Yes they do. Nobody cares about the tank's ability to survive or the healer's ability to keep the rest of the party alive, because every tank can stay alive and every healer can keep the others alive. The DPS potential is what remains and what counts.
Because to make people co-operate, you have to make it so that some can do important things others can't, and those are the three main jobs on the table.
It turned shit when delevoper decided to depersonalize every spec and removed every class-specific buffs
squads had to take at least 1 ranger, 1 warrior and 1 revenant to cover every buff
Now anyone can be anything and plays the same
That's not the underlying problem, it's that boons are absolutely broken and fundamentally poorly designed. You shouldn't be able to have permanent quickness and alacrity and you shouldn't be able to do 50K dps but now the genie's out of the bottle and gays would complain if they actually fixed the game.
guild wars 1 already successfully broke the trilogy, but they didn't have the balls to stick with it in 2 so they tried to reinvent the wheel to attract the WoW audience
>why can't any MMO break this structure effectively?
Because every mmo is just a brainlet combat fest. A good MMOrpg would give classes a strong identiy outside of combat and also offer class specific advantages in every dungeon. Like Rogues picking locks, scouting etc, Wizards/Mages being learned enough to open rune sealed doors and the like.
this
but at this point you would basically do like 10 games in 1 where sneaking around is actually engaging for yourself and productive for the rest of the team
so you have all the map design and mechanics and npc interactions for this and 10 other classes and their abilities
it would be great if you can pull it off and every class has their specialities outside of combat and it’s actually fun and not just >well this class can buff you this stat and this one that
but i guess it’s rather not possible to create a good game that’s so deep
you are massively overcomplicating it. it's not ten different games in one, it's not an issue of difficulty to implement, modern gamers just don't want to be forced to interact with and rely on other people so a game like this would inevitably flop
It's important for all players to be able to access all content at all times. You can't limit what they can and can't do based on their role anymore. What do you think this is, a role playing game?
every player is a one man army in rs, there are no "roles" unless you're stretching the definition to include something like a designated dspear holder or freezer and those only exist in multi pvp
RS3 bosses do have very important roles though. You can't defeat beastmaster or yakamaru without a competent team where everyone has a dedicated task. Imo RS3 has some of the best group PVM encounters in all of MMOs, it's just a shame it never received recognition for it because it never recovered from the reputation harm it got for going full chinese mtx farm before that was a commonly accepted monetization scheme
They could a dedicated buff/debuff class, ie a class that buffs the party and curses the enemies. Usually, this task is split between the other other three.
It's not even just a XIV/WoW problem, it's an issue with the fact that I don't even think the combat designers from XI and XII even work at the company anymore, and if they do they've been banished to the cuckshed. Ito hasn't done anything for well over 10 years at this point and Matsui I believe has been relegated to primarily support staff for smaller projects.
God I fricking hate Square Enix
A lot of Korean MMOs have just DPS or DPS+Support (healing and/or buffing) party compositions.
For Western MMOs, GW2 has DPS+Support compositions for their instanced group content too. Tanks in 10-man content are DPS or Support players in a trench coat.
Every MMO also requires 2-4x as many DPS in the party compared to tanks and healers, having so many tank/healer classes is a waste of development when it's a forced role that is useless to stack.
raids are objectively fricking moronic
there's so many people in that playing dps is dehumanising
it's a moronic concept that came around from thinking that big player gatherings are le epic and wacky xDDD
you could legitimately take every raid and slice enemy health numbers and mechanics so they can be played by 4-6 people and nothing would've been lost
it came from big epic godlike enemies and their hordes of minions living in separate hostile planes of existence which needed large groups of people to have any chance of surviving
now we get instanced raids of 25 dudes vs some random human shitter and its lame but i don't hate the original idea
>dps
Not stricly "dps", but on some tactical mmos stacking tank/supports is preferable on high level content.
Wakfu is an example, level 216-230 dungeons doing on high stasis (high difficulty) usually have 4-5x tank/supports and 1-2x damage dealers.
>Pandawa >Feca >Osamodas >Sadida >Rogue >FREE SLOT
On every s3+ 230 dungeon and you will like it.
Every normal MMO has healing sickness and running multiple tanks is pointless in PvE.
Wakfu does also has healing sickness (healing resistance), and it stacks pretty damm quickly and up to 100% (only for players, monsters can heal without restrictions) on high difficulty fights, and because the monsters also become damage sponges that takes turns of setup or chipping to kill, the boss fights can easily become a race against the clock if you do a mistake.
>Every MMO also requires 2-4x as many DPS in the party compared to tanks and healers
Because nobody wants to take responsibility, everyone wants to press DPS buttons and have fun.
Tanks and healers are the ones who pay taxes while DPS players are the ones who live on welfare
>having so many tank/healer classes is a waste of development
Than don't expect me to play your game. As a healer main I want to have a class choice too.
Tanks and healers will always be underrepresented no matter what magic you use to make them fun to play. Majority don't want any on the spot responsibility, you can frick up as dps but that hardly matters in non bleeding edge content and you can blame healer, tanks etc for that. If you frick up as a tank or healer everybody knows it is you frick up instantly, and even if it is not you will be blamed for it regardless.
> If you frick up as a tank or healer everybody knows it is you frick up instantly
not even remotely true
tanks frick up constantly and get hit by mechanics they shouldn't but live because theyre tanky.
DPS make a mistake and die instantly and everyone knows they stood in something
If it wasn't broken, it wouldn't be a system that can only function because of the contrived mechanic of aggro.
Take away aggro and the "trinity" falls apart.
If it wasn't broken, it wouldn't be a system that can only function because of the contrived mechanic of aggro.
Take away aggro and the "trinity" falls apart.
While I agree with that sentiment, I disagree with the idea that most people who complain about role trinity in MMOs do it because they want more roles. Almost everyone who does it, does it because they want to be damage dealers only, and they're annoyed at the existence of other roles as they depend on them to do content.
I used to play pic rel for years. It was shit, but it also didn't really care about the tank/dd/healer trifecta. There were 6 classes originally, 8 eventually I think, but out of all of them there was really only 1 tank and 1 healer, and neither were so specialized as to be necessary in any party. You could pretty much run any dungeon with any class combination, since everyone had something useful. Of course some classes were more useful in a party than others, but it wasn't as pronounced as in most other games, since everyone had some ways to heal and mitigate damage, and everyone could deal a decent amount as well.
Frick I remember this one, still trying to find the anime MMO from back then who got me into rogues so much that I can't even consider playing an MMO without them
I liked how they didn't force you into the same party size like most MMOs do. You could have up to 7 people in your party, but quickly running easier dungeons solo might be just as profitable as running harder stuff in a larger party. I would often just do solo awakened DX dungeons or awakened hv runs, or run some duo FI or something with a friend, and whenever there was a larger party forming we could go onto the more difficult stuff like awakened ft2 or fi or b3f or whatever.
It doesn't need to be fixed.
I play game with friends so having roles for me and my friends to RP or play as in general is also better than what GW2 tried to do and waste time with everyone being a deathball that clumped and ran in circles.
problem is most players these days see other players as backdrop that makes the economy work and someone they can MAYBE interact with for dungeons, it's what happens when soloers take over your genre.
Because any half-assed attempt fails.
You can't have half tanks or half healers. Stuff like old GW2 where every class had a self heal and some classes had slighty higher support capabilities just makes everything too boring because anything interesting would be too OP in that class's favor. So you either have the holy trinity in all it's glory, like wow or ff14. Or you have only damage dealers and it's all just based on dodging, like almost every Korean mmo ever.
Also a difference in PvP focus vs PvE focus. PvP focussed mmo's tend to not have the holy trinity since it's hard to balance (because tanks in pvp are either pointless or absolute cancer)
they should just add stamina, dodge and iframes and ditch the healer, the tank would need to block or iframe unblockable attacks and keep the aggro and the dps should hit the boss and dodge the AOEs, if you get hit you'll need to use a potion with limited uses (around 5 sounds good). Also shortening the fight to 5 minutes max should help.
Phasing out hotbar combat for more skill-based combat is something that a lot of mainstream MMOs attempted to do in the late 2000s to mid 2010s, but they all failed to hold on to player bases due to combination of: >Typical MMO players prefer classic hotbar gameplay over skill-based combat and damage avoidance. >MMO content is hyper repetitive, shallow slop and engaging action combat highlights this, whereas hotkey combat lets players work mostly on autopilot, similar to a casual phone game.
