How to get people to tank!

[Makeda]

Well, true to a degree. That's because both tanks and healers are pretty much just pointless fluff roles that nobody needs unless you force them on players, as they both rely on gimmicks that are only as useful as they are required.

In the end, every game with "roles" has the issue that some are more popular than others and only vary rarely does supply meet demand. Last I heard from LoL, they still haven't been able to fix the support role and instead are now forcing people into it via force-fill. I think it's healthier to adjust demand.

Yes... tanks and healer are kinda forced roles.

What is a tank but a person sitting there telling 'yo momma' insults and getting hit in the face... so your 4 buddies over here can shoot at the person thus insulted without being interrupted...
Healer at least you can rationalize in a world with magic. (I also play Overwatch, a favorite hero of mine there is the guy who plays good music, and this music somehow inspires people to recover in mere seconds from being shot by a robotic gatling gun monster... because... gaming logic...)

My larger point was that... much as I like the idea of not requiring roles... we see how well that didn't work in Guild Wars 2: popular game and all... but when they did an expansion they scrapped all of their instanced content that didn't require roles. They went so far as to disband the dev team for their dungeons. They replaced it with raids... and changed a few classes into healers... while letting anyone make a tank (if you stack the toughness stat there, raid bosses aggro on you. But to stack that, you have to not stack something else... ie: you give up damage... end result: traditional MMO tank minus a 'taunt' button, but you don't even have to attack to build threat, you just have to have 1 point more armor than anyone else in your raid... so you can stack armor and healing...).

In other words... Guild Wars 2... gave up on not having a trinity.

The reason was that content just couldn't be made to have skillfull challenge without it.

Real world combat involves hiding behind a lot of cover, and shooting at the enemy... and 1 single hit usually ends the fight for the person hit... That won't work in a game. So you need to make things so they trade off blows... and that means the blows can't one-shot the people expected to take them... and that means you either assign someone who can handle heavy hits... you make everything hit really light... or you add a system to let people dodge to avoid damage...

And in GW2, they went with dodge. First few months out nobody could clear even the starter dodge. Then the timer on dodging became easy to spot, people learned to know when it was coming... and suddenly people were clearing the final dungeons... without any defensive gear at all... and doing them in speed runs by stacking pure damage...

And pretty much ALL GW2 content at that point became so easy many people just left the game...

So to fix this... They gave up... changed design leads... and added in a trinity...

When FFXIV messed up big, they brought in Yoshi to take over and make ARR... When GW2 messed up big, they kept it quite, but they more or less did the same thing... they got rid of their devs that put them in that spot, and got new ones to figure out how to add tanks and healers into a game that had promised it's fans it would NEVER have tanks or healers... They did it... and people came back... Maybe not the same people... but the game stabilized...

Before you ask for content here that can skip the trinity... consider what's happened to other MMOs that tried to do that...
- and consider why.

Unfortunately no one has manage to design their way out of this problem...

So instead games have to rely on finding some portion of players that like being the center of attention.

FFXIV's Yoshi is claiming 22% of us like being in the limelight. That's pretty amazingly good if true. I do notice this game has unusually good queue times for me though - as a leveling tank. Which implies that I am fewer than 22%...

[Zojha]

The reason was that content just couldn't be made to have skillfull challenge without it.

And that reason is bogus because it implies that every game without a trinity can not present a skillful challenge. This statement completely precludes all single-player games (including the Dark Souls series) from having any sort of skillful challenge as well as most competitive games ever, whether real or electronic. Fighting games, MOBAs, shooters, dungeon crawlers...

If you're asking me, that's complete nonsense. It's proven to be nonsense further when you realize that in order to create challenge in games with a trinity, you have to ignore the trinity - We call that mechanics. Avoidable AoEs thrown at the ground, attacks that require you to do certain things in order to avoid their effects. Stack, Spread, Hide behind a pillar, press a button, tethers of all kinds, turn away, stack with a set amount of players, stay on high ground, stay on low ground, interact with objects etc etc... they are numerous. All of those completely ignore the trinity. In order to make fights remotely exciting, you have to ignore, remove and otherwise circumvent the trinity already.

And yet you stand here, saying that fights cannot be made a skillful challenge with out it? When all of the skillful challenges in the game rely on massively circumventing it?

