[Suggestion] Do away with holy trinity in the long run

[HoneyBiscuit]

My suggestion would be to treat all classes as DPS, but with each having a particular specialty. A tank would be a damage dealer who specializes in melee combat and wears heavy armor (or little armor, but with a high dodge/parry rate). Encounters would be designed around forcing the different players to use their specialty abilities in a coordinated manner in order to defeat the encounter.

Sorry but, you just described the holy trinity in it's purest form. Different people who specialize in different things to clear encounters. Tank's deal damage, but give up damage to mitigate more of it. Healers can deal damage, but usually give up all or most of it to keep their friends alive. DPS forgoes healing and mitigation for pure damage. Damage dealers specializing in different areas of play, would you look at that?

If everyone were treated as a dps role with special things they can choose to specialize in, what happens when you put a group together? You aren't going to take 4 or 8 guys who are all good at mitigating damage, or healing damage, or dealing damage. You're going to find some guys who can take the hits, some guys to keep the others alive, and some guys to beat the living crap out of stuff so you aren't there all day. Pray tell, what is the difference from what we have now?

All 3 roles have an equally important job, and if any of them fail at that job, the group fails. Simple as that. The tank can't hold threat or stop enough damage, he's gone and then the rest of the group has no chance. The healer can't keep up with the damage, everyone goes down. The DPS can't get targets down fast enough, it either kills everyone via the bosses mechanics, or the healer runs out of mp and it all cascades into failure.

If the game needs to be designed with absolute freedom of choice, that means groups who want to specialize in damage, and only damage, will still need to be able to clear any content, since your groups can be formed at random via DF, and a group of nothing but damage dealers becomes a possibility. Would it be fun for you to sit in queue, get into a dungeon, look at each other and say, "Well shit, none of us are equipped to do this, let's drop and re-queue again I guess." No! I want no part of that! Bearing that possibility in mind when designing content in turn means no more tanks and healers and all damage dealers, since it will clear content the fastest and become the obvious choice. Boy that sounds great! It would actually achieve the opposite of what you're looking for.

It also sounds like you're just saying, "Make tanks do more damage, make healers do more damage, so everyone does more damage and the damage dealers are just not useful anymore. So. . . give them debuffs or something, or get rid of them. Whatever. Nothing but tanks and healers!" If you would just look at the skills everyone has you'd realize the damage dealers do provide worthwhile debuffs and buffs to support their allies in more ways than just doing (absolutely necessary and high amounts of) damage. Monks can reduce the enemy intelligence reducing a good portion of damage to the party members, and aoe silence. DRG can buff bards damage. Both can stun. BRD has a broad array of buffs and debuffs. Black mages have. . . err apoctastasis. SMN has Virus, which is again more mitigation for your friends. SMN also brings emergency healing/resurrection. Those abilities while not class defining points, are certainly all relevant (just pretend I didn't say apoctastasis for a sec) and provide group utility. WHM and SCH can each deal decent damage when they get the chance. And tanks deal okay damage. You can't just discount the damage entirely, it is lower but existent. It's not what they're "specialized" in. But everyone is specialized in succeeding. And nobody can do it alone. It's an MMO. It's built upon diversity. And the holy trinity hard coded diversity that works no matter how you put it together (not accounting for skill of course) with varying degrees of success.

Maybe the game is fine and it's your viewpoint that needs a little doing away with in the long run.

[matic]

tldr;

sounds good on the paper. Any game that has tried that failed hard due to this. (alltough some are moderatly sucessfull in pvp)
The Trinity is like Democracy. It´s a flawed system but it is the best we have.

we don't actually have democracy. we have a republic. your teachers all lied to you.

also this is a ridiculous thread because no developer is going to rework the core mechanics of their game like OP suggests.

[Kitru]

we don't actually have democracy. we have a republic. your teachers all lied to you.

Technically, it's a democratic republic, as opposed to a plutocratic republic (which is what Rome was), which is often classified as a democracy since, by design, everyone has input into governance (ideally) instead of a select few. The fact that it's a republic is simply a recognition that the logistics of a true (Athenian) democracy are completely absurd when dealing with large governments (as opposed to rule of a single city-state).

As to the actual topic, the best argument for why this isn't going to happen is basically what you've said: the game is already too vested in the trinity design that abandoning it simply isn't going to happen. Of course, in every case where I've seen a game try to abandon the trinity, the player base turns it into one or teamwork simply stops existing because everyone tries to do everything. The trinity forces cooperation and keeps things balanced.

[matic]

Technically, it's a democratic republic, as opposed to a plutocratic republic (which is what Rome was), which is often classified as a democracy since, by design, everyone has input into governance (ideally) instead of a select few. The fact that it's a republic is simply a recognition that the logistics of a true (Athenian) democracy are completely absurd when dealing with large governments (as opposed to rule of a single city-state).

right. so....its a republic. every time i post here i remember why i shouldn't.

[Kitru]

right. so....its a republic. every time i post here i remember why i shouldn't.

You're the one that wanted to argue semantics. It's equally appropriate to call the US a democracy as it is to call it a republic because it's both.