However, this idea of the action-combat mmo eventually evolved into the live-service shooter model and traditional mmos know better than to try to compete with the likes of Destiny or GTA:O after the series of high profile flops from EA and Ubisoft. So traditional themepark mmos remain stagnant and presumably will do so for the next few decades until they fall out of favor completely.
FFXIV unironically tried to make some healers to be buffers instead of healers with the alternate fairy, but no one used the buffs in favor of just more heals. People generally just don't want anything more than this.
Ideas like this never work because mmo designers are too scared and unimaginative to commit to making the non-trinity roles or abilities powerful or useful. E.g.
>You're NEVER allowed to CC a boss >You're only allowed one instance of a curse style debuff on a boss, if at all >Any sort of good raid buff is never allowed to stack always has some sort debuff attached to it to prevent it being used more than once a fight for a few seconds.
If you make the role weak, situational and boring to play, of course players are going to get more heals instead.
Ideas like this never work because mmo designers are too scared and unimaginative to commit to making the non-trinity roles or abilities powerful or useful. E.g.
>You're NEVER allowed to CC a boss >You're only allowed one instance of a curse style debuff on a boss, if at all >Any sort of good raid buff is never allowed to stack always has some sort debuff attached to it to prevent it being used more than once a fight for a few seconds.
If you make the role weak, situational and boring to play, of course players are going to get more heals instead.
TERA had a really nice original buffing class, that doubled as a healer. You couldn't heal directly, and had to drop health and mana balls on the ground, and others had to pick them up to regen. Sadly this was too complex for most people.
But the class still had a lot of use just because of their auras (shit like mana regen, more damage, more speed etc). It was actually prefered to speedrun dungeons. But in raid it wasn't really a healer and more of an aura stick, you might as well afk while the real healers did the job.
Its not true that noone used the buffs. They got rid of selene's buff because they were trying to lower the skill ceiling on classes as a whole and the power gap between groups that used the buff and didn't was larger than they were aiming for. In practice it wasn't hard to start with selene for the opener and then summon eos after the buff wore off instead of pressing 1 for the 16th time. If you wanted to min max it you could mentally keep a timer of when to summon selen again for everyone's burst.
>the power gap between groups that used the buff and didn't was larger than they were aiming for.
That's the real problem with buff classes. Flat buffs are either worse than bringing another dps, or so good that you're gimping yourself by not bringing the buffer (ties almost always go in the latter direction, since the buffer is probably bringing a few non-damage-related buffs at the same time and that tips the scale). Variable buffs (+X% damage) are a special hell. Low enough to be balanced in high-end groups makes it worthless in low-end groups. High enough to be a reasonable option in bad groups is game-breaking in competent groups.
Plus, if the game has multiple group sizes for content, you have to re-tune the buffs for each of them.
That's not even getting into special cases, like multiplicative bonuses going crazy if a boss has a phase where they take bonus damage, etc.
tl;dr buff classes are the most dev-intensive style of class and the power fantasy the supply already overlaps with the more simple healing role
It's similar to jobs i've done in software for companies of various sizes. I've worked in a small company environment where there was obvious benefit to having multiple skills in multiple areas. The more of a swiss army knife you were the better. Cloud service having issues? 2 minds are better than one, especially if one of them is on holiday.
A larger company doesn't really benefit from that since they already have multiple people who can do the same job and they really just need you to be a predictable cog in the machine. Like why would they give you access to the cloud service, it just creates a security risk and they already have 3-4 people who specialise in that area so it's a waste of your time to focus on that. And even if you were able to do the job, it just messes with managements plan to create a predictable work pipeline as you helping out could misalign productivity expectations in one area and all of a sudden you have a bunch of bottlenecks occurring because they didn't factor in that you couldn't help out all the time.
I fricking hated big company culture. It makes sense the way it is from a logical perspective but it's lame to deal with.
MMOs are in a similar way where Hybrid utility only makes sense when you are playing solo or with a small ground of players. Having someone who can offheal as a group of 2-3 is amazing utility but when there are 3-4 healers in a raid it loses any real value. The more players you're playing with, the more you benefit from specialising as either a tank, healer or dps. The less players you're playing with, the more your utility spells count. Considering how MMOs use 5+ people as the standard for group content, the benefit of bring a hybrid is diminished.
I'd say the fact that the game artificially eliminates most of the threats to large groups feeds into this. >Little conflict over loot drops >Little fear of attack from other players >Little fear of subterfuge or espionage >Always enough rewards to make the venture worthwhile
In the release version of Tree of Savior the Cleric tree was best in all three. They outdamaged every DD while tanking the most and have access to heals and buffs all at once.
DPS is DUMB and STUPID but MMOs somehow get designed around it because people like big stupid numbers
like if you tried to quantified a game of magic by what deck does the most 'damage per turn' you're gonna think red is just the best deck by a million miles because jeez 20 damage by turn 4 no other deck can compete!!! or if you tried to quantify chess with 'pieces per turn' or something. there's plenty of ways to design challenges for multiple players that don't just involve getting the biggest number possible, you just have to have an objective that isn't solved by doing damage.
but that doesn't matter anyway because MMO brain autists like the trinity. if you like mario party but everyone else likes smash bros guess what, you either learn to like smash bros or you deal with the fact you're the weird one and get used to playing with nobody.
Id say you could make a class that's for doing high single target damage and one for multiple target damage but it'd just boil down to a boss/solo class and a trash mob class no one really respected.
Everquest 1 broke it just fine by having the fourth BUFFER/CC role, but it turned out that was highly party-depended and essentially built for end-game group content. Over the years aspects of that fourth archetype were gradually spread out to the other three.
easist way to force co-op
most attempts outside turn into >players juryrig the game into the trinity anyway >game becomes a mindless monkey dps zerg ft 1 or 2 """"""supports"""""" that boost the zerg over having more pure dps monkeys
because what is there that could adjust the trinity?
Boss needs to hit something, so someone tanks it. Tank needs to have their HP reset, so healer heals it. Boss needs to have HP go to zero, so damage dealers do damage.
Anything you add into that is just not needed. Let's say we add a support class into the mix, you make everyone do the thing they do better but you don't add a new step into the boss damage->damage tank->heal tank->damage boss>boss damage->repeat cycle. This is the same with debuffers, summoners, whatever. Something will tank the boss. Something will heal the party. Something will damage the boss. Doesn't matter if your class tweaks those numbers, you don't add anything to the fundamental idea.
Do you realize what you've done, anon? You've simplified combat to a minimal amount of elements, then said "nothing more interactions can be derived from this." It's like reducing, let's say, a platformer to:
>You exist on a one-dimensional line. You need to go left, you go left. You need to go right, you go right. Doesn't matter if you tweak the speed, you can only ever go left or right.
The limits of combat are endless. Arguably, bosses don't even need HP - it is possible to conceive of a boss killed without damaging it, but by completing some other objective. (And in such a game - let's say a game where you kill bosses by talking to people - you can imagine someone saying DPS? that simply can't exist in this game, there's no HP numbers!). In other words - you are saying, "Within this tight framework which has no elements except the holy trinity, nothing can exist but the holy trinity!" And exactly. To break the holy trinity, an element from outside this system would need to exist, and add a new dimension. What that is is the topic of discussion, and the most brainlet thing one could do is say "actually, there's nothing possible."
The game I described was just an extreme example to show the box that anon was stuck thinking in. My intention was not to give an actual alternative with that, it was to invite further thought (because there will never be a "final answer" on how to design a game). Your inability to detect this says everything on its own, no need for an insult.
Because that is what the "trinity" is, a simplified view of MMO combat. You can't add a fourth aspect. All "classes" or "aspects" are just part of the trinity.
Not saying the trinity is absolute or none, plenty of classes move between them. For example, if a debuff-focused class causes damage and makes it so that the boss does less damage overall, then they would probably fit between healer and damage in some scale.
The issue is how would one change the fundamentals to add something to it. It just doesn't seem possible.
>it is possible to conceive of a boss killed without damaging it, but by completing some other objective.
We call those levels with hazards. We've had them for decades. Typically they reward you for the obnoxious experience by giving you an actual boss fight after, where you get your revenge after a boring stage spent scurrying like a rat.