The only "mechanics" of the trinity are: You take damage and there's nothing you can do about it - Autoattacks, Tank busters, Damage Up Stacks, Prey, Raid Wide AoEs. And the non-trivial ones rely on the same principle of dodge: You have to time the mitigation buff/heal right or someone dies. The principle you just claimed was so easy that people left a game over it.

My apologies, but perhaps YOU should be the one considering why things are as they are, because what you are saying makes no sense.
I'll also note that those 22% refer to the official census numbers, which in past censi has always been the number of jobs of that role at 31 or higher. Whether they play it or not is a completely different matter. This means it includes people who picked up DRK, got one level and then never touched the job again. It shouldn't be taken as a reliable number.

And the connection between enjoying tanking and liking the limelight is and stays shaky at best - tumblr is full of people trying to get into it, yet only few of them main or even play tank. I'll continue to cast doubts on that.

[Moomba33]

My main issue with tanking is I don't like the feeling of leading.
Your mistakes being really noticeable adds to the stress but that's true of healing as well and I love healing as much as DPSing.

The other issue is I'm not comfortable with making big pulls at all. I pretty much don't tank anything at level cap unless it's for friends because I know I can't keep up the pace expected by the community.

[ADVSS]

The other issue is I'm not comfortable with making big pulls at all. I pretty much don't tank anything at level cap unless it's for friends because I know I can't keep up the pace expected by the community.

it took me a really long time to even consider speed tanking, well untill i started to level dps in 2.0 the only downside of the new cross role system will be having people level other classes to get an understanding of how they operate. Now, when I do tank, its usually speed mass pulling, you can thank evellinh smn and blm for that. Ubless i get 2 melee, then they get the chain pulling cause no way in hell am i standing in the moshput for 5 minutes blowing all my cooldowns and the healers oomp and theyre still not dead

[Rinari]

The other issue is I'm not comfortable with making big pulls at all.

The only complaints I've had about my tanking are due to normal pulling. I really haven't figured it out yet. I usually pull a single pack for the first pull to judge DPS, and if they are really fast, I'll do double pulls from there on out. My ability to judge the DPS is still lackluster though, so I often don't have a good grasp of what a random group is capable of. Sometimes they complain about the first pull being too small (like I should know what they can do already?), or sometimes I judge them to be mediocre but they want bigger pulls. I'm probably too conservative in my estimates, as I've never pulled larger than the group could handle to the point of wiping. The complaints are rare and most groups will quietly go along with whatever I do anyway, so it's not a big deal really. I do wish I could be better at the 'when' for big pulling, but I think that just comes from experience that I don't have yet.

[Makeda]

And that reason is bogus because it implies that every game without a trinity can not present a skillful challenge. This statement completely precludes all single-player games (including the Dark Souls series) from having any sort of skillful challenge as well as most competitive games ever, whether real or electronic. Fighting games, MOBAs, shooters, dungeon crawlers...

My apologies, but perhaps YOU should be the one considering why things are as they are, because what you are saying makes no sense.

You say you want to get rid of tanks.

I present to you an actual current MMO, Guild Wars 2, that tried to get rid of tanks, and failed to do so. An MMO that had to patch tanks AND healers into the game in order to make it's content work.

You then try to counter me not with another no-tank MMO, but with SINGLE PLAYER games. And you call my point nonsense? Yours is not even on topic.

Please try again, without the 'bogus' non-MMO example. Bring me an example of an MMO that has done successful group content without needing tanks or tanks+healers. Perhaps, as you say, you should be considering WHY things are as they are... and not trying to use non-MMOs to argue MMO design.

You might want to start by looking over Guild Wars 2 with a very critical eye - examine what it did when it tried to be an MMO without tanks, examine why that failed, and examine why it now has a trinity based raid system. In there, in an actual MMO - you will likely find you 'WHY', or if you can - you will find what they could have done instead and be able to present that in a way that fixes all of their things their developers were unable to find solutions to.

[Drakkaelus]

Bring me an example of an MMO that has done successful group content without needing tanks or tanks+healers..

I think the problem was the fact that Guild Wars 2 just promoted zerging everything to death. Hell, WoW had that problem for years and they stick to the trinity.

