And the slow death of the RPG based battlesystem

[Shurrikhan]

Heretical position, I suppose, but why are we acting like “trinity-based roles” or “trinity-based gameplay” is necessarily good, let alone ideal? RPG mechanics in the sense of variety and immersion, sure, but the homogenizing of class/job/specs/professions to suit/leverage three rigid roles? That hardly seems a net improvement past a pretty low threshold, let alone an ideal to aim for...

Whether you are playing a trinity-based game or not, your core gameplay is simply an assemblage of (fairly) consistent mechanics and considerations. And you don’t strictly need Tanks, Healers, Damage-Dealers —let alone in that particular “trinity”— to have depth of mechanics related to each.

All that is needed for depth in tanking, healing, damage-dealing, etc. is significant sway and reliable effect from actions (that when I hit this skill that costs me damage, I can more than make up for that through the utility of suppression, distraction, etc.), not pre-allocated responsibilities.

Pre-allocated responsibilities are effectively just restrictions on what you can have that amount to, at best, a “QoL” measure to ensure that you spend far less time learning…

• What your party’s players are good at and/or tend towards,
• What a given fight needs (since it’s always doable with a standard composition),
• How to play new jobs of the same role (since the fights are designed around the a standard allotment of roles, not jobs), and
• How to play in general, especially if playing just one role (since per job you can only meaningfully interact with about half the breadth of player mechanics otherwise available to you).

That’s not to say, of course, that every non-trinity game will necessarily be more complex than a trinity-game. Obviously not, just as not every trinity-based game will be of equal complexity, nor every shooter, etc. But the model itself is less restricted despite being capable of everything a trinity model is if only players were willing to deal with a larger breadth of mechanics, more frequent and deeper periods of adapting to one’s teammates, and were okay with occasionally learning what all a fight might need (with some fights having wildly different conditions than just bringing a standard composition, doing the fight’s dance, and hitting one’s CDs and GCDs while hopefully at least needing to occasionally leverage what differences still remain among choices within the same job).