I think the concept of trinity is fine its the content that MMOs provide is the problem. Mainly because its 100% static and scripted. Zero variation causes people to quickly optimize the content and demand everyone conforms to meta to not waste everyone's time. And that makes sense. If you are doing the same monotonous shit over and over for some 2% drop why would you take anything but the best? So devs enforce the trinity as a bandaid to preserve at least some role and class variety. Cant have 10 tanks clearing the hardest content, can we?
Basically MMOs are moronic and unfixable
The trinity is a sign of a very basic combat system, it doesn't have a place in modern MMOs if they want this genre to stay relevant. Devs gotta stop copying WoW and think outside the box, create encounters that are more realistic. Enemies should be able to think for themselves and make decisions based on self preservation instead of being mindlessly taunted by a tank that cannot die. There can still be tanky classes that have abilities to protect others but it shouldn't be their only job.
Dedicated healers slow the game down immensely while being the shittiest job and they make PvP really dull so they have to go. Healing should be more of a consumable thing where anyone could potentially drop an AoE effect on the ground that heals anyone that stands in it over time or heal themselves with limited potions or bandages.
The trinity would still be present but in a severely weakened state, meaning there's more room for experimentation with different group compositions that work because of other synergies rather than the trinity for a more flexible and interesting game.
>playing Ragnarok Online in 2012 >Martyr's Reckoning build
was all 3 of the "holy trinity" at once
for being as old as it was, RO had a lot of build freedom and mechanics. Not sure why everyone thinks WoW invented MMORPGs and they all have to be structured like it
Because people know better and you wouldn't sell ro model of mind numbing grind and miss click a plus bin the character to anyone outside of incredibly small niche audience which probably wouldn't be able to keep your project afloat in the first place.
It's the only way to do tab-target combat in a balanced way. Blame WoW for cementing itself as such a low bar that everyone else copied it for 20 years and avoided any sort of progress. NPC's like for instance.
Making something else is not the same as destroying it, the trinity works but it isn't very flexible. Most games that take advantage of it turns out exactly the same and most players are sick of it. The dwindling MMO audience supports my claim.
>The dwindling MMO audience
MMOs dropped off because 95% of them failed and the upfront dev effort is huge even for a mediocre game
There are much cheaper bandwagons to jump on like battle royales
Whether you like it or not players will always fall into these categories in the end if they want to clear content. Devs put in shit like DPS checks so that you can't have a group of all tanks, or all healers win. The bosses deal a frick ton of damage so a group of DPSers would quickly fall apart too.
Go play fricking Monster Hunter or something then it should be right up your alley
If you can't hold aggro and you can't spam heals to top other players then it simply won't devolve into a standard trinity implementation. Devs could go from there and create something different.
Maybe the goal isn't to keep the trinity operational 100% of the time but instead coordinate with your team to do other things, like climbing on the side of a monster all at the same time to topple it over. Set up a trap and lure the monster into it. Herd a bunch of monsters into a narrow canyon and drop a giant boulder on them, there are a million things they could do instead of copying WoW, but they won't do it because it's RISKY and HARD.
>but they won't do it because it's RISKY and HARD.
No, they won't do it because no one wants this. GW2 started this shit and look at them now lol, it's even worse, you still need support, but you also need a moronic buffstick now. What a great result.
GW2 is a shitty scapegoat that gets brought up all the time in these discussions, but the fact is that it isn't all that different from WoW to begin with. In order to make a proper game that truly differentiates itself from classical MMOs you gotta start with a different foundation.
>you gotta start with a different foundation.
Just like GW2 did. All it's content was available for parties without trinity. But apparently having a support is better, than timing all your evades and spending slots on mitigation abilities.
GW2 has the same foundation as WoW in a sense, it's so similar that players managed to play it the same way as they would WoW. That should be impossible if they designed the game right, but instead they backpedaled and made it more like WoW instead because of their immense frick up.
It's simply a case of moronic devs without a clear vision.
>than timing all your evades and spending slots on mitigation abilities.
With the AI targeting people at random (until HoT) that still felt pretty bad. You could have been a Mace/Focus Guardian with tank utilities in every slot and still get downed because bosses focused you and only you. Other times half your kit was worthless because you were never targeted the entire fight
>aggro doesn't exist, the boss will walk past your 0,5dps full plate shield and board tank >healing others has a big cooldown, you slowly heal overtime and have 1 big self heal on a CD too >everyone does dps but some classes are designed to buff others, or improve everyones healing over time, while others are more selfish
Now explain why a tank wouldn't be fine in that structure, a dude focused on drawing the mob's attention so others can deal damage better, heal people safely etc
>aggro doesn't exist
Your game is now shit. Without aggro, you're left with four options: >boss attacks with avoidable AoEs
You made an easier version of most existing MMO fights because now boss positioning isn't even under your control >boss with unavoidable AoE attacks
You've made a game with fully deterministic damage (an idle game). >boss with avoidable single target attacks
You made a game that randomly assigns players a boring kiting session. >boss with unavoidable single target attacks
Your game still has a tank player, but now they didn't opt into it and whether they live or not is entirely based on how well the group as a whole spreads out their big "heal others" cooldown.
>boss attacks with avoidable AoEs
This is the way, and you can balance it so it's as easy or hard as you desire. It's just a matter of bigger numbers and harder patterns.
The solution is to make major damage the result of a player fricking up and not something that's just always going to be a thing requiring a dedicated healer.
For example, lets say you have a boss that has 6 pillars, 3 pillars on each side. On one side a pillar lights up with a certain icon. Said team must relay to the team on the other side what icon is lit up and must also destroy the pillar. If they destroy the wrong pillar the people who destroy the wrong pillar get damaged. If you restrict healing then the damage they took will accumulate and over time they will end up dying.
This is better than the dogshit WoW has where they need to make 1 mistake wipe the whole fricking raid team because otherwise they healers will just outheal everything.
I wish the WoW you imagined existed. That sounds more fun than the "idiot fricks up, dies, and you carry on without them and hope the boss dies before the healers are drained" that actually exists.
I'm making a maplestory clone and ran into this issue with the priest class. My solution was to effectively turn everyone into a DPS with self-sustain abilities along with potions on cooldowns. The "tank" classes would have less mobility but as a result have higher uptime by being able to power through attacks other classes would have to respect. The regular DPS classes either had range to be able to avoid certain mechanics or sheer mobility to avoid attacks since all the attacks have tells.
I'm still in pre-pre-pre-alpha so who knows if this design is going to pay off but I won't be able to test it for probably another year or two at this rate of progress but I'm open to ideas
. I got one of my first bosses partially worked out in design. Boss is a knight with a tower shield and spear and only has 2 phases. Phase 1 has him walk around and do telegraphed attacks, really simple as he's on the slower side due to the shield. In phase 2 he'll toss the shield to 1 side and attack people on his other side. The shield will reflect damage back for 1-3 seconds to punish morons spamming. On the other side the knight will be doing really rapid but telegraphed attacks - it will be an endurance match for anyone caught on that side. Every hit taken applies a stacking debuff that increases damage taken and reduces healing from potions. If you try to jump over the boss he'll grab you mid-air and beat the shit out of you, doing huge damage and applying 2 stacks of debuff and then toss you to the side he's attacking. Once the shield breaks it'll reform in his hand and he'll go back to phase 1. You can jump across the boss by keeping him busy by sacrificing someone to get nuked by him for a few seconds as mentioned prior.
Goal of the boss is to teach people about positioning as you can frick up and let the boss get too close to one side and if he traps anyone they won't have enough space to move from his attacks. The mid-air grab also teaches positioning of the character because if you have 3 people to 1 side and 1 to the other you may risk a situation where the shield doesn't get destroyed fast enough and people die on the other side. The damage reflection teaches people to pay attention to the fricking fight.
Was thinking of maybe making a runescape knock-off but they're so fricking addicted to OSRS and Maplestory enjoyers haven't had a good alternative, ever.
It unironically just works. That aside, I started playing as a healer in Neverwinter because I wanted to be a healbawd but it’s actually surprisingly engaging being a healer.
Unironically, LoL does this well.
Tanks engage and peel instead of hold aggro.
Supports do damage, provide cc and buffs, can protect the carries.
Assassins job is to get in, eliminate the most dangerous target and get out without dying.
