigning roles in the abstract to describe what every part of a group did
In Rocket League, or an infantry squad unit, (idealy) every member has the same abilities, they have the same equipment, they are instructed to do things in a certain way, etc. They don't have different roles.
The idea behind the trinity, or pre-defined roles, is that every member has different attributes that made them suit for a specific task better than the others. Because RPGs work with character classes and basically archetypes or other forms of progression that lead to differences in players, their role in a group is going to be determined by those.
Otherwise we wouldn't be talking about roles and every class should be able to do the same at any time, basically going against the spirit of RPGs and roles.
I understand it perfectly and I'm all for breaking the convention of fixed RPG roles, I want it to be fluid so you can switch it up if the situation calls for it instead of being locked in what's best described as a job. Most MMOs or RPG encounters in general are designed in a very primitive way where everything is scripted and predictable, so everyone can perform their job relatively autonomously without much strategy or social interaction. "You have your job, just do it right and shut up." I don't like that.
Everyone should do DPS, except maybe the healer because let's be honest healers are too gay to do DPS. The mage or whatever should have to CC by pressing the sheep button. And yeah you can have a rogue or whatever.
This will sound stupid but I wish we had more non combat roles, like some wounds are treated in combat but triage is needed on more serious blows. You would have your front liners in combat and backliners providing alternative support.
In practice, it's a lot more complex. Look at EQ2.
>Main Tank
>Off tank (with possibly a third one if the encounter demands it)
>Blast healer for MT
>Ticking healer for MT
>Ward healer for MT
>Troubador for MT group
>Crowd control for adds
>Debuffer (usually a Brigand)
>Healer for all other groups
The rest will usually be DPS and buffers, but 11-12 slots out of 24 are must haves. Add Troubadors for the other groups and that becomes 14-15. Your DPS has to be chosen carefully. A necromancer can lifeburn which does insane damage, but lifeburn is proportional to the necromancer's HP, meaning MT healers will need to take buffs off the MT and put them on the necromancer for the 30 second duration (which is a long time) as well as counteract the damage being done to the necromancer by both lifeburn and the new agro. Some DPS is useless in certain situations (single target vs large encounters and AoE vs single targets or when agro management is difficult). Some mobs require weird tanking strategies (3 Princes required a Crusader, a Warrior, and a Brawler to tank a mob apiece, and you had to swap agro every 60 seconds or so. Tactician's Armor couldn't be tanked by actual tanks, so we ping-ponged agro between an Assassin and a Swashbuckler). Good encounter design makes your pentagon pointless. Mobs gonna mob.
And frick, I forgot.
>Inquisitor to cast Verdict, which reduces a mob from 1% HP to 1 HP.
I will be your healer for tonight. Please be kind
Unironically having a game with six man parties based on the roles from ff13 might work
Sentinel - Tank
Medic - Healer
Ravager - Burst DPS that fills the chain gauge quickly
Commando - Stable DPS that stabilizes the chain gauge
Synergist - Buffs allies
Saboteur - Debuffs enemies
Problem is, Tactician and Support are the same thing, and all 3 of the others can have aspects of support in them. Nobody wants to be the character that stands in the back and avoids combat. Even healers sometimes get into the thick of it.
>Nobody wants to be the character that stands in the back and avoids combat.
Only if that role is designed in a really sucky way.
I'd even claim the opposite: A LOT OF PEOPLE want to play healers and suppors, and it's one of the main draws of MMOs. Non-combat roles. All "regular" games are just different flavours of DPS races, but it's hard to find a game where you can play in a purely supportive fashion.
>Only if that role is designed in a really sucky way
>Only if
>if
Anon, there is no way to design a "Tactician" role that has someone doing anything other than standing around and doing absolutely nothing. And if they're doing something to actually help the battle, then they're just a renamed Support. And if Support is doing anything other than buffing and debuffing, they're doing DoT damage....which also makes them DPS. Because, again, literally nobody wants to stand around and avoid the combat.
>there is no way to design a "Tactician" role
Then you are dumb. Plain and simple. And it doesn't matter whether we use a word like "Tactician" or just "support". The point is that not everything has to be combat-oriented.
