Matchmaking without the Trinity: how would you do it?

[Kaurie]

No. I'm saying that the only mechanic that necessitates healers is: Unavoidable damage.
And the only mechanic that necessitates a tank is: A large amount of unavoidable damage at a single person.

Consider A11 where the currently closest target in range is being attacked by an autoattack that just barely does more than you can self-sustain. All the mechanics are still in place and still do lots of damage if not done correctly but zero otherwise. What does that lead to? The only method to beat him is to do the mechanics of the fight correctly (Hide, dodge, activate, burn etc). All the strategy involved is precisely what you currently are supposed to do anyway, except that the "tank" regularly needs to be swapped by another DPS stepping closer to him.

Is any teamwork lost in the process? I argue no - to me, teamwork is human to human coordination (Such as the "don't get close" part of the judgement Nisi mechanic), not machine to human coordination (such as focus healing a tank buster/prey target). You don't even need to forego things such as positionals or synergy effects via disembowel. Healers and tanks only add unavoidable damage to the boss mechanic roster. And that's for a simple reason, too:
The only resource that matters is HP. The only way to reduce that resource is damage. The winning condition of a fight is to reduce the enemies HP before your own runs dry. Not just in this game - shooters, fighting games and many more work on the same principle. Healers add nothing to this system except increasing your own HP by their own mana pool times conversion rate. Tanks add nothing to this system except increasing the effective HP by reducing the incoming damage. Both exist solely to increase the HP pool the boss needs to deplete and in turn, they only add more damage to the boss to bring the equation back into balance. And unavoidable damage at that because otherwise good players would be inclined to just replace them with more DPS. That is all tanks and healers add to a game.

There also, naturally, is the satisfaction of different fantasies - some players just want to be sylphie, or that stalwart, impenetrable wall etc. But gameplay wise, healers and tanks add a lot less to a game than people give them credit for.

I would disagree that it is as simple as you are making it out to be. For example, a BRD can supply MP to healers while the DPS are learning a fight and taking extra avoidable damage. Healers provide buffers to DPS to learn a fight as they take avoidable damage. Without them, you will die sooner - the mechanics can't be as complex or difficult, or it would be deemed to difficult. A Summoner can use super virus to reduce damage to a tank buster or big aoe to help both the tank and the healer. The tank needs to position the boss, so melee can properly do their positional rotations. and so on.

Have you played Guild Wars 2? I do find it a difficult thing to explain, but Guild Wars 2 removed the Trinity and it made PvE content incredibly dull. It is the largest reason I am playing FFXIV (I jumped back and forth between both games a couple of years ago, before landing on FFXIV). It may be one of those things where it's hard to get it until you try it, and then you have that "ahhh" moment.

In essence, I think it comes down to difficulty and complexity of content. Without Tanks and Healers, content is made simple for the sake of balance - and thus is dull.

[Zojha]

I would disagree that it is as simple as you are making it out to be.

On that, we will have to agree to disagree, because IMO, it really is that simple "on principle" and yes, mechanics can be just as complex and difficult. You can have the same effect you're describing with the MP supply by simply having a damage reduction song instead. It's the same on principle. The mana song supplies the healers with mana and those in turn convert it into HP for the party. A damage reduction song would reduce the damage the boss does and thus increase the effective HP of the party. It doesn't matter because it's interchangeable, as it all fulfills the same purpose - increasing the effective HP of the party so that the boss needs to do more damage to deplete it. On the meta level, the game is only about health and damage - whoever depletes the others HP pool via damage first wins.
Although I admit with how powerful healing is in this game, you'd have to make substitutes completely ridiculous to achieve the same effect - it's just that strong. I'd also note that the positioning would be the same in either case - it would just be the currently aggro'd player doing the positioning (whoever that would be), rather than the dedicated tank.

Have you played Guild Wars 2?