ADCs job is to stay safe and deal with the whole enemy team trying to get them whilst still dealing damage.
Mage can either AoE or nuke whoever gets close.
All these roles are flexible as to who is fed, a fed tank can act as an assassin, a fed support as a mage or a tank.
All this and I hate LoL, one of the worst games ever.
No lol is not an mmo, 5-20 man games are not MMO’s. If 20 is “massive” to you, I would suggest learning to count higher. Go to a LOL thread if you want to talk about some dead shitty game so badly.
The healer/dps/tank thing is a 5 man concept, 1 tank 1 healer 3 dps, anymore people and you're just scaling it up to have 2 tanks, 5 healers, 20 dps etc. You could make 40 man LoL map if you were that autistic, it would work exactly the same.
Let’s be real though, by this logic, a COD match is an MMO. You really need more than a few dozen people in the game at once for your game to be an MMO. That’s really like the only requirement. And that it be online I guess.
8 months ago
Anonymous
Does wow stop being a mmo when you get into a 5 man dungeon?
8 months ago
Anonymous
Of course not, can you still not interact with other players while in that dungeon? Hell, I usually am at least talking to my guild in GC while doing so. Yeah, the world has to support many hundreds of people at once, regardless of whether they are actually there or not to be considered an MMO.
DDO has been doing it for over a decade at this point and that’s why it still feels fresh to play. Absolutely endless class/build variety without locking you into a fixed role. Only limit is your imagination.
Because you don't really have to think about your party nearly as much as the other roles do. The tank's job is to keep enemies from killing their weaker party members, and the healer's job is to heal the party. The DPS' job is to kill stuff.
>make a class that does all three extremely well alone >make all content braindead easy >remove any and all incentive to ever interact with another person
there
no-one actually wants to talk to other people
just make all content extremely easy to AFK solo and 99.99% of people will be happy
By folding DPS into the other roles.
So you'd have dps-debuffer, dps-healer, dps-tank, etc.
Yes, I did just shuffle things around to create another trinity.
I'm making a maplestory clone and ran into this issue with the priest class. My solution was to effectively turn everyone into a DPS with self-sustain abilities along with potions on cooldowns. The "tank" classes would have less mobility but as a result have higher uptime by being able to power through attacks other classes would have to respect. The regular DPS classes either had range to be able to avoid certain mechanics or sheer mobility to avoid attacks since all the attacks have tells.
I'm still in pre-pre-pre-alpha so who knows if this design is going to pay off but I won't be able to test it for probably another year or two at this rate of progress but I'm open to ideas
Because it all boils down to numbers.
Take away the flashy animations, particles, sound effects, volumetric fog and loot and what you end up with is number manipulation.
The main goal of HP based games is to reduce HP to zero and there's no other way to manipulate it other than subtract it, add it, slow down the subtraction, hasten the subtraction, etc.
That trinity is all because of number manipulation.
Healing shouldn't be a fricking thing. It's literal whack-a-mole gameplay looking at health bars all game. Even in FFXIV you just sometimes have breaks between the whack-a-mole gameplay and can maybe press an attack button
Action MMOs really are the answer, new server architecture allows for more complex behaviors across many more clients, it's just up to the developers to learn what makes an action games fun rather than shitting out the same basic systems they've been using for ISDN players for the past 20 years, simple range and RNG hit checks has to go. It's time for proper physical interactions on a massive scale.
Again, DDO has action combat and you can even dodge projectiles by rolling or jumping out of the way. All the while giving you endless build diversity.
DDO is great but it's barely even an MMO, it's more like an instanced lobby game. Other players are laggy as frick, jittering all over the place because of the shitty netcode. There's no PvP at all so they didn't have to worry about player interactions at all, just pump tons of action features and run them on the clients.
A truly modern action MMO will be a totally different beast.
Well there is PVP, it’s just very poorly implemented. And yes, it is barely an MMO, but still is an MMO unlike LOL, since it supports many hundreds of people in the world at once. Most content is instanced, but landscape areas exist as well. The real draw is the class system, you’re not limited to just one class or specialization. That’s really the magic of the game and what keeps people coming back to the old content again and again. You know, the actual topic of this thread.
Is Street Fighter 6 an MMO because it has a lobby with hundreds of players? If you get funneled into a small group every time you want to do something that isn't just standing around chatting then it really doesn't feel very massively multiplayer. Besides it's fricking dead.
Players crave the next leap in the genre, a big world full of players that feels seamless and interactive. Great combat and build variety with tons of options and content goes without saying.
Top tier:
The holy trinity
Shit tier:
The everyone is a jack of all trades (guilds war2, new world,sw:tor)
Absolute dogshit tier:
Class existing for only 1 single job and its mandatory for the raid (basically every single korean/chinese MMO)
A class less system is best. You should be able to do everything on one character so you can fill roles whenever the party needs it.
The Holy Trinity only applies to group content anyway. There should be solo/duo content that follow a different meta.
Have a random Runes of Magic screenshot.
It's not so much that there aren't other "roles", it's just that they always get lumped up with one of these 3 >tanks or healers can commonly be defensive buffers too, dps are commonly offensive buffers >tanks and dps are commonly crowd controllers or debuffers >dps itself can be divided into different sub-roles, like burst dps, aoe dps, multi dot dps, etc
because most people are dogshit at games and having tanks/healers makes MMOs more accessible
in theory gw2 would work if everyone knew wtf they were doing
in reality it ended up being 1 person knows what they're doing and they spend the entire fight playing medic reviving their moronic group
Tanking could actually be really fun and engaging but because its such an important role developers have to dumb it down hard because when you have a dogshit tank your entire group of 5-40 people suffer because 1 moron can't do their job. A bad healer for the most part can be circumvented by avoiding mechanics better, a bad DPS can get carried easily, but a bad tank that requires precise positioning while maintaining debuffs and building threat and you get moron dad guild warrior MT in TBC and quickly realize why blizzard dumbed tanking down every expansion.
Healer mains are almost never good players because if they were they'd be dps mains which are far more valuable. Healing is the easiest role and literally exists to fix morons mistakes but designed in tandem with tanks as their personal healbitch. Why do you think women tend to play support roles?
They tried, but it turns out people like it.
Why do we call the role DPS when literally every roles does measures their damage in DPS?
it's dd but gamers are moronic
yeah, DD = Dps (Damage)
I remember everyone using DD back in 2008 wow. That's not the norm today.
because the other roles don't care about their dps?
Yes they do. Nobody cares about the tank's ability to survive or the healer's ability to keep the rest of the party alive, because every tank can stay alive and every healer can keep the others alive. The DPS potential is what remains and what counts.
If playing support is this easy you're playing an irredeemably shit game
playing support can be easy but when the tank/DPS turned out to be extreme morons, it turns into hell
playing support is pass/fail
if you can pass you can only seperate yourself from the cattle by adding more through damage
if too many are failing reddit and Ganker call it shit design
When they do it usually devolves into everyone being a jack-of-all-trades and generally pisses on any real player co-ordination.
>DPS (Damage)
Because to make people co-operate, you have to make it so that some can do important things others can't, and those are the three main jobs on the table.
>healer (restore health)
I guess you could split DPS into Hard DPS and Support DPS but it usually doesn't really matter
>Healer (reverse damage)
GW2 tried to stay away from it
Game turns into dogshit
It turned shit when delevoper decided to depersonalize every spec and removed every class-specific buffs
squads had to take at least 1 ranger, 1 warrior and 1 revenant to cover every buff
Now anyone can be anything and plays the same
That's not the underlying problem, it's that boons are absolutely broken and fundamentally poorly designed. You shouldn't be able to have permanent quickness and alacrity and you shouldn't be able to do 50K dps but now the genie's out of the bottle and gays would complain if they actually fixed the game.
guild wars 1 already successfully broke the trilogy, but they didn't have the balls to stick with it in 2 so they tried to reinvent the wheel to attract the WoW audience
can't punish shitters for getting hit
>your soul when you play healer
>why can't any MMO break this structure effectively?
Because every mmo is just a brainlet combat fest. A good MMOrpg would give classes a strong identiy outside of combat and also offer class specific advantages in every dungeon. Like Rogues picking locks, scouting etc, Wizards/Mages being learned enough to open rune sealed doors and the like.
