Matchmaking without the Trinity: how would you do it?

[MomomiMomi]

I wouldn't. You've seen PotD: it has pretty much no mechanics besides dodging aoes because the content has to be designed to be completed by 4 dps.

What excuse do all the other dungeons have? PotD enemies have more going on than enemies in all the normal dungeons.

[SendohJin]

Why do some people want to remove the holy trinity? I don't get it but unfortunatly it seems to be a trend ... some new MMOs removed the healer/tank so everyone is basically a dps.
In the forums of said MMO I found a statement of a player who said that he doesn't want to depend on other players help. Why bother playing a MMO at all?

I personally would not remove it but in my ideal game it would be a little more flexible than what exists in XIV. Many jobs would have an ALT role where they can still function fairly well at least in 4 and 24 man content.

Some examples:

MNK - Fists of Earth would actually let them queue as tank, the potency for healing and max HP boosting type of skills like Second Wind and Mantra would increase a lot. Featherfoot, Internal Release, Perfect Balance would all turn into adequate defensive cooldowns.

SCH and SMN wouldn't be two jobs, it would be one but you can't summon everything at the same time. nearly every Summon would be aligned with a spell type, Titan - Galvanize, Garuda - Cure, Leviathan - Regens, Ramuh - DoT, Ifrit - AOE damage, Shiva - Single target damage.

WAR and DRK - would have actual DPS modes.

BRD should be able to ALT heal, turns most of their DoTs into HoTs but my version of BRD would've always had more songs.

some things shouldn't have options like PLD BLM WHM.

and i don't want this to happen to the current FFXIV.

[Sandpark]

Here is what I think about removing the trinity. To do that for jobs would go against the principle of jobs and it is not happening here.

Now if we are talking about classes. On the fly class switching could be interesting for solo or low man content. Anything more than that and different characters would become redundant. Why do you need a party of eight people when you can do every role yourself?

The system would have to have pre-selectable loadouts per on the fly class swap consisting of skills and traits. Combat would have to move more towards synergy systems and less self rotation epeen. I have a defense buffing parameter in my loadout, I place that circle on the ground, someone with a provoke walks into that circle and provokes an enemy into that circle and takes less damage while tanking. The concept of class synergy skillchains comes into play for heals and attacks. I use a Fast Blade on x enemy, a second player executes an Absorb Speed weaponskills after and gains an attack speed buff of x amount of seconds.

Class synergy would have to be the meta, the best way to do things and any self executed skills that boost your own power would have to be very weak. Basically, it would almost be a classless system and class would mostly be a cosmetic effect, color shifted skills, etc. Because once different specs start getting labeled with identities aka stuff they can only do/use, then things start getting reverted back to a job like system.

This is all theoretic stuff because a complete meta shift is not happening at this point in the game.

If anything I would like to see jobs become their own separate things from classes as now with specialist systems designed for full party- alliance play. And for classes to not be obliterated but re-imagined for play in 1-3 person thier own difficult endgame content designed for people who don't want to raid or be so locked into a build.

[SaitoHikari]

I would go as far as to say everyone that wants to remove the trinity has never played a game that was originally designed with a trinity in mind actually remove it. And thus never saw the actual consequences of such a thing.

Some of you have likely seen me say this before, but I came from a different MMO known as Dragon Nest, which didn't have a strictly defined trinity, but all of its harder content was still designed with it in mind. After a while, as the game kept pushing out new classes at a stupid rate (along with the infamous Korean F2P MMO Power Creep syndrome), we eventually ended up with true hybrid classes that did everything better than the purer classes. It turned into an arms race of party buffs and overall utility.

("Hey, let's release a new healer which we ADMIT to releasing specifically to compete with the one unofficially designated 'pure healer' class in raids, with super mobility, double the buffing strength of said pure healer, have UNLIMITED RANGE HEALS, -triple- the healing strength of the 'pure healer', have DPS that rivals that of actual pure DPS classes, and summons designed to circumvent the bad AI that plagues a different summon-based class. And we'll justify this by saying that they have to remain still and meditate in mid-air to use their buffs, but it won't even matter because all of their damage is frontloaded into two attacks, one of which can be launched from a mile away and still hit because of absurd AoE, and the floating will actually be a huge advantage because bosses for the next year just coincidentally happen to spam ground-based attacks like no tomorrow that screws over how the 'pure healer' is designed (support through summons that die as soon as they're sneezed on). Oh, and let's make this a branch of the Assassin class."