All I can think of is City of Heroes. They had tanks and healers but content generally didn't require it (though a well rounded team made things go much smoother). Monster Hunter is built around group content that doesn't rely on a trinity. But, that also has a level of interactivity and control that traditional MMOs generally don't provide.

[Shurrikhan]

You say you want to get rid of tanks.

I present to you an actual current MMO, Guild Wars 2, that tried to get rid of tanks, and failed to do so. An MMO that had to patch tanks AND healers into the game in order to make it's content work.

You then try to counter me not with another no-tank MMO, but with SINGLE PLAYER games. And you call my point nonsense? Yours is not even on topic.

Please try again, without the 'bogus' non-MMO example. Bring me an example of an MMO that has done successful group content without needing tanks or tanks+healers. Perhaps, as you say, you should be considering WHY things are as they are... and not trying to use non-MMOs to argue MMO design.

You might want to start by looking over Guild Wars 2 with a very critical eye - examine what it did when it tried to be an MMO without tanks, examine why that failed, and examine why it now has a trinity based raid system. In there, in an actual MMO - you will likely find you 'WHY', or if you can - you will find what they could have done instead and be able to present that in a way that fixes all of their things their developers were unable to find solutions to.

Guild Wars 2 is scarcely a proof of conceptual failure. Its own developers have admitted to issues in execution and backing designs irrelevant to trinity or non-trinity systems that made their result far from ideal. And even after "patching in" tanks and healers it is far from being a "trinity" MMO. The tanks themselves lack any significant general manipulation utility and are generally just higher armor classes with an occasional during-animation DR and those "healers" are specific specs of specific specializations or else little more than hybrid tack-ons. It simply added bits of threat control, mitigation, and on-ally health restoration to the existent mix. It still depends primarily on evasion and target swapping to trade off threat where able and, sadly, death for threat-resets when not.

That said, if I were to look with a critical eye over various MMOs that didn't allot entire classes to, essentially, meat-tanking and direct allied health restoration, or did so to a far lesser extent than WoW, XIV, Rift, etc., e.g. GW2, Tera, Vindictus, B&S, BDO, DN, MHO, NNO the one thing that really sticks out isn't any necessity for passively-set or specialized "roles" in order to develop meaningful content. It's the need for capabilities for manipulation and consequent interaction (enmity, CC, and kiting, in some of their simplest terms), whether they be given to all classes or not. If there's nothing for your play to build around that of others, combat complexity falls drastically. For the more mechanistically-challenged, this can be substituted in part by filling hotbars with the stuff of 16-step openers and the like, even tacking on some intentional button-bloat to really fill them out. But less you allow for an actual effect on, from, and between group interactions (which the trinity can restrict at least as much as allow), the less you get out of each button, so to speak, and the less creativity and variance is made available.

MMOs are by no means a completed genre. A stale, convention-driven one, sure, but far is any from reaching anything ideal or pinnacle-like, even in their own narrow design philosophies. Why restrict all ideas, then, to what's already been produced in MMOs specifically? "Fighting games, MOBAs, shooters, [and] dungeon crawlers" all fall under, in one game or another, successful multiplayer titles. Even single player RPGs, for instance, can yet shed light on what works and does not work in swappable specialization in end-game activities, enjoyable environments, story-building, team interactions (NPC -> players), creating windows of urgency, and so forth.

[Khalithar]

It's the need for capabilities for manipulation and consequent interaction (enmity, CC, and kiting, in some of their simplest terms), whether they be given to all classes or not. If there's nothing for your play to build around that of others, combat complexity falls drastically.

I actually wanted to add more to this specific part of the post as it was something that really stood out to me in the early days of doing dungeons in GW2. Due to the lack of trinity based systems and your survival/healing largely depending on your own abilities and ability to avoid things I rarely felt like I was actually in a party of players doing the group content or even the open world FATE-style content. Unless I made a mistake and needed to be revived, the other players could have been NPC's for all I cared since a lot of came down to being self sufficient. I could best describe it with the phrase that GW2's role-less system was like "we're all playing alone, together." Due to the fact that I couldn't really do anything to buff or support my party (this way back in the days where you wanted to max out your damage as much as possible, not sure if the meta