>Like Rogues picking locks
I remember when WoW had that. That was nice.
this
but at this point you would basically do like 10 games in 1 where sneaking around is actually engaging for yourself and productive for the rest of the team
so you have all the map design and mechanics and npc interactions for this and 10 other classes and their abilities
it would be great if you can pull it off and every class has their specialities outside of combat and it’s actually fun and not just
>well this class can buff you this stat and this one that
but i guess it’s rather not possible to create a good game that’s so deep
you are massively overcomplicating it. it's not ten different games in one, it's not an issue of difficulty to implement, modern gamers just don't want to be forced to interact with and rely on other people so a game like this would inevitably flop
It's important for all players to be able to access all content at all times. You can't limit what they can and can't do based on their role anymore. What do you think this is, a role playing game?
There is no healer role in runescape. Everyone is responsible for their own healing via consumables.
every player is a one man army in rs, there are no "roles" unless you're stretching the definition to include something like a designated dspear holder or freezer and those only exist in multi pvp
RS3 bosses do have very important roles though. You can't defeat beastmaster or yakamaru without a competent team where everyone has a dedicated task. Imo RS3 has some of the best group PVM encounters in all of MMOs, it's just a shame it never received recognition for it because it never recovered from the reputation harm it got for going full chinese mtx farm before that was a commonly accepted monetization scheme
They could a dedicated buff/debuff class, ie a class that buffs the party and curses the enemies. Usually, this task is split between the other other three.
because mmos are made for literal morons to maximize subscriptions
I miss old FFXI bros
We'll never get class complexity to that point ever again
It's not even just a XIV/WoW problem, it's an issue with the fact that I don't even think the combat designers from XI and XII even work at the company anymore, and if they do they've been banished to the cuckshed. Ito hasn't done anything for well over 10 years at this point and Matsui I believe has been relegated to primarily support staff for smaller projects.
God I fricking hate Square Enix
What are archetypes for 200$.
A lot of Korean MMOs have just DPS or DPS+Support (healing and/or buffing) party compositions.
For Western MMOs, GW2 has DPS+Support compositions for their instanced group content too. Tanks in 10-man content are DPS or Support players in a trench coat.
Why fix something that isn't broken?
Every single MMO has way too many dps and not enough tanks or healers.
Every MMO also requires 2-4x as many DPS in the party compared to tanks and healers, having so many tank/healer classes is a waste of development when it's a forced role that is useless to stack.
raids are objectively fricking moronic
there's so many people in that playing dps is dehumanising
it's a moronic concept that came around from thinking that big player gatherings are le epic and wacky xDDD
you could legitimately take every raid and slice enemy health numbers and mechanics so they can be played by 4-6 people and nothing would've been lost
it came from big epic godlike enemies and their hordes of minions living in separate hostile planes of existence which needed large groups of people to have any chance of surviving
now we get instanced raids of 25 dudes vs some random human shitter and its lame but i don't hate the original idea
>dps
Not stricly "dps", but on some tactical mmos stacking tank/supports is preferable on high level content.
Wakfu is an example, level 216-230 dungeons doing on high stasis (high difficulty) usually have 4-5x tank/supports and 1-2x damage dealers.
Every normal MMO has healing sickness and running multiple tanks is pointless in PvE.
>Pandawa
>Feca
>Osamodas
>Sadida
>Rogue
>FREE SLOT
On every s3+ 230 dungeon and you will like it.
Wakfu does also has healing sickness (healing resistance), and it stacks pretty damm quickly and up to 100% (only for players, monsters can heal without restrictions) on high difficulty fights, and because the monsters also become damage sponges that takes turns of setup or chipping to kill, the boss fights can easily become a race against the clock if you do a mistake.
people still play that?
im waiting for the mono account servers... never ever
>Every MMO also requires 2-4x as many DPS in the party compared to tanks and healers
Because nobody wants to take responsibility, everyone wants to press DPS buttons and have fun.
Tanks and healers are the ones who pay taxes while DPS players are the ones who live on welfare
>having so many tank/healer classes is a waste of development
Than don't expect me to play your game. As a healer main I want to have a class choice too.
That's a problem of shit developers not knowing how to make tanks/healers be fun to play, not a problem with the trinity in itself
Tanks and healers will always be underrepresented no matter what magic you use to make them fun to play. Majority don't want any on the spot responsibility, you can frick up as dps but that hardly matters in non bleeding edge content and you can blame healer, tanks etc for that. If you frick up as a tank or healer everybody knows it is you frick up instantly, and even if it is not you will be blamed for it regardless.
> If you frick up as a tank or healer everybody knows it is you frick up instantly
not even remotely true
tanks frick up constantly and get hit by mechanics they shouldn't but live because theyre tanky.
DPS make a mistake and die instantly and everyone knows they stood in something
You could make it work with body blocking
If it wasn't broken, it wouldn't be a system that can only function because of the contrived mechanic of aggro.
Take away aggro and the "trinity" falls apart.
the healer is unnecessary, it can either be merged into the tanks job or everyones own responsibility
Good luck wit dat bruh!
Humans are solved.
Healers. what is the better type? Shields to prevent damage. or health to recover damage?
Depends how they're balanced, and if having low-but-not-0 HP affects you.
clutch shields feel more orgasmic than clutch heals
I'll take "hit your enemy to heal allies". To this day Warrior Priest from Warhammer Online is one of THE best healers I've ever played.
Why is having Roles in a Role Playing Game so bad?
it's not, which is why the holy trinity needs to be broken so they can finally start introducing more roles
While I agree with that sentiment, I disagree with the idea that most people who complain about role trinity in MMOs do it because they want more roles. Almost everyone who does it, does it because they want to be damage dealers only, and they're annoyed at the existence of other roles as they depend on them to do content.
Because it's literally the most effective setup that works against the braindead moronic enemy AI that MMOs have.
>Healer (reverse trauma) - in short, HRT
I used to play pic rel for years. It was shit, but it also didn't really care about the tank/dd/healer trifecta. There were 6 classes originally, 8 eventually I think, but out of all of them there was really only 1 tank and 1 healer, and neither were so specialized as to be necessary in any party. You could pretty much run any dungeon with any class combination, since everyone had something useful. Of course some classes were more useful in a party than others, but it wasn't as pronounced as in most other games, since everyone had some ways to heal and mitigate damage, and everyone could deal a decent amount as well.
Frick I remember this one, still trying to find the anime MMO from back then who got me into rogues so much that I can't even consider playing an MMO without them
I liked how they didn't force you into the same party size like most MMOs do. You could have up to 7 people in your party, but quickly running easier dungeons solo might be just as profitable as running harder stuff in a larger party. I would often just do solo awakened DX dungeons or awakened hv runs, or run some duo FI or something with a friend, and whenever there was a larger party forming we could go onto the more difficult stuff like awakened ft2 or fi or b3f or whatever.
It doesn't need to be fixed.
I play game with friends so having roles for me and my friends to RP or play as in general is also better than what GW2 tried to do and waste time with everyone being a deathball that clumped and ran in circles.
problem is most players these days see other players as backdrop that makes the economy work and someone they can MAYBE interact with for dungeons, it's what happens when soloers take over your genre.
Guild Wars 2
they should change it into the holy pentagram
Tank
Healer
support
dps 1
dps 2
Because any half-assed attempt fails.
You can't have half tanks or half healers. Stuff like old GW2 where every class had a self heal and some classes had slighty higher support capabilities just makes everything too boring because anything interesting would be too OP in that class's favor. So you either have the holy trinity in all it's glory, like wow or ff14. Or you have only damage dealers and it's all just based on dodging, like almost every Korean mmo ever.
Also a difference in PvP focus vs PvE focus. PvP focussed mmo's tend to not have the holy trinity since it's hard to balance (because tanks in pvp are either pointless or absolute cancer)
They should change it into this:
>Main Character (formerly Tank)
>Healer
>Support
>Melee DPS
>Ranged DPS
they should just add stamina, dodge and iframes and ditch the healer, the tank would need to block or iframe unblockable attacks and keep the aggro and the dps should hit the boss and dodge the AOEs, if you get hit you'll need to use a potion with limited uses (around 5 sounds good). Also shortening the fight to 5 minutes max should help.
Phasing out hotbar combat for more skill-based combat is something that a lot of mainstream MMOs attempted to do in the late 2000s to mid 2010s, but they all failed to hold on to player bases due to combination of:
>Typical MMO players prefer classic hotbar gameplay over skill-based combat and damage avoidance.
