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

[Fendred]

The problem causing more people to gravitate to DPS is that the encounter design is based on defeating adversaries for experience points, reputation, and loot. No matter how much you try to cover up the underlying difference in damage, people gravitate towards DPS roles because they promise to accomplish the primary goal of the game faster. Healers are more popular in FFXIV than other MMOs primarily because their damage output during the leveling experience is roughly on par with the damage dealing classes, making the conjurer/White Mage and arcanist/Scholar more appealing because they can bash things faces in just as well as any of the DPS. So for most of the game, the healer role plays more like the beloved "combat medic" people find in many group-centric First Person Shooters, where the combat medic can kill things just as well as the rest of them, but when a buddy looks like he is going down, the combat medic's specialty is keeping him up.

Tanks on the other hand have markedly lower damage when in group because the abilities that allow them to survive getting wailed on also reduces their damage output, making them hit like a wet sponge. So we have this guy with a giant axe using flashy special moves, but the payout is still so obviously less than the DPS he is playing with.

Standard RPGs can get away with these kinds of conventions because the player is controlling a team of characters instead of a single character, and the fact that the game doesn't last nearly as long. You simply can't hide the underlying mechanics in a game where people are going to be playing for years, so it is important to have an encounter design that rewards all roles equally.

And the scary part about this is that I've been making the same complaint about the holy trinity for about ten years... which is only slightly shorter than how long I've been playing MMORPGs. Can we get rid of DPS as a specific role already?

[Starkbeaumont]

so you want damage dealers to be also capable of tanking and/or healing?

[Fendred]

so you want damage dealers to be also capable of tanking and/or healing?

I'm just saying that the game experience is based around the player controlling a single character who must blow tons of stuff up to reach the end goal, so having one party member being capable of clearly outdoing the others in damage is what creates the current problems we see with tank and healer disparity.

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. A black mage, for instance, might be conceptually similar to a sniper, where he can "spell nova" down a dangerous target from far range very quickly, like the laser probes in Minstrel's Ballad: Ultima's Bane. Other DPS might specialize in debuffing the boss in order to overcome some defense that the boss erects, etc.

[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.

[Aura_Shurifon]

Black mages have. . . err apoctastasis.

BLM have Lethargy, a good slow attack and slow movement is useful to kite and survive while waiting for healer/tank to catch up.

A little off topic, but :

And a good DPS is not "do all Max damage right now" it's more like "do it when it's the right moment"...
If tank cannot keep aggro, it's not always his fault, sometime when all DPS go all out before he can actually do his first hate combo, he can't do anything to keep it better (Bards like to use all their skill ASAP and run everywhere, screwing the hate management and positioning of the tank).
Unfortunatly, when this happen, people tend to flame the tank. This happen in duty roulette where the tank isn't over geared for the content and the other are (and this is still not the fault of the tank)

A good DPS observe how a tank can keep aggro, and should slow his attack (at start) accordingly, a good DPS should attack the same target to kill it faster and lower the damage to the team, should help in stunning/silencing AoE, staying out of AoE.
It's not always about "i've got the biggest DPS on this fight, i'm better than you !!"

In Topic :
What the OP ask is just that the difference between stats of class's should be lessen... And what you will see is stacking of max DPS to roll on content. Not interesting, no strat...

[Deusteele]

You're looking for Guild Wars 2.

https://www.guildwars2.com/en/

[Fendred]

You're looking for Guild Wars 2.

https://www.guildwars2.com/en/

I think they tried something interesting in GW2, but roles are not a bad thing. A roleless system is harder for players to master and understand, because its difficult at times to know what a particular job is really capable of doing. I'm suggesting that they try a different role system as opposed to a role-less system like GW2. Plus, their current design turned most encounters into zergs, so that really didn't work out well.

Edit: Also, the story kinda sucks in GW2...

[Boots-365]

thats not right i play all the classes and they each have their forte stat them right and they all will do damage just not as much as the dps.

[Akiva_Ninazu]

You're looking for Guild Wars 2.

https://www.guildwars2.com/en/

Or Elder Scrolls Online (kinda).