Yes, though only for a fairly brief while after hitting the level cap due to horizontal progression boring me to no ends. And I found that the encounters weren't very well designed for the combat system they had. That's why I bring up a mechanic heavy fight like A11 - I didn't find anything of the kind in GW2. Instead, I found simple bosses that had strong unavoidable autoattacks that I had to kite endlessly. Most of the mechanic indicators were very vague, if existent at all. And all of it coupled with a much lower rotational complexity.

Yes, I agree - it was dull. But I disagree on the reasons as to why it was. Content doesn't need to be simple to work without the trinity - it just can't have lots of unavoidable damage. The epitome of trinity combat design is tank and spank, the epitome of trinity-less design is bullet hell.

[Yellow]

Tank, Damage, Healing, Support.

[Telsyr]

The only solution I see would be to re-think the dungeons and add a 5 member with a support slot like Rift did (they have 5 men team instead of 4).
Considering the amount of work it would be to balance everything I would go with

Except that it would take even more work and time to balance everything around 5 people, including older content.. they would have to change everything to fit the new style of 5/10/30 Meaning tacking MORE HP to already over inflated bullet sponge bosses we already have. More damage from bosses means each tank class has to be re-balanced to be able stand their ground and all DPS get a nerf due to adding more roles and the fact that support increases DPS all around.

Tank, Damage, Healing, Support.

I can just smell those 1-3 hour 4-man queues now. Thats only for healers.. DPS will be worse as we'll be waiting for all those supports, that are going to be rarer than tanks, to show up.

[Connor]

I can just smell those 1-3 hour 4-man queues now. Thats only for healers.. DPS will be worse as we'll be waiting for all those supports, that are going to be rarer than tanks, to show up.

Not really sure where this assumption that a 'support' role would be played by such a tiny percentage of players that it would cause the entirety of the Duty Finder to become near-inaccessible. XIV has a pretty big playerbase and as long as they developed a support role to be fun and worthwhile I don't think it would be as bad as people assume. Not saying it wouldn't increase the wait times, but nobody can know for sure unless they actually implemented it, otherwise it's just theory. The entire thing could be circumvented by having support and dps sharing the same slot in 4/8 man parties. They've already split Melee / Ranged so it's not impossible for them to have different levels of the same slot / role.

[Welsper59]

Not really sure where this assumption that a 'support' role would be played by such a tiny percentage of players that it would cause the entirety of the Duty Finder to become near-inaccessible. XIV has a pretty big playerbase and as long as they developed a support role to be fun and worthwhile I don't think it would be as bad as people assume. Not saying it wouldn't increase the wait times, but nobody can know for sure unless they actually implemented it, otherwise it's just theory. The entire thing could be circumvented by having support and dps sharing the same slot in 4/8 man parties. They've already split Melee / Ranged so it's not impossible for them to have different levels of the same slot / role.

Support roles have a long documented history of being the least represented role in RPGs by huge degrees. Most players are about being the "hero" or the one that does a lot of damage. The trinity formula represents the most prominent roles, where even then, there's a significant difference in activity between them (tanks and healers nearly always being lowest).

Recalling my time in the earlier days of XI, purely support roles like BRD were the most sought after jobs in the game. Even if you were mediocre at it, people wanted you to join them. They were such an important role for groups to have, but they were very rare to find people willing to play it. Obviously even rarer to play it well.

Your mentioning of them taking up DPS slots is indeed likely to be the best approach on the matter. Introducing a full fledged support role to the DF is not a good idea. It's very possible to create a support job that focuses primarily on damage boosting, since "support" can reflect any role.

[Connor]

Recalling my time in the earlier days of XI, purely support roles like BRD were the most sought after jobs in the game. Even if you were mediocre at it, people wanted you to join them. They were such an important role for groups to have, but they were very rare to find people willing to play it. Obviously even rarer to play it well.

Your mentioning of them taking up DPS slots is indeed likely to be the best approach on the matter. Introducing a full fledged support role to the DF is not a good idea. It's very possible to create a support job that focuses primarily on damage boosting, since "support" can reflect any role.