>MMO content is hyper repetitive, shallow slop and engaging action combat highlights this, whereas hotkey combat lets players work mostly on autopilot, similar to a casual phone game.
However, this idea of the action-combat mmo eventually evolved into the live-service shooter model and traditional mmos know better than to try to compete with the likes of Destiny or GTA:O after the series of high profile flops from EA and Ubisoft. So traditional themepark mmos remain stagnant and presumably will do so for the next few decades until they fall out of favor completely.
MH never gets boring
FFXIV unironically tried to make some healers to be buffers instead of healers with the alternate fairy, but no one used the buffs in favor of just more heals. People generally just don't want anything more than this.
Ideas like this never work because mmo designers are too scared and unimaginative to commit to making the non-trinity roles or abilities powerful or useful. E.g.
>You're NEVER allowed to CC a boss
>You're only allowed one instance of a curse style debuff on a boss, if at all
>Any sort of good raid buff is never allowed to stack always has some sort debuff attached to it to prevent it being used more than once a fight for a few seconds.
If you make the role weak, situational and boring to play, of course players are going to get more heals instead.
TERA had a really nice original buffing class, that doubled as a healer. You couldn't heal directly, and had to drop health and mana balls on the ground, and others had to pick them up to regen. Sadly this was too complex for most people.
But the class still had a lot of use just because of their auras (shit like mana regen, more damage, more speed etc). It was actually prefered to speedrun dungeons. But in raid it wasn't really a healer and more of an aura stick, you might as well afk while the real healers did the job.
Its not true that noone used the buffs. They got rid of selene's buff because they were trying to lower the skill ceiling on classes as a whole and the power gap between groups that used the buff and didn't was larger than they were aiming for. In practice it wasn't hard to start with selene for the opener and then summon eos after the buff wore off instead of pressing 1 for the 16th time. If you wanted to min max it you could mentally keep a timer of when to summon selen again for everyone's burst.
>the power gap between groups that used the buff and didn't was larger than they were aiming for.
That's the real problem with buff classes. Flat buffs are either worse than bringing another dps, or so good that you're gimping yourself by not bringing the buffer (ties almost always go in the latter direction, since the buffer is probably bringing a few non-damage-related buffs at the same time and that tips the scale). Variable buffs (+X% damage) are a special hell. Low enough to be balanced in high-end groups makes it worthless in low-end groups. High enough to be a reasonable option in bad groups is game-breaking in competent groups.
Plus, if the game has multiple group sizes for content, you have to re-tune the buffs for each of them.
That's not even getting into special cases, like multiplicative bonuses going crazy if a boss has a phase where they take bonus damage, etc.
tl;dr buff classes are the most dev-intensive style of class and the power fantasy the supply already overlaps with the more simple healing role
It's similar to jobs i've done in software for companies of various sizes. I've worked in a small company environment where there was obvious benefit to having multiple skills in multiple areas. The more of a swiss army knife you were the better. Cloud service having issues? 2 minds are better than one, especially if one of them is on holiday.
A larger company doesn't really benefit from that since they already have multiple people who can do the same job and they really just need you to be a predictable cog in the machine. Like why would they give you access to the cloud service, it just creates a security risk and they already have 3-4 people who specialise in that area so it's a waste of your time to focus on that. And even if you were able to do the job, it just messes with managements plan to create a predictable work pipeline as you helping out could misalign productivity expectations in one area and all of a sudden you have a bunch of bottlenecks occurring because they didn't factor in that you couldn't help out all the time.
I fricking hated big company culture. It makes sense the way it is from a logical perspective but it's lame to deal with.
MMOs are in a similar way where Hybrid utility only makes sense when you are playing solo or with a small ground of players. Having someone who can offheal as a group of 2-3 is amazing utility but when there are 3-4 healers in a raid it loses any real value. The more players you're playing with, the more you benefit from specialising as either a tank, healer or dps. The less players you're playing with, the more your utility spells count. Considering how MMOs use 5+ people as the standard for group content, the benefit of bring a hybrid is diminished.
I'd say the fact that the game artificially eliminates most of the threats to large groups feeds into this.
>Little conflict over loot drops
>Little fear of attack from other players
>Little fear of subterfuge or espionage
>Always enough rewards to make the venture worthwhile
Dofus doesn't have any class trinity because it's combat isn't based on stand still and press buttons
It's turn-based, stand still and press buttons is all you do.
Positioning is literally the most important aspect of Dofus combat
It's like whipping out a tiny tabletop chessboard every time you enter combat, your character is actually standing still the whole time.
In the release version of Tree of Savior the Cleric tree was best in all three. They outdamaged every DD while tanking the most and have access to heals and buffs all at once.
DPS is DUMB and STUPID but MMOs somehow get designed around it because people like big stupid numbers
like if you tried to quantified a game of magic by what deck does the most 'damage per turn' you're gonna think red is just the best deck by a million miles because jeez 20 damage by turn 4 no other deck can compete!!! or if you tried to quantify chess with 'pieces per turn' or something. there's plenty of ways to design challenges for multiple players that don't just involve getting the biggest number possible, you just have to have an objective that isn't solved by doing damage.
but that doesn't matter anyway because MMO brain autists like the trinity. if you like mario party but everyone else likes smash bros guess what, you either learn to like smash bros or you deal with the fact you're the weird one and get used to playing with nobody.
They're just not ready for the truth
>Damage Dealer - Ranged, melee, setup, etc. variants
>Protector - Reduces/prevents damage
>Positioner
>Summoner
>Buffer
>Debuffer
>Tank - Perfect hitme target
Dofus did it right
Id say you could make a class that's for doing high single target damage and one for multiple target damage but it'd just boil down to a boss/solo class and a trash mob class no one really respected.
Everquest 1 broke it just fine by having the fourth BUFFER/CC role, but it turned out that was highly party-depended and essentially built for end-game group content. Over the years aspects of that fourth archetype were gradually spread out to the other three.
easist way to force co-op
most attempts outside turn into
>players juryrig the game into the trinity anyway
>game becomes a mindless monkey dps zerg ft 1 or 2 """"""supports"""""" that boost the zerg over having more pure dps monkeys
because what is there that could adjust the trinity?
Boss needs to hit something, so someone tanks it. Tank needs to have their HP reset, so healer heals it. Boss needs to have HP go to zero, so damage dealers do damage.
Anything you add into that is just not needed. Let's say we add a support class into the mix, you make everyone do the thing they do better but you don't add a new step into the boss damage->damage tank->heal tank->damage boss>boss damage->repeat cycle. This is the same with debuffers, summoners, whatever. Something will tank the boss. Something will heal the party. Something will damage the boss. Doesn't matter if your class tweaks those numbers, you don't add anything to the fundamental idea.
Do you realize what you've done, anon? You've simplified combat to a minimal amount of elements, then said "nothing more interactions can be derived from this." It's like reducing, let's say, a platformer to:
>You exist on a one-dimensional line. You need to go left, you go left. You need to go right, you go right. Doesn't matter if you tweak the speed, you can only ever go left or right.
The limits of combat are endless. Arguably, bosses don't even need HP - it is possible to conceive of a boss killed without damaging it, but by completing some other objective. (And in such a game - let's say a game where you kill bosses by talking to people - you can imagine someone saying DPS? that simply can't exist in this game, there's no HP numbers!). In other words - you are saying, "Within this tight framework which has no elements except the holy trinity, nothing can exist but the holy trinity!" And exactly. To break the holy trinity, an element from outside this system would need to exist, and add a new dimension. What that is is the topic of discussion, and the most brainlet thing one could do is say "actually, there's nothing possible."
no one will ever play the game you describe beyond passing fancy, and you are not as smart as you think you are
The game I described was just an extreme example to show the box that anon was stuck thinking in. My intention was not to give an actual alternative with that, it was to invite further thought (because there will never be a "final answer" on how to design a game). Your inability to detect this says everything on its own, no need for an insult.
Movement. Something Wildstar proved players cannot cope with.
There is movement and then there is ddr floor is lava that is high end wildstar content.
Because that is what the "trinity" is, a simplified view of MMO combat. You can't add a fourth aspect. All "classes" or "aspects" are just part of the trinity.