>Because, again, literally nobody wants to stand around and avoid the combat.
And again you are wrong. Do you even play MMOs? Have you never met those (in)famous "healbawds" people always talk about?
>words words words
>none of them explaining how your moronic idea for a tactician that isn't just standing around doing nothing would even work
Yeah, thought so.
>just posting whatever
>not even reading the thread
There's no helping simpletons like you.
>expecting someone, on fricking Ganker of all places on this hellsite, to waste time reading the entirety of a thread full of responses before giving their opinion to the moron OP
My friend, you have far too high of expectations for this place.
>too high of expectations
Yeah, maybe. But why bother posting anything, if you aren't even following the conversation? There's dozens of threads (and boards) where to shitpost, so why choose the one where people are actually trying to discuss things in a serious manner?
>you still haven't explained what a Tactician does by the way
I'm not OP, but in my mind, "a tactician" could be a lot of support roles/functions lumped into one. I already mentioned Shadowrun and deckers earlier. They can 1) call out targets (buffs/debuffs), 2) scout (reveal traps and weakpoints, gather intel, provide vision), 3) hack devices (affect the world in certain ways). Lots of stuff, that is not DPS nor healing, in the strictest sense. They also aren't absolutely necessary - but when they are present, you can have more varied encounters.
>How is this supposed to be fun exactly?
Maybe team-oriented MMOs just aren't for you? But you can let others still enjoy them - by keeping the frick away. Your mind is clearly fixated on really particular kinds of games/encounters.
>They can 1) call out targets (buffs/debuffs), 2) scout (reveal traps and weakpoints, gather intel, provide vision), 3) hack devices (affect the world in certain ways)
You can just add these spells to a Rogue or Ranger-type class, it doesn't have to be its own class. Even then, since it's an MMO, devs have to be extremely careful with balance. Imagine:
"Hey guys, were you looking for a DPS? I'm a Barbarian, can you invite me?"
"No sorry, we only take Rogues because they can lockpick doors and the dungeon ends 10 minutes sooner."
>Maybe team-oriented MMOs just aren't for you?
It's a shit idea for an MMO, full stop. It would work much better on a 3, 4, 5-men co-op game. And honestly? Even in a co-op game, forcing a guy to be a shotcaller/utility guy and nothing else doesn't seem all that fun for him. Just give him a gun and let him shoot, even if he doesn't deal anywhere near as much damage as DPS classes.
But maybe someone likes it, who knows. I'd try it, it's a cute idea. If it's a co-op game I can play with my small circle of friends for a week or two, beat all the content and then uninstall it, why not.
In an MMO, a genre that's supposed to keep hundreds of thousands of people entertained for months? Complete nonsense, it would never work.
I liked playing We Were Here with my friend, once. In that game one player is the "shotcaller", the other player has to solve puzzles based on the information received. I doesn't mean I'd play a We Were Here MMO for 2000 hours.
I mentioned Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes earlier as well. Similar idea: a guy is the shotcaller, everyone else has to defuse the bomb. We had fun with it... for a few days.
>Your mind is clearly fixated on really particular kinds of games/encounters.
You didn't provide any practical examples, other than saying "It's like that class in that tabletop game." What works for single-player games rarely translates well in MMOs.
The issue is that encounters are built around just killing everything and then 1v5 or 1v20 boss fights and so you don't get a lot of room for variation. The easiest way to solve this is to have more mechanics than "dont stand in the fire" and "hit boss until it dies". Maybe there could be a necromancer class that raises undead from adds that need to be on the field to do something, like stand on switches or absorb arrows, or you need some kind of caster with control mind to bring another boss from another room to fight a boss. Maybe an explosives class could blow holes in the floor or destroy walls to bring stuff down on bosses. Maybe certain dungeons need certain players to clear and so the rewards could be tailored to other classes in order to get that class their clear or something.