I mained the 'pure healer' during that time period and I will never ever freaking forgive the developers for going down that route. And that wasn't even the worst of it, that class was so absurdly broken at release that for the next half year, they basically 're-balanced' all classes around its existence (and failed so badly to the point where there was a 'light elemental meta', in which deviating from it in terms of raid composition would actually lead to as much as a 10-20% DPS loss for omitting even a -single class-). Thankfully the devs have learned since then and new classes from that point on have actually been relatively balanced in comparison, though it also resulted in an across the board massive nerfing of party buffs, many being outright changed into self-buffs.)

As a result of the above absurdity (accompanied by a huge population drop worldwide as people lost faith in the developers), the developers actually redesigned the entire game into a strict trinity - and for the first time admitting they would design the game around the existence of one - and class balance in comparison since has been better (outside of a few outliers in the DPS department, which especially salty people that formerly mained the hugely broken classes from the prior time period - and thus hugely nerfed after - use to push a narrative saying that this new direction has failed).

It is an extremely bad idea to wish for such massive changes without first thinking about how it would affect the rest of the game, from encounter design to subsequent changes in community mindset towards classes.

[Derio]

The moment you get rid of the trinity you turn this game into GW2 and DCUO which is a terrible idea.

Enhancing the trinity though may be better

[Auteur]

The one thing that has a track record of being done before, albeit only in PvP MMOs, is adding dedicated support classes. NCSoft in particular stands out for this as Lineage 2 and Aion both have such a class (Iss Enchanter and Chanter, respectively). Applied to FF14, bard would be converted to support, add new class (dancer?) and make astrologian a hybrid option (can queue as either one). This would require such a drastic retooling of the game though and would put such insane pressure on maintaining a critical mass of players (now SE has to ensure enough players are available for 4 distinct roles, 1 more than 3) that this is probably impossible to SE.

Another way to spice things up would be to create and enable hybrid roles with pre-existing classes. To me, I can see Scholar as hybrid healer/dd, Marauder as tank/dd, and Bard as dd/healer (I can imagine the eyes rolling now but Bard is already stationary as is and the songs could be easily converted into healing spells).

[MilesSaintboroguh]

What excuse do all the other dungeons have? PotD enemies have more going on than enemies in all the normal dungeons.

Typical dungeons are designed with specific ilvls in mind. Palace of the Dead is not designed for that, so your gear is ignored. The devs also had to make the palace be cleared with any party composition.

[Mycow8me]

Cyan Healer/tank > Party heals/party damage mitigation from MP skills and TP skills.
Yellow Healer/DPS > Party heals/DPS skills using MP skills and TP skills.
Magenta DPS/Tank > Mob debuffs/Party buffs Skills using TP. Buffs are short duration 5-10 seconds, possibly stackable?


This has been an Idea I've had since forever. There is always 2-4 dps in a party in which a spot could easily fit the role of support. A 4 player party can have a dps spot interchangable with a support spot. A 8 player party can have 2 dps spots interchangable with a support spot. There's so much possibility here that its unreal. This is really just a very rough draft. Ultimately though, this could add so much variety to the game that it will probably not happen simply because of that.

In before Balancing issues, dungeon/raids need redesigned, devs understaffed, can't have nothing nice... etc...

Reposting my thoughts on this from another thread. My thoughts remain unchanged. I'd like to see diversity and this could easily work if the dev team actually put some thought into it. The reason it will probably never make it though is cause people will cry balance issues the moment things start to diversify or they will cry about fights having to be different which isn't entirely true.

[Naunet]

I like the trinity (primarily because I enjoy healing and tanking - two things you don't really have in non-trinity games like GW2), but I think this game could really stand to take a page out of Rift's book and make a true support role. I loved playing that role in Rift.

[Lunavi]

What excuse do all the other dungeons have? PotD enemies have more going on than enemies in all the normal dungeons.

To be fair though, back in 2.0 I tanked lvl 50 dungeons as BLM, so there is nothing preventing it from happening other than SE wanting the blue-blooded classes to feel important by adding a "required" party composition. Did it go smoother with a "real" tank? Sure did, while I could manage the first giant pull of half the dungeon in WP I had a more difficult time keeping the same speedrun time as a party with a dedicated tank class during the second half of the instance, but it WAS very much possible, and with great times too. Rarely took over 15 minutes as the bosses went down like butter. To be honest, summoners could also tank WP very well with Titan Egi. Bards too with kiting, but that was a snoozefest as it takes so long to beat a dungeon that way.

Point is, the normal dungeons are often doable without a tank. SE just don't want to put that stress on DF groups, and that for a good reason. What makes it work better in PotD is that it is all mechanics that hurts, and having a good party comp (one healer, 3 DPS) only allows more opsies.