How to get people to tank!

[Shurrikhan]

You say you want to get rid of tanks.

I present to you an actual current MMO, Guild Wars 2, that tried to get rid of tanks, and failed to do so. An MMO that had to patch tanks AND healers into the game in order to make it's content work.

You then try to counter me not with another no-tank MMO, but with SINGLE PLAYER games. And you call my point nonsense? Yours is not even on topic.

Please try again, without the 'bogus' non-MMO example. Bring me an example of an MMO that has done successful group content without needing tanks or tanks+healers. Perhaps, as you say, you should be considering WHY things are as they are... and not trying to use non-MMOs to argue MMO design.

You might want to start by looking over Guild Wars 2 with a very critical eye - examine what it did when it tried to be an MMO without tanks, examine why that failed, and examine why it now has a trinity based raid system. In there, in an actual MMO - you will likely find you 'WHY', or if you can - you will find what they could have done instead and be able to present that in a way that fixes all of their things their developers were unable to find solutions to.

Guild Wars 2 is scarcely a proof of conceptual failure. Its own developers have admitted to issues in execution and backing designs irrelevant to trinity or non-trinity systems that made their result far from ideal. And even after "patching in" tanks and healers it is far from being a "trinity" MMO. The tanks themselves lack any significant general manipulation utility and are generally just higher armor classes with an occasional during-animation DR and those "healers" are specific specs of specific specializations or else little more than hybrid tack-ons. It simply added bits of threat control, mitigation, and on-ally health restoration to the existent mix. It still depends primarily on evasion and target swapping to trade off threat where able and, sadly, death for threat-resets when not.

That said, if I were to look with a critical eye over various MMOs that didn't allot entire classes to, essentially, meat-tanking and direct allied health restoration, or did so to a far lesser extent than WoW, XIV, Rift, etc., e.g. GW2, Tera, Vindictus, B&S, BDO, DN, MHO, NNO the one thing that really sticks out isn't any necessity for passively-set or specialized "roles" in order to develop meaningful content. It's the need for capabilities for manipulation and consequent interaction (enmity, CC, and kiting, in some of their simplest terms), whether they be given to all classes or not. If there's nothing for your play to build around that of others, combat complexity falls drastically. For the more mechanistically-challenged, this can be substituted in part by filling hotbars with the stuff of 16-step openers and the like, even tacking on some intentional button-bloat to really fill them out. But less you allow for an actual effect on, from, and between group interactions (which the trinity can restrict at least as much as allow), the less you get out of each button, so to speak, and the less creativity and variance is made available.

MMOs are by no means a completed genre. A stale, convention-driven one, sure, but far is any from reaching anything ideal or pinnacle-like, even in their own narrow design philosophies. Why restrict all ideas, then, to what's already been produced in MMOs specifically? "Fighting games, MOBAs, shooters, [and] dungeon crawlers" all fall under, in one game or another, successful multiplayer titles. Even single player RPGs, for instance, can yet shed light on what works and does not work in swappable specialization in end-game activities, enjoyable environments, story-building, team interactions (NPC -> players), creating windows of urgency, and so forth.

[Khalithar]

It's the need for capabilities for manipulation and consequent interaction (enmity, CC, and kiting, in some of their simplest terms), whether they be given to all classes or not. If there's nothing for your play to build around that of others, combat complexity falls drastically.

I actually wanted to add more to this specific part of the post as it was something that really stood out to me in the early days of doing dungeons in GW2. Due to the lack of trinity based systems and your survival/healing largely depending on your own abilities and ability to avoid things I rarely felt like I was actually in a party of players doing the group content or even the open world FATE-style content. Unless I made a mistake and needed to be revived, the other players could have been NPC's for all I cared since a lot of came down to being self sufficient. I could best describe it with the phrase that GW2's role-less system was like "we're all playing alone, together." Due to the fact that I couldn't really do anything to buff or support my party (this way back in the days where you wanted to max out your damage as much as possible, not sure if the meta still favors that) outside of reviving them, I never felt like it was part of a cohesive group.

Compare and contrast to a game like this one with the trinity and what do we have? The ability to debuff an enemy so it deals less damage to the party or the party deals more damage to it, using abilities to protect and support each other, aoeing down mobs while the tank holds them in place... it "feels" much more like an actual team effort in my opinion. I agree with you that it IS stale and convention-driven, but alas that's part of the issue, sometimes popular things are popular for a reason, because they work.

[Shurrikhan]

I actually wanted to add more to this specific part of the post as it was something that really stood out to me in the early days of doing dungeons in GW2. Due to the lack of trinity based systems and your survival/healing largely depending on your own abilities and ability to avoid things I rarely felt like I was actually in a party of players doing the group content or even the open world FATE-style content. Unless I made a mistake and needed to be revived, the other players could have been NPC's for all I cared since a lot of came down to being self sufficient. I could best describe it with the phrase that GW2's role-less system was like "we're all playing alone, together."

Alternatively, you could take undermanned, undergeared content in B&S, where if each player isn't timing his rotations in order to CC-fill, you're all screwed. Both it and GW2 are without any real "healers" (SMN has it tacked onto a couple AoEs in B&S, just as a ranger can take a 180* into Druid on GW2) and the capabilities aren't at all divided by roles (apart from KFM/BM bonus threat skill specs), but because that one has more that can be done, people don't take dodge-spamming and necessary damage taken as "self-sufficiency". Because damage can and should be hard-countered, but no one player can hard-counter everything (except a KFM/BM against a single mob, which to me is still regrettable), none are "self-sufficient".

It's a difference in having things that can be done, and therefore temporary "roles" to be fulfilled or responsibilities to be split. GW2 is simply shallower still, in most cases, than even XIV, because there are fewer tools or meaningful manipulations available. At best, in place of enmity modifiers and taunts it gives back decent kiting. But that's not because XIV is "trinity" and GW2 is "role-less". It's because they're both "low-tool" and therefore "low-interaction". You do not need passively or rigidly set roles in order to achieve division of responsibility; in fact, doing so only limits, outside of player choice, the means of interaction available to the party. I'm not saying specialization should never occur, but as a convention its best use is in long-term parties in games that allow for actual customization—as an MMO convention it streamlines content, sometimes seemingly for the better but usually ultimately for the worse.