Vanilla wow already did mmo roles perfectly
Every class is a DPS first and foremost, this is necessary for a game where you're expected to solo for any significant period of time, and an MMO where you need a party for everything becomes too tedious for many players
After that you have the ability for a class to specialize into a tank, dps, or healer role, with this specialization becoming more pronounced the higher your level, as you gain more abilities devoted to that role and the bonuses from equipment become more significant, you're going to be grouping up more at high levels too
Then there's all the support, CC, and debuff abilities, which are relegated to different classes instead of having dedicated classes just for those roles like EQ did. This makes grouping more flexible; all you need is a tank a healer and 3 dps, but its better to have different classes for those dps so you can cover a wider variety of buffs, debuffs, and CC, but without it being required. My main criticisms of original wow's customization system though is the way different builds effectively wind up specializing in soloing, group play, or pvp, like how you level with enhancement shaman, raid with resto shaman, and pvp with elemental shaman. Ideally, each build would be competent at all 3 modes of gameplay to encourage grouping and pvp-ing on the fly. It's also important that each class have notable shortcomings and for each class to be kind of bad at soloing (which wow really fails at with some jobs being notably way better at soloing) in order to encourage grouping up out in the open world while questing and not just in dungeons and raids.
PSO2 (RIP) and Maplestory have the best designed classes in any MMO purely because they completely ignore the holy trinity and every class offers uniquely distinct playstyles
I hate ngs I hate ngs I hate ngs frick hmzk for ruining pso2
In a game I used to play the healer role was replaced by potions and there was a whole economy and trade skills built around producing and acquiring them. The melee damage dealers required strength and endurance to wear armour so they were inherently tanky and were expected to aggro first, this made the dedicated tank role redundant. This left us with only the damage dealer role.
That's not to say you couldn't have any of those roles because a mage can throw heals and buff and one guy could allocate stats to be more tanky than hard hitting, but it just wasn't necessary and t'was a good time.
You solve by having 1 tank 1 heal and 6 dps and double that for raids
Full time healers were a mistake but tanking is fun when your job involves more than generating aggro and using damage reduction CDs.
What about this:
>every class does meaningful DPS, none of this "healers can DPS", yet they do 1/10th dps of a pure DPS class"
>healing is restricted to either placing AoE healing on the ground, healing people around your character at intervals or grabbing healing orbs around the room. No more spaming heals on the mouthbreather standing on a fire pool
>instant healing on CDs and self only
>support has both party wide buffs and debuffs for enemies
>tank has to juggle his damage rotation and CC enraged enemies, interrupt enemy casts etc
>Healers do meaningful dps
Just becomes a party full of healers
MMO fights are usually on a timer and without supports to boost their damage and tank to deal with tank busters you would be SOL
>Just becomes a party full of healers
Imagine the smell
Im the opposite. Id prefer healers to be purely supportive instead of some pseudo DPS. Id play a DPS if I just want to do damage. I prefer healers when they are purely a supportive duty. But it includes stuff on top of healing like applying buffs/debuffs, controlling enemies and applying mitigations and other protective effects.
DPS: Me
Healer: Gf, Healing me
Everyone else: Not my problem
Now have each character provide two of those. So you are a tank and a tactician, a healer and a buffer, a dps and a healer, etc, and force players to juggle those two roles actively.
Now we are pod racing.
You are onto something. But healer and buffer would make it too boring. How about healer and tank at the same time?
1 tank that can self sustain and heal others very sparringly, 4 DPS
remove healers, healers are boring
>Nooo lets remove every role except dps because my parsies won't parse themselves!!!!
fk off
in my post I said keep tanks, why are you acting like a moron who can't read?
>solved
>Strategist
>support (buffer)
Lol no
If DPS players are so good at the game, why do they keep standing in obvious killzones?
>DPS, healer and tank obviously doesn't work
There's literally nothing wrong with the MMO triangle. Its perfect, which is why it has stuck around for so long.
>every enemy attacks the near-stationary brick with enough HP to overflow the register
>they ignore the squishies who run around and deal the most damage to them
Why are they like this
usually cause brick guy yells at them
Just make it so a party can have whatever classes it wants with no class restriction, if they want to run content as 5 healers or 5 dps then let them and it should be viable
I prefer the "everyone can do anything depending on what weapon, gear and skills they chose and they can freely switch it up at any time" approach.
you are all idiots.