[Kitru]

The problem causing more people to gravitate to DPS is that the encounter design is based on defeating adversaries for experience points, reputation, and loot. No matter how much you try to cover up the underlying difference in damage, people gravitate towards DPS roles because they promise to accomplish the primary goal of the game faster.

Apparently you believe that the primary goal of the game is governed entirely by solo play and/or leveling. As an MMO, ARR isn't a single player game and, like pretty much every single other MMO, isn't designed primary around leveling but instead around the end game (which is why you see so very very much end game content and comparatively little end game). Even when leveling, unless you're it exclusively through questing, the primary goal is to succeed at a given piece of content as a group, whether you're doing FATEs or leveling dungeons. Considering that you say you've been playing MMOs for about 10 years, I seriously have to wonder how you've missed that, unless you play all MMOs without interacting with anyone except through chat.

Healers are more popular in FFXIV than other MMOs primarily because their damage output during the leveling experience is roughly on par with the damage dealing classes, making the conjurer/White Mage and arcanist/Scholar more appealing because they can bash things faces in just as well as any of the DPS. So for most of the game, the healer role plays more like the beloved "combat medic" people find in many group-centric First Person Shooters, where the combat medic can kill things just as well as the rest of them, but when a buddy looks like he is going down, the combat medic's specialty is keeping him up.

Once again, you demonstrate a distinct lack of recognition about what the game actually is.

First off, if you actually knew the numbers, you'd see that healers, even in Cleric Stance, heal significantly less damage than a DPS. In fact, their DPS is roughly on par with a tank outside of their tank stance, which renders your argument basically null: a tank and a healer have pretty much identical DPS so the "healers have better DPS making them more playable than tanks" is completely and utterly void.

Secondly, you once again display the laughably flawed idea that leveling is "most of the game", which is even more ludicrous when you realize that healers can only really do the "combat medic" thing while they are solo or in a non-dangerous situation (e.g. FATEs where no one in their group is actually tanking or actually taking damage). In a dungeon, a healer will actually have to spend a majority of their time healing unless both they and the tank completely outgear that piece of content (at which point the entire argument is irrelevant because you're not doing anything remotely challenging).

Tanks on the other hand have markedly lower damage when in group because the abilities that allow them to survive getting wailed on also reduces their damage output, making them hit like a wet sponge. So we have this guy with a giant axe using flashy special moves, but the payout is still so obviously less than the DPS he is playing with.

Tanks do not have low damage at all times. You seem to be operating under the notion that tanks are *forced* to run in their tank stances constantly as soon as they get them. Tank stances can be turned off and, in fact, a good tank *will* turn it off in situations where they don't need to tank anything, like when they're soloing or offtanking. At that point, they're dealing as much damage as a healer.

And the scary part about this is that I've been making the same complaint about the holy trinity for about ten years... which is only slightly shorter than how long I've been playing MMORPGs. Can we get rid of DPS as a specific role already?

And what would it be replaced by? You're basically suggesting that there is simply tank and healer or that all DPS can swap, on the fly, to be either a tank or a healer, which still keeps the same 3 roles since you don't need 4 tanks and 4 healers in a group.

The trinity exists (and actually works quite well) because, when you're running the group content that a trinity game is built around, there are specific functions that certain players need to specialize in. Tanking and healing are the absolutely required specialized functions since they also deal damage; they're required because someone needs to be able to reduce healing requirements and make it easier on the healers and someone needs to heal the inevitable damage. DPS isn't *required* but it's present because tanks and healers are roles limited in their usefulness for a given piece of content: you only need as many tanks as there are subgroups of enemies that need to be tanked (subgroups could be a single big target or a group of smaller targets) and you only need as many healers as are required to keep everyone alive; DPS are there to fill in the remaining slots that, otherwise, redundant healers and tanks would occupy.

I honestly have to wonder if you actually *do* any endgame content and what MMOs you've actually played. I have a sinking feeling that you've never actually done any 8 man content, possibly barring the required story stuff, which is so laughably easy now that everyone is hugely overgeared that you could run it with a 4 man group, and that you've never actually done any endgame in any game previously or, possibly, have never actually played an MMO that's actually built around endgame as opposed to leveling.