Why not just make everyone a DPS?

[Makeda]

You can do this, but it requires an entire combat engine redesign.

Guild Wars 2's fault is not the lack of a trinity. Guild Wars 1 lacked tanking as well (but had healers). The problem Guild Wars 2 has is that early on players figured out how to 'hack/cheat/gimp' the combat mechanics... and the devs response was to ignore the problems in their engine and just say "you people aren't playing it right".

Now... if you actually DO play Guild Wars 2 the way the devs talked about doing it in their pre-launch videos, the combat is amazingly cool and exciting. The problem is that it also makes what are now easy fights become suddenly complex and wipe prone.

Imagine if you could defeat every single boss and trash pull in FFXIV by standing in a corner, facing an angle where you couldn't even see the screen properly and often had 'seizure inducing flickering' going on because the camera was jerking around trying to figure out your location... so you all stand there... ignore all your moves except your first and second primary attacks, and everybody slots "Second Wind", while bringing no healers or tanks... and the only gear brought was gear that was made for Thaumaturge/Black Mages - even Ninjas and Dragoons wore that.
- Imagine if this worked, not matter WHAT content you did. Imagine that level of crazy broken hack, working.

Now imagine if SE's response when players figured this out was not a ban, not a patch, but instead telling us to "L2P right"...

Who do you think is going to "L2P right" if such an easy trick actually could clear everything from a level 1 quest to the final boss of Alexander?

- That is the problem of Guild Wars 2... And the tactic I wrote above is pretty much it now.

They do have a very engaging combat system, but you can cheat it, and they don't care...
- Back when my GW2 guild was active, we had a rule of no cheating the pulls and no skipping and our runs were amazingly fun. But they took 3x longer than PUG runs, and had a LOT of wiping.

So the problem isn't the lack of a trinity... the problem is AFK devs...

But building a no trinity game has to be done from the start. Doing it in FFXIV now is just too late.

Guild Wars 2 could have killed the concept of Trinity MMOs. They had the chance. One big patch about 4 months after launch to fix this would have done it. But they blew their chance, and they blew it shockingly hard... And that is coming from a major fan of the game...