The only fix for this is spells/abilities are drops from monsters and bosses. They are not tradeable and you can create your own builds but have a limited load-out when fighting that you can choose. Each ability has their own separate tree, for which you have to get separate drops if you want the end version of each tree.
The players make the classes and play how they want.
>tactician(strategist)
So which is it?
Couldn't you solve this by having a different take on difficulty tiers?
Say you have normal which can be beaten by any combo of roles for people who just wanna play as their main and frick around and then have higher tiers where you have to make a balanced party or better yet dare the players to beat the content with some bullshit party by getting good.
WoW has been doing this for decades and it doesn't solve anything.
Wait, the lowest entry tier into the dungeons and raids let you form a party of all DPS now?
You can physically walk into the dungeon and clear it with any class composition you want because the dungeons are butt-easy on normal.
I see, well it seems the issue here is that two biggest MMOs are a 20 year old game and a clone of said 20 year old game and the genre needs something to come along and revolutionize what an MMO is
The idea in OP's image isn't too bad, if gameplay wise you're adding dedicated buffer and debuffer roles to make healers and DPS focus more on damage and healing, although you're basically telling every person who roles a healer you're too much of a moron to be trusted to do anything else.
That's fractals (ie, instanced dungeons) in Guild Wars 2. But it's not as good as it sounds.
Since those dungeons are designed to be beatable with any combination of classes, if you have a party composition that makes any sense you can steamroll through 99% of fractals. You can literally stand still, eat all mechanics and just DPS away.
And even at low levels, people ask for meta classes and comps because that's the easiest way to beat the content.
It's always Tank, Healer and two or three DPS.
Anything more and you are being inefficient. The next step are 20 man raids.
Tanks are always played by the most experienced player. They also shotcall over voicomm.
All MMOs have some kind of healing sickness debuff to prevent unkillable healer parties. Name one where this isn't a thing.
Literally all modern MMOs.
Did you ever heard of DPS check?
The MMO trinity is cancer. Just make interesting classes with diverse abilities, and let the meta figure itself out.
The class with the most amount of heals will be the healer, the sturdiest class will be the tank and the one that deals the most amount of damage will be dps. Every time.
And if those things are situational and not absolute, every class will have situations in which they're useful
Nope, guild leader says it's more optimal for you to just keep healing the whole fight instead of trying to do other things.
Game designers can't fix stupid
Why do you assume every encounter will have a boss with an aggro table? The only reason that's the most common encounter type in every MMO is because they're designed with the trinity in mind.
The problem with making a support class is that most games nowadays are solo focused. A support class would be aids to do solo content with unless it was overpowered. Plus the support class in groups need to contribute more DPS overall than bringing another DPS or it'd be considered a worse choice.
Let players hire mercenary bots that are just okay on their own, but nearly as good as a player if supported
So basically GW1, which could work, it's one of the few games where I would say where support characters were viable. Blood is Power necros gave everyone energy to keep using expensive spells, imbagons gave everyone insane damage reduction and a few years ago a new elite skill that gave everyone extra attributes, which meant more damage overall.
I hate pets in videogames.
Don't try to solo content as a support class then
Don't tell me what to do. I'll kill that elite alone, it's going to take me 94 minutes and I'll be happy.
objectively the best
MMO"RPG"s suck!
The solution is to make everyone a dps.
Just have DPS who dodges all the damage.
And if he gets hit, he will eat something to magically heal.
what would a strategist even do during combat? just take away most buffs and debuffs and give them to pure support roles
Scream at you for getting feared into the whelp pit
>draw dicks on the battlefield
>gives you the cuck marker if you fricked up
Formation abilities that put different buff zones on the ground in preset arrangements. Everyone gets powered up if they stay in formation.
limiting every single players movement just so some tiny subsection of the playerbase can get off on their little chain of command wet dream sounds like a great way to make a terrible game nobody wants to play
honestly never seen a more moronic idea in my life
support should be a spectrum that all classes are balanced across, you either are stronger at damage/healing/tanking or you bring more support
tbc wow was literally perfect mmo class design, everything had its place
The problem with TBC (and most of wow honestly) is that mages had the best big dick dps AND the best utility. Good luck finding a group as a rogue.
warriors hunters and warlocks do more damage than mages in tbc