[givemeraptors]

The main reasons that people play DPS aren't that they kill faster or that they get rewards faster (which they don't; the best rewards are gained via group content and, all things being equal, DPS progress at the exact same rate as tanks). The main reasons that people play DPS are that it's a low responsibility job and that it's a straightforward job with immediately visible returns (you see big numbers fly up).

Tanking is the least popular because it has an indirect effect upon success (you contribute to success by keeping the enemies from attacking anyone else), has abstract demonstration of effectiveness (your comparative effectiveness as a tank isgoverned by the reduction in damage taken, which varies massively based upon the situation itself), and has a high degree of responsibility that is made more difficult when you have potent allies (stronger heals and DPS means that you have a harder time keeping aggro, which is the most obvious way for a tank to fail).

I think you're underestimating the importance of DD. A tank and healer don't have an infinite resource pool. Most fights in this game can't be done with just a tank and a healer because both would run out of steam long before the boss was dead due to their inability to deal meaningful damage e.g. Haukke Manor HM, Copperbell HM, Coil, CT etc. Heck, even Wanderer's Palace, an easy + fast dungeon, needs DD to kill adds so you can stay ahead of the tonberry stalker.

As for why people dislike playing tanks, I think it's more than just "Tanks have so much responsibility ermagah!!!" I leveled my PLD to 50 and got a relic weapon, doing duty roulette every day to get more practice, and got 1000% more flack than I ever got as a DPS on my worst days. Like hell I would want to continue tanking after that. Only good thing is that people will mindlessly give you commendations.

As a healer I get a decent amount of commendations and love all day long, even if I spent 90% of the time just standing there doing nothing.

[Kitru]

I think you're underestimating the importance of DD.

Nothing you quoted had anything to do with relative importance of the roles, so I'm not even sure where you got it from. I can only guess that you conflated "responsibility" with "importance" which is a pretty naive viewpoint. DPS is *important* because of various enrage mechanisms, but it doesn't have a high degree of responsibility because, when they screw up, things don't fall apart and, most of the time, no one notices. A bad tank or a bad healer is going to be obvious from the start. As such, it's got more responsibility because there are more people that explicitly rely upon them.

As for why people dislike playing tanks, I think it's more than just "Tanks have so much responsibility ermagah!!!" I leveled my PLD to 50 and got a relic weapon, doing duty roulette every day to get more practice, and got 1000% more flack than I ever got as a DPS on my worst days. Like hell I would want to continue tanking after that. Only good thing is that people will mindlessly give you commendations.

You're simply proving my point. A bad DPS passes under the radar because it's hard to notice a bad DPS, especially since parsers aren't really used often. A bad tank is going to get hassled constantly because the other members of the team count on the tank actually doing their job well so that the they can do their job well. DPS and healers can't do their jobs very well when they're getting punched in the face; healers have a harder time doing their jobs when bad tanks stand in bad shit.

It's probably a safe bet that you were hassled as much as you were because you were simply a bad tank. A bad tank is going to get a helluva lot worse punishment than a bad DPS, which groks with your own experiences. The fact that you somehow missed that connection doesn't really bode well for your ability to actually contribute to the discussion since you're the archetype of those players that don't play tanks for the exact reasons I outlined.

[Raestloz]

I don't think breaking out of Holy Trinity will ever be successfully achieved. Not with the current processing power and the limited ways we can input commands.

Holy Trinity exists for the same reason the world as we know it exists: load balancing. People do what they're good at and counts on everyone else to do what they're not good at so when combined the whole creates a complete "good at everything". When you try to let go of Holy trinity, you come up with Guild Wars 2: Tanks can't do jack, and DPS roams like there's no tomorrow.

Even Guild Wars 2 admits it doesn't do away with Holy Trinity. It simply allows a tanky mage, a DPS mage, or a support mage, but not a mage that can do all three. The last time people try to create tanky and DPS-y mage (2 out of 3), the whole mage class got nerfed.

When you can do everything on your own is when you do away with Holy Trinity. It's also the time you discovered Left 4 Dead.

[PrincessOfSwords]

The reason that people have been shouting to get rid of the trinity for 10 years and it still hasn't happened successfully is that getting rid of it doesn't work. The tank role succeeds in the job of taking down things as fast as possible, because everyone dying does not contribute to that success.

There is nothing in the game that makes tank or healer classes any less rewarding than dps. In fact, if you are good at them, people are much more likely to bend over backwards for you.

I actually kind of wonder what supposed reward OP thinks any non-dps might miss out on by playing their role. They get the same experience and loot as everyone else in the dungeon, and they get far more player commendations just for not screwing up than a dps will for playing brilliantly. So what is it again that they are missing, exactly?

People don't play tank because of the responsibility thing Kitru mentioned.

[Sinaloa]

we don't actually have democracy. we have a republic. your teachers all lied to you.

also this is a ridiculous thread because no developer is going to rework the core mechanics of their game like OP suggests.

I will consult my politics teacher if you consult your english teacher. I never wrote I am living in a democracy. I actually do but I never wrote it.