I totally get why people would be incredibly wary of the addition of a full-on support role, but as an optimist I like to think that there's enough players expressing interest in it that it wouldn't significantly increase DF wait times. It's one of things where nobody could really know unless they actually done it, but naturally it'd far too much of a risk to implement a 'support' role as a distinct thing by itself.

Personally I'd love to see a job where the whole focus would be to boost the damage / survivability / etc of others instead of dps'ing, if not purely because it's be a great change of pace from the usual dps-frenzy that all current jobs/roles have in the current game.

My main problem with adding a dps/healer/etc that focuses primarily on supporting others is that I honestly don't think the developers could do it. Currently they believe this is exactly what Bard and Machinist are, 'support' jobs whose focus is to support the party. But I don't think there's a single player here who would take a great-support but middling-dps Bard/Machinist over one with high personal DPS. Not to mention the fact that they have such limited 'support' that very rarely gets touched anyway because of the damage penalties on anything that doesn't increase raid dps (the sole reason for this being because if Foe Requiem / Hypercharge had a damage penalty nobody would ever use Bard/Machinist). Both only have a single ability that can increase another's dps, but it's incredibly limited by large MP requirements or cooldowns and requires no forethough or strategic use. The entirety of their 'support' is available at the press of one button and that's all we get.

I fear that even if they added more 'support dps' they would be the exact same, dps with a single button that's somehow supposed to completely distinguishes them from normal dps. I honestly believe the only way they can implement support jobs into the game properly is if they design them as a full-on support, because in my eyes there's nothing 'support' about Bard or Machinist at all.

I know I constantly sound like a raving, deluded lunatic on these forums, but as someone who has wanted to play a support class in this game since I first levelled Bard in 1.X, their implementation of them is a constant source of disappointment. I know many probably just see my posts and think 'play a different game', but I've always loved this one since it was my first ever experience with an MMO, so I still hope that one day they can finally find some way to implement real support jobs.

[Welsper59]

snip

Believe me when I say I'm with you in wanting an actual support role job. That was the primary reason I leveled BRD here (I was one of those BRDs in XI that I mentioned). I also share the same criticisms about the devs not being able to properly introduce the concept. You've already pointed out the BRD/MCH aspect, but also consider how they treated AST upon release. Gimping it just like they did BRD/MCH, seemingly under the premise that the RNG cards are so powerful that it warrants subpar primary role output. Clearly, they were wrong on the potency of these jobs' support effects leveling things out with all the buffs that followed.

I don't have faith in the devs actually gauging proper mechanics to such a role, given this games history, but that's why I do think they can start with the DPS aspect. A job that is still DPS, but has a focus on party output, rather than individual, which is something ALL roles and jobs are focused on.

For example, maybe it'd have reduced output like BRD/MCH by design, so an acceptable amount of DPS by itself. The party functionality however involves using an ability that sacrifices self output, for increasing a targeted party members output (not an aura, but a direct link). Say it reduces your output by 20%, but it increases a party members by 25%. Or if that's too potent, then 20% reduction on you but 15% increase with one party member. You can distribute that link to multiple members though, increasing overall output while you take greater hits to personal DPS for each additional link. 1 link - 20%, 2 links - 30%, 3 links - 40%, and so on while that bonus to party members remains constant (e.g. 15% increased output on each link).

THEN we can gauge interest properly on the idea of people helping the team, rather than focusing on themselves. I mean, think about how often BRDs/MCHs may not use buffs/debuffs or how often healers in pugs don't actually heal because they rely on the other healer to do it for them.

[SaitoHikari]

(snip)

To add to this, when Dragon Nest reshuffled all of the classes into a trinity system, they actually mentioned having a fourth 'Support' category as well.

If a Support category exists, it's not obvious which classes are actually in there. We still argue whether or not the devs still consider the Support class category a real thing, or if they've abandoned the category. (While they admitted that class composition in raids should adhere to a trinity system, they still leave it up to the player to figure out which classes go where. And it's very, very obvious who the tanks and healers are, while all of the DPS are just everywhere else.)