The trinity, party responsibility, and how to try and improve the game from within

[Kuwagami]

I am social and friendly but many do not like my playstyle. I am a 100% healer, I do not dps. I am a healer, I am there to keep everyone alive.

And that is indeed your role as a healer. However as I said, FFxiv has stepped a bit further and added an extra side-role for the healers capable enough, and it is damage dealing. Said role is mainly optionnal but the community tries to enforce it because.. reasons (mainly because a healer doing nothing for repeated periods of time isn't exactly efficient when the game provides tools to do something when you don't have to heal).
Without going into the debate, I'd just say that if you are indeed finding yourself doing nothing for extended periods of time, you could throw 1 or 2 spells to appease the guys telling you to dps. For them you tried, and for you, well, you weren't doing anything anyway at that moment
No need to min-max your healing to throw in maximum dps as a healer out of the latest raids.
And who knows, you might end up liking dealing damage and start doing it on your own (that's what happened for me).


However,

People expecting the healer to pick the slack for the DPS is not fair and unreasonable in my opinion.

This isn't a good mindset. Healer dps isn't asked to pick the slack, but to further quicken a run. I have never met anyone asking the healer to compensate low dps except in cutting edge content, because people are undergeared there (and Alexander Savage is even more over the top). I did however met people asking healers to dps because they were afk through the run (fairies being a little too good in low level dungeons ^^).

+ what Kaurie said

Rude, if you post is saying the OP post is useless spam. Maybe has something constructive to say or move onto another thread.

I can understand that people don't like walls of text. And it was a mess before my edits to try and put some formatting done, plus spoiler boxes because it was super long. If they really think that it was useless spam though, well, opinions. Everyone has one. Not gonna throw a fit at it

[Lexia]

Yoshi-p too worried about keeping everything balanced and fair for anyone to actually make the trinity system you know a true trinity system and not a poser system, by the player base definition healers shouldn't even be called healers just support role.

[Kuwagami]

I have a solution in mind. Leave things as they are for solo play, but when in a party make tanks tankier (increase damage resistance and aggro multiplier), and do less DPS (reduce attack potency), make Healers healier (strongerbuffs and heals) and do less DPS (reduce attack potency), make DDs stronger (increase potency of attacks), but squishier (decrease damage/status resistance.

This restores DD to the correct place in a party, while at the same time compensating tanks and healers by strengthening their respective roles. Since this is a buffonly when in a party, it doesn't alter solo capability, but for group play it encourages the trinity and knowing your role.

I gave a thought to it after reading you, but I can't see it working any different than what we have now. Tanks would still maximize their dps as much as they can (and that would just make it harder for them than now because they already don't have hate issues, except PLD), healers would have more time to do nothing (stronger heals mean more uptime for other stuff, but you nerf this other stuff), and DDs would just die quicker to everything thrown at them in raids.

The problem lies in the core of the system in my opinion, and you'd need to rework it entirely to either enforce the current system by making the DD heavy on the utility part (to justify their lack of significant output compared to the tanks) and thus have roles which are balanced in their output but bring a different input for the party (tankyness, heal and support), or to get rid of it and return to the basis with the DDs having the only significant dps of all the jobs.

Like this for example :

I am one of the people who believe the traditional trinity idea doesn't apply to this game, due to exactly your points on the roles, and who hopes that 4.0 will bring more utility to the damage dealer class, allowing them to expand on their role as more than just a damage dealer(like the old Bard LBs, 1 bar gave a damage boost to all party members, while 2,3 bars gave raid wide heals)

No matter which side you're going to, you're pissing off a bunch of people though.

[Kaurie]

I honestly think this is the biggest weakness of not having specs and using stances instead. Specs you'll need to turn off/on before content, whereas as stances allow for stance dancing mid-combat.

In WoW, for example, you could level up as a Shadow Priest in solo play, and then swap to Holy/Desc for healing in late game.

If we had something similar, a WHM could spec for ClericStance for open world content, but then respec for Healing in grouped content. Their DPS would be abysmal in the healing spec, and it would be useless; however, when in open world they could respec for DPS.

[DPZ2]

OP writes: "Putting the debate itself aside, what we can see is that there are essentially 2 types of players : those who expect people to do their best, and those who don't care as content is cleared within the (generous) dungeon timer."

Your two types of player are actually more like 8 types of players, but we'll go with two for now.

The first type is much more interesting. These are what I consider the true semi-professional gamers --- those who see the game as a contest pitting their own skills against the game. Anything less than "the best" reduces their own value in this contest. They have a point.

Unfortunately, with great skill comes great temptation to let players who are not at their best know it. In. no. uncertain. terms.

Being great at playing a video games does not necessarily equate to having great people skills.

When that happens, the term "jerk" is sometimes appropriate.

[DPZ2]

I have a solution in mind.

Nice solution there. Thanks.

[DPZ2]

The problem lies in the core of the system in my opinion, and you'd need to rework it entirely ...

Reworking the game entirely to mitigate or eliminate Tank/Healer/DPS would mean writing a new game with a different feel to it. To this point I have not seen a successful reworking of the Trinity that still felt like an MMO. Anytime you have an instance/encounter where damage needs to be either mitigated or healed, you invoke the Trinity.

There are nice systems that allow you to change your part in that triangle by using different weapons (GW2), but game designers always appear to think world encounters should be punishing engagements where death is always one failed heal away.

I haven't encountered any persistent world FPS yet, so maybe that genre would fit the bill.

[Iagainsti]

It's sad to see ppl so against a non linear trinity system. Great example was the myth farm back in 2.2; my party consisted of 2 whitemages, a blk mage and myself on War and we would clear bray hm 2/3 in 9 minutes thanks to whitemages aoe. It made my teammates feel like they were playing actual badasses. I don't understand why those that enjoy a more traditional trinity not choose to play a game that caters to this, and leave this breakthrough on the norm to those that enjoy it.

[Lexia]

If people are in premade groups they can set how they think everyone in the party should play but if you in DF you should know you walking into randomness of people with all different play styles some may play like you other may play a style you hate so going through DF is like rolling dice on what kind if players you going to get as teammates

[StrejdaTom]

The game doesn't punish anyone for not being responsible about his role and if it accidentally does, it get's fixed (read nerfed) soon. This way you cannot build responsibility or correct mindsets.
8man raid excluded from my statement.

EDIT:
do what you can to increase your damage output
kill things as fast as you can do
always strive to increase your skill, as the party is dependent on it to clear content

You cannot get these 3 points from majority, when game doesn't punish you from playing under-average. In other games if you don't try, you die. Here we really don't have a type of content that would make you think "wow, I need to step up my game."
Again 8man raid excluded.

I just dont think that it is enough for a game to consist of 95% faceroll and 5% do something content.