Not saying the trinity is absolute or none, plenty of classes move between them. For example, if a debuff-focused class causes damage and makes it so that the boss does less damage overall, then they would probably fit between healer and damage in some scale.
The issue is how would one change the fundamentals to add something to it. It just doesn't seem possible.
>it is possible to conceive of a boss killed without damaging it, but by completing some other objective.
We call those levels with hazards. We've had them for decades. Typically they reward you for the obnoxious experience by giving you an actual boss fight after, where you get your revenge after a boring stage spent scurrying like a rat.
>Boss needs to hit something, so someone tanks it.
Or parry it.
Or dodge it.
Ah yes, evasion tanks. Because those always work out.
because its perfect
I think the concept of trinity is fine its the content that MMOs provide is the problem. Mainly because its 100% static and scripted. Zero variation causes people to quickly optimize the content and demand everyone conforms to meta to not waste everyone's time. And that makes sense. If you are doing the same monotonous shit over and over for some 2% drop why would you take anything but the best? So devs enforce the trinity as a bandaid to preserve at least some role and class variety. Cant have 10 tanks clearing the hardest content, can we?
Basically MMOs are moronic and unfixable
Because they all inevitably use the same framework. They're very broad archetypes that you'd need to be creative to avoid.
All classes fall into tank, support and damage dealer categories.
The trinity is a sign of a very basic combat system, it doesn't have a place in modern MMOs if they want this genre to stay relevant. Devs gotta stop copying WoW and think outside the box, create encounters that are more realistic. Enemies should be able to think for themselves and make decisions based on self preservation instead of being mindlessly taunted by a tank that cannot die. There can still be tanky classes that have abilities to protect others but it shouldn't be their only job.
Dedicated healers slow the game down immensely while being the shittiest job and they make PvP really dull so they have to go. Healing should be more of a consumable thing where anyone could potentially drop an AoE effect on the ground that heals anyone that stands in it over time or heal themselves with limited potions or bandages.
The trinity would still be present but in a severely weakened state, meaning there's more room for experimentation with different group compositions that work because of other synergies rather than the trinity for a more flexible and interesting game.
>playing Ragnarok Online in 2012
>Martyr's Reckoning build
was all 3 of the "holy trinity" at once
for being as old as it was, RO had a lot of build freedom and mechanics. Not sure why everyone thinks WoW invented MMORPGs and they all have to be structured like it
Because people know better and you wouldn't sell ro model of mind numbing grind and miss click a plus bin the character to anyone outside of incredibly small niche audience which probably wouldn't be able to keep your project afloat in the first place.
are you having a stroke?
Because there is no reason to break something that works. Are you a israelite, perhaps?
It's the only way to do tab-target combat in a balanced way. Blame WoW for cementing itself as such a low bar that everyone else copied it for 20 years and avoided any sort of progress. NPC's like for instance.
>Let's destroy perfectly working system! Why? I dunno lol, progress!
only a wowgay would hold up tab targeting as some sort of paragon
Making something else is not the same as destroying it, the trinity works but it isn't very flexible. Most games that take advantage of it turns out exactly the same and most players are sick of it. The dwindling MMO audience supports my claim.
>The dwindling MMO audience
MMOs dropped off because 95% of them failed and the upfront dev effort is huge even for a mediocre game
There are much cheaper bandwagons to jump on like battle royales
Wasn't Guild wars 2 fellating itself for not having this?
people just juryrigged an approximation for its versions of raids and everything else is just mindless deathballs
ITT: NPCs with no imagination
Fewer pure, strong, distinct archetypes is better than whatever midwits would think to propose.
Whether you like it or not players will always fall into these categories in the end if they want to clear content. Devs put in shit like DPS checks so that you can't have a group of all tanks, or all healers win. The bosses deal a frick ton of damage so a group of DPSers would quickly fall apart too.
Go play fricking Monster Hunter or something then it should be right up your alley
Players will always metagame in a way that will lead to tanks, optimized damage dealers etc
It's the nature of those games,.you can't avoid it unless it's an MMO that's not about fighting and has no combat stats
If you can't hold aggro and you can't spam heals to top other players then it simply won't devolve into a standard trinity implementation. Devs could go from there and create something different.
Maybe the goal isn't to keep the trinity operational 100% of the time but instead coordinate with your team to do other things, like climbing on the side of a monster all at the same time to topple it over. Set up a trap and lure the monster into it. Herd a bunch of monsters into a narrow canyon and drop a giant boulder on them, there are a million things they could do instead of copying WoW, but they won't do it because it's RISKY and HARD.
You're basically describing Monster Hunter.
Go play that.
It would be better if they started copying great games like Monster Hunter instead of shitty games like WoW.
>but they won't do it because it's RISKY and HARD.
No, they won't do it because no one wants this. GW2 started this shit and look at them now lol, it's even worse, you still need support, but you also need a moronic buffstick now. What a great result.
GW2 is a shitty scapegoat that gets brought up all the time in these discussions, but the fact is that it isn't all that different from WoW to begin with. In order to make a proper game that truly differentiates itself from classical MMOs you gotta start with a different foundation.
>you gotta start with a different foundation.
Just like GW2 did. All it's content was available for parties without trinity. But apparently having a support is better, than timing all your evades and spending slots on mitigation abilities.
GW2 has the same foundation as WoW in a sense, it's so similar that players managed to play it the same way as they would WoW. That should be impossible if they designed the game right, but instead they backpedaled and made it more like WoW instead because of their immense frick up.
It's simply a case of moronic devs without a clear vision.
>than timing all your evades and spending slots on mitigation abilities.
With the AI targeting people at random (until HoT) that still felt pretty bad. You could have been a Mace/Focus Guardian with tank utilities in every slot and still get downed because bosses focused you and only you. Other times half your kit was worthless because you were never targeted the entire fight
>aggro doesn't exist, the boss will walk past your 0,5dps full plate shield and board tank
>healing others has a big cooldown, you slowly heal overtime and have 1 big self heal on a CD too
>everyone does dps but some classes are designed to buff others, or improve everyones healing over time, while others are more selfish
Now explain why a tank wouldn't be fine in that structure, a dude focused on drawing the mob's attention so others can deal damage better, heal people safely etc
>aggro doesn't exist
Your game is now shit. Without aggro, you're left with four options:
>boss attacks with avoidable AoEs
You made an easier version of most existing MMO fights because now boss positioning isn't even under your control
>boss with unavoidable AoE attacks
You've made a game with fully deterministic damage (an idle game).
>boss with avoidable single target attacks
You made a game that randomly assigns players a boring kiting session.
>boss with unavoidable single target attacks
Your game still has a tank player, but now they didn't opt into it and whether they live or not is entirely based on how well the group as a whole spreads out their big "heal others" cooldown.
>boss attacks with avoidable AoEs
This is the way, and you can balance it so it's as easy or hard as you desire. It's just a matter of bigger numbers and harder patterns.
That is shit and lost ark has proven that its shit
Lost Ark has excellent combat and raids. A million times better than popular trinity slop like FFXIV.
Is that why raids are the most hated part of the game and the main reason why everyone quits
Raids are the only reason people still play
The solution is to make major damage the result of a player fricking up and not something that's just always going to be a thing requiring a dedicated healer.
For example, lets say you have a boss that has 6 pillars, 3 pillars on each side. On one side a pillar lights up with a certain icon. Said team must relay to the team on the other side what icon is lit up and must also destroy the pillar. If they destroy the wrong pillar the people who destroy the wrong pillar get damaged. If you restrict healing then the damage they took will accumulate and over time they will end up dying.
This is better than the dogshit WoW has where they need to make 1 mistake wipe the whole fricking raid team because otherwise they healers will just outheal everything.
I wish the WoW you imagined existed. That sounds more fun than the "idiot fricks up, dies, and you carry on without them and hope the boss dies before the healers are drained" that actually exists.
I'm
. I got one of my first bosses partially worked out in design. Boss is a knight with a tower shield and spear and only has 2 phases. Phase 1 has him walk around and do telegraphed attacks, really simple as he's on the slower side due to the shield. In phase 2 he'll toss the shield to 1 side and attack people on his other side. The shield will reflect damage back for 1-3 seconds to punish morons spamming. On the other side the knight will be doing really rapid but telegraphed attacks - it will be an endurance match for anyone caught on that side. Every hit taken applies a stacking debuff that increases damage taken and reduces healing from potions. If you try to jump over the boss he'll grab you mid-air and beat the shit out of you, doing huge damage and applying 2 stacks of debuff and then toss you to the side he's attacking. Once the shield breaks it'll reform in his hand and he'll go back to phase 1. You can jump across the boss by keeping him busy by sacrificing someone to get nuked by him for a few seconds as mentioned prior.
