How to get people to tank!

[Makeda]

And that reason is bogus because it implies that every game without a trinity can not present a skillful challenge. This statement completely precludes all single-player games (including the Dark Souls series) from having any sort of skillful challenge as well as most competitive games ever, whether real or electronic. Fighting games, MOBAs, shooters, dungeon crawlers...

My apologies, but perhaps YOU should be the one considering why things are as they are, because what you are saying makes no sense.

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.

[Drakkaelus]

Bring me an example of an MMO that has done successful group content without needing tanks or tanks+healers..

I think the problem was the fact that Guild Wars 2 just promoted zerging everything to death. Hell, WoW had that problem for years and they stick to the trinity.

All I can think of is City of Heroes. They had tanks and healers but content generally didn't require it (though a well rounded team made things go much smoother). Monster Hunter is built around group content that doesn't rely on a trinity. But, that also has a level of interactivity and control that traditional MMOs generally don't provide.

[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.

[Zojha]

You say you want to get rid of tanks.

No. I'm saying that I think it's pointless to try and make people tank or heal, hence we should have more content that accommodates non-trinity gameplay so that it's not as important whether we have tanks or healers readily available or not.

Since then, I've done nothing but argue your points. And you only have one:"One game without the trinity changed to trinity, therefore non-trinity cannot work." That's a fallacy and I've gave you ample reason why. You even go as far as to ignore my point about mechanics, which, I repeat, are attacks that completely ignore the fact that there's a tank holding aggro to focus all attacks on him and instead attack the entire raid. The entire point of mechanics is to circumvent the trinity, because otherwise people would get bored, as the trinity is nothing but tank and spank. You further ignore that I didn't just name one game, but referred to a plethora of games, both single- and multiplayer.

You aren't analyzing the metagame at all, you aren't thinking about reasons at all, you're only saying:"Guild Wars 2 patched in tanks/healers, therefore..."

To spell it out for you, in bold because you missed it: Every single mechanic we use to make DPS do something is independent of the trinity. You can port them over into any non-trinity design and they'd work just as well. The only mechanics you can't port over blindly are mechanics that only the tanks and healers have any interaction with, because these mechanics exist to force healers and tanks into the group. Any challenge you can present DPS players in a trinity game can logically also be presented to any player in a non-trinity game. That's just plain fact. A fact that you can't dispel with:"But muh Guild Wars 2".

And these challenges are also what are presented in single-player games which necessarily have no trinity due to not having a group in the first place. That's why they are valid to bring up. Any challenge you can present in single-player games you can also present in non-trinity multiplayer games, whether it's vector based attacks, resource management, timing, combos... anything. And you can then add additional challenge on top via group interactions. But the trinity, as stated before, does the opposite - it removes interaction in favor of role based gameplay.

Let me walk you through Alexander 11 Savage, non trinity version: Somebody pulls and the boss uses a random laser sword or spin crusher instead of autoattacks. Optical sights work exactly the same as now, the only thing you remove is the damage you take on doing clock positions right. The add homes onto the nearest person and uses it's AoE cleave, while not killing the pauldron in time gives it an autoattack. Whirlwind now requires players to spread. Limit cut works exactly as now, except you take less damage if you do it right. Photon in this phase drops health packs on the floor and puts a DoT on people - they have to grab them quick.
After the flight phase, lapis spawn. The orbs are exactly the same, they just don't deal damage unless they overlap. Laser X becomes a stack mechanic where everyone needs to get in front of the boss. Laser swords are still fired in rapid succession due to being the new autoattack.
Next phase starts, the ground is on fire, but deals no damage. In this phase, photon is replaced with a brief debuff that deals massive damage if you do something. Otherwise, mechanics follow the previous pattern.
In the final phase, the boss uses GA-100 on a random party member and he has to run away from the rest and the pillars. Only change: He doesn't take a lot of damage if he does it right. Everything else works the same as before. For the double whirlwind, you also add a tether mechanic to all players that damages them if they stray too far from their partner.

Does the difficulty of the fight decrease? Hell no, it increases, for all people involved. You have to deal with more than you do in the current version of the fight, because tank/healer only mechancis have been replaced with mechanics everyone has to deal with. The fact that no game has put that fight into their game yet has no bearing on the fact you can make it.

That said: This entire discussion is off-topic. It's been off-topic from the moment you pushed your trinity agenda, because it has nothing to do with how to get people to tank, which is why I put it in spoilers. Since you have no point and clearly are ignoring half of my posts to make it, I don't intend to continue this discussion.

Role issues have always been a thing in games with roles and the only way to significantly change the population of a role is to fundamentally change the role into something else entirely. If we don't want that, we have no way to change the role distribution, the best we can do is to throw the players of less popular roles a bone ever so often so that the players who do enjoy that role stay.

A solution to role scarcity can only go over changing the demand - require more of the more popular roles for every one of the less popular roles. Or, make roles irrelevant entirely. You can't do that for all content without risking the players of the artificial roles becoming alienated, but you can do that for some content without that risk.

[Laerune]

I remember wnen I was a newcomer to the tank role, one of the things that I disliked was how the rest of the group would push me left and right to do certain things. The DPS and Healer would often pull the mobs and when they got agro, they ran away from me. Whenever they died, because of their mpatience they would blame me for their mistakes. Now as a vetern, tanking is easy and it enjoy it alot, but leveling as a newbie tank was not fun and there were times where I thought of dropping the classes and just leaving them at pre-50.

From my experience of when I was a newbie tank, I noticed that:

- I was expected to know (even if the whole group was full of first-timers) the layout of the dungeon, how to beat the boss etc.
- I was treated like a dog, go fast, go slow, go there, go here etc.
- DPS and healers would make my job harder, by pulling the mobs and then running away from me.
- As a tank, I was the perfect scapegoat for the blame game.

When you are leveling, tanking is the only role where one can find some challenge and 98% of it, is because of the other players. If people get annoyed of tanking, because of what they experience at low level, one can not be suprised to see that they arent tanking at max level.

On-topic:

The only way, in my opinion to get people to tank, is to divide the responsibility that the group has in equal portion. Giving tanks an popular class wont fix it. SE has already told us that majority of the new Dark Knights are players that were playing a Warrior or Paladin. This shows that the issue is somewhere in the core of the role.

[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.

[Korbash]

The first Guild Wars has no tank, and all the classes are DPS except for the Monk, which is the healer class. The Ritualist has some healing capacity. But there are no tank in GW.

[winsock]

The first Guild Wars has no tank, and all the classes are DPS except for the Monk, which is the healer class. The Ritualist has some healing capacity. But there are no tank in GW.

GW was really fun, but had similar problems though. Not enough healers. They combated this with heroes / mercs, but that imo isn't a very good solution, replacing real people with AI.

[Venjenz]

Everyone goofs stuff up during their run up the learning curve. Everyone. Big difference for tanks and healers is that their goof ups are glaringly obvious. If a tank loses aggro, everyone immediately knows. If a tank eats an obvious tank-buster, you know. If a healer lets someone die, it's pretty freaking obvious. Etc. But....if DPS don't optimize their max possible rotation...well, that's harder to notice until you scan the DPS meters and parse the logs and all that. And even if they draw aggro, in FF14 that gets blamed on tanks, not them.

So the question isn't "how to get people to tank" as much as it is "how to get more people to want to be on the hook for not just their mistakes, but everyone else's as well?" Because that is what tanking and healing in most trinity-centric MMOs has become.