Quote Originally Posted by Zojha View Post
Well, true to a degree. That's because both tanks and healers are pretty much just pointless fluff roles that nobody needs unless you force them on players, as they both rely on gimmicks that are only as useful as they are required.

In the end, every game with "roles" has the issue that some are more popular than others and only vary rarely does supply meet demand. Last I heard from LoL, they still haven't been able to fix the support role and instead are now forcing people into it via force-fill. I think it's healthier to adjust demand.
Yes... tanks and healer are kinda forced roles.

What is a tank but a person sitting there telling 'yo momma' insults and getting hit in the face... so your 4 buddies over here can shoot at the person thus insulted without being interrupted...
Healer at least you can rationalize in a world with magic. (I also play Overwatch, a favorite hero of mine there is the guy who plays good music, and this music somehow inspires people to recover in mere seconds from being shot by a robotic gatling gun monster... because... gaming logic...)

My larger point was that... much as I like the idea of not requiring roles... we see how well that didn't work in Guild Wars 2: popular game and all... but when they did an expansion they scrapped all of their instanced content that didn't require roles. They went so far as to disband the dev team for their dungeons. They replaced it with raids... and changed a few classes into healers... while letting anyone make a tank (if you stack the toughness stat there, raid bosses aggro on you. But to stack that, you have to not stack something else... ie: you give up damage... end result: traditional MMO tank minus a 'taunt' button, but you don't even have to attack to build threat, you just have to have 1 point more armor than anyone else in your raid... so you can stack armor and healing...).

In other words... Guild Wars 2... gave up on not having a trinity.

The reason was that content just couldn't be made to have skillfull challenge without it.

Real world combat involves hiding behind a lot of cover, and shooting at the enemy... and 1 single hit usually ends the fight for the person hit... That won't work in a game. So you need to make things so they trade off blows... and that means the blows can't one-shot the people expected to take them... and that means you either assign someone who can handle heavy hits... you make everything hit really light... or you add a system to let people dodge to avoid damage...

And in GW2, they went with dodge. First few months out nobody could clear even the starter dodge. Then the timer on dodging became easy to spot, people learned to know when it was coming... and suddenly people were clearing the final dungeons... without any defensive gear at all... and doing them in speed runs by stacking pure damage...

And pretty much ALL GW2 content at that point became so easy many people just left the game...

So to fix this... They gave up... changed design leads... and added in a trinity...

When FFXIV messed up big, they brought in Yoshi to take over and make ARR... When GW2 messed up big, they kept it quite, but they more or less did the same thing... they got rid of their devs that put them in that spot, and got new ones to figure out how to add tanks and healers into a game that had promised it's fans it would NEVER have tanks or healers... They did it... and people came back... Maybe not the same people... but the game stabilized...

Before you ask for content here that can skip the trinity... consider what's happened to other MMOs that tried to do that...
- and consider why.

Unfortunately no one has manage to design their way out of this problem...

So instead games have to rely on finding some portion of players that like being the center of attention.

FFXIV's Yoshi is claiming 22% of us like being in the limelight. That's pretty amazingly good if true. I do notice this game has unusually good queue times for me though - as a leveling tank. Which implies that I am fewer than 22%...