Goal of the boss is to teach people about positioning as you can frick up and let the boss get too close to one side and if he traps anyone they won't have enough space to move from his attacks. The mid-air grab also teaches positioning of the character because if you have 3 people to 1 side and 1 to the other you may risk a situation where the shield doesn't get destroyed fast enough and people die on the other side. The damage reflection teaches people to pay attention to the fricking fight.
Was thinking of maybe making a runescape knock-off but they're so fricking addicted to OSRS and Maplestory enjoyers haven't had a good alternative, ever.
What if the tank can also do DPS and have self-heals?
It unironically just works. That aside, I started playing as a healer in Neverwinter because I wanted to be a healbawd but it’s actually surprisingly engaging being a healer.
Unironically, LoL does this well.
Tanks engage and peel instead of hold aggro.
Supports do damage, provide cc and buffs, can protect the carries.
Assassins job is to get in, eliminate the most dangerous target and get out without dying.
ADCs job is to stay safe and deal with the whole enemy team trying to get them whilst still dealing damage.
Mage can either AoE or nuke whoever gets close.
All these roles are flexible as to who is fed, a fed tank can act as an assassin, a fed support as a mage or a tank.
All this and I hate LoL, one of the worst games ever.
Lol is not a fricking mmo you Brazilian dumbass.
Firstly it is, secondly the tank/dps/healer aspect only comes to play in dungeons and raids which is limited to 5-20 people anyway.
No lol is not an mmo, 5-20 man games are not MMO’s. If 20 is “massive” to you, I would suggest learning to count higher. Go to a LOL thread if you want to talk about some dead shitty game so badly.
The healer/dps/tank thing is a 5 man concept, 1 tank 1 healer 3 dps, anymore people and you're just scaling it up to have 2 tanks, 5 healers, 20 dps etc. You could make 40 man LoL map if you were that autistic, it would work exactly the same.
Let’s be real though, by this logic, a COD match is an MMO. You really need more than a few dozen people in the game at once for your game to be an MMO. That’s really like the only requirement. And that it be online I guess.
Does wow stop being a mmo when you get into a 5 man dungeon?
Of course not, can you still not interact with other players while in that dungeon? Hell, I usually am at least talking to my guild in GC while doing so. Yeah, the world has to support many hundreds of people at once, regardless of whether they are actually there or not to be considered an MMO.
DDO has been doing it for over a decade at this point and that’s why it still feels fresh to play. Absolutely endless class/build variety without locking you into a fixed role. Only limit is your imagination.
Why is it that DPS is the designated morono class for monkeys who can't seem to figure out the game?
Because you don't really have to think about your party nearly as much as the other roles do. The tank's job is to keep enemies from killing their weaker party members, and the healer's job is to heal the party. The DPS' job is to kill stuff.
>make a class that does all three extremely well alone
>make all content braindead easy
>remove any and all incentive to ever interact with another person
there
no-one actually wants to talk to other people
just make all content extremely easy to AFK solo and 99.99% of people will be happy
That's just Runescape.
>no-one actually wants to talk to other people
I actually do, and it's why I can't seem to stay invested in FFXIV whenever I've tried the free trial
The best solution is to make everyone DPS and give them a subclass to specialize in something not damage dealing
Runescape
By folding DPS into the other roles.
So you'd have dps-debuffer, dps-healer, dps-tank, etc.
Yes, I did just shuffle things around to create another trinity.
I'm making a maplestory clone and ran into this issue with the priest class. My solution was to effectively turn everyone into a DPS with self-sustain abilities along with potions on cooldowns. The "tank" classes would have less mobility but as a result have higher uptime by being able to power through attacks other classes would have to respect. The regular DPS classes either had range to be able to avoid certain mechanics or sheer mobility to avoid attacks since all the attacks have tells.
I'm still in pre-pre-pre-alpha so who knows if this design is going to pay off but I won't be able to test it for probably another year or two at this rate of progress but I'm open to ideas
Because people like tanking. People like healing. And have DPS only means every fight is solved by kiting enemies.
Because it all boils down to numbers.
Take away the flashy animations, particles, sound effects, volumetric fog and loot and what you end up with is number manipulation.
The main goal of HP based games is to reduce HP to zero and there's no other way to manipulate it other than subtract it, add it, slow down the subtraction, hasten the subtraction, etc.
That trinity is all because of number manipulation.
Where's the buff/debuffer?
asiatic action MMOs are fine without it
Healing shouldn't be a fricking thing. It's literal whack-a-mole gameplay looking at health bars all game. Even in FFXIV you just sometimes have breaks between the whack-a-mole gameplay and can maybe press an attack button
Action MMOs really are the answer, new server architecture allows for more complex behaviors across many more clients, it's just up to the developers to learn what makes an action games fun rather than shitting out the same basic systems they've been using for ISDN players for the past 20 years, simple range and RNG hit checks has to go. It's time for proper physical interactions on a massive scale.
Again, DDO has action combat and you can even dodge projectiles by rolling or jumping out of the way. All the while giving you endless build diversity.
DDO is great but it's barely even an MMO, it's more like an instanced lobby game. Other players are laggy as frick, jittering all over the place because of the shitty netcode. There's no PvP at all so they didn't have to worry about player interactions at all, just pump tons of action features and run them on the clients.
A truly modern action MMO will be a totally different beast.
Well there is PVP, it’s just very poorly implemented. And yes, it is barely an MMO, but still is an MMO unlike LOL, since it supports many hundreds of people in the world at once. Most content is instanced, but landscape areas exist as well. The real draw is the class system, you’re not limited to just one class or specialization. That’s really the magic of the game and what keeps people coming back to the old content again and again. You know, the actual topic of this thread.
Is Street Fighter 6 an MMO because it has a lobby with hundreds of players? If you get funneled into a small group every time you want to do something that isn't just standing around chatting then it really doesn't feel very massively multiplayer. Besides it's fricking dead.
Players crave the next leap in the genre, a big world full of players that feels seamless and interactive. Great combat and build variety with tons of options and content goes without saying.
Top tier:
The holy trinity
Shit tier:
The everyone is a jack of all trades (guilds war2, new world,sw:tor)
Absolute dogshit tier:
Class existing for only 1 single job and its mandatory for the raid (basically every single korean/chinese MMO)
>Caduceus instead of the Rod of Asclepius for healer
What did they mean by this?
He’s just secretly a FROMdrone, don’t worry about it.
i love snakes i want snakes all over my body
Just shows how stupid americans are for not knowing the origin of things.
Where is the jester? Where is the dancer class? The op clearly never played a rpg.
A class less system is best. You should be able to do everything on one character so you can fill roles whenever the party needs it.
The Holy Trinity only applies to group content anyway. There should be solo/duo content that follow a different meta.
Have a random Runes of Magic screenshot.
It's not so much that there aren't other "roles", it's just that they always get lumped up with one of these 3
>tanks or healers can commonly be defensive buffers too, dps are commonly offensive buffers
>tanks and dps are commonly crowd controllers or debuffers
>dps itself can be divided into different sub-roles, like burst dps, aoe dps, multi dot dps, etc
because most people are dogshit at games and having tanks/healers makes MMOs more accessible
in theory gw2 would work if everyone knew wtf they were doing
in reality it ended up being 1 person knows what they're doing and they spend the entire fight playing medic reviving their moronic group
Tanking could actually be really fun and engaging but because its such an important role developers have to dumb it down hard because when you have a dogshit tank your entire group of 5-40 people suffer because 1 moron can't do their job. A bad healer for the most part can be circumvented by avoiding mechanics better, a bad DPS can get carried easily, but a bad tank that requires precise positioning while maintaining debuffs and building threat and you get moron dad guild warrior MT in TBC and quickly realize why blizzard dumbed tanking down every expansion.
Healer mains are almost never good players because if they were they'd be dps mains which are far more valuable. Healing is the easiest role and literally exists to fix morons mistakes but designed in tandem with tanks as their personal healbitch. Why do you think women tend to play support roles?