Matchmaking without the Trinity: how would you do it?

[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]

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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.

[Connor]

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.

Yeah, I've mentioned before in another thread but I think jobs with mechanics like this would go a long way in encouraging more team play as well. They could even simplify it by having a dps job with support abilities that are on the GCD with a base MP cost like Brave (increase physical attack), Faith (increase magical attack), Barrier (increase defense), rather than just the standard 'support aura'. They would still have access to direct damage abilities but would be able to sacrifice personal dps to increase everyone elses. The buffs could be short duration so their dps doesn't become too high. I think a job like this would be a great way to implement a support job in a way that fits well into the dps role whilst still having a support mechanic that's interesting and engaging, requiring awareness of the battle situation. It would also facilitate team work since buffs are multiplicative, so communicating with team members about stuff like when you're popping personal buffs, when a dps check is coming up, etc, would become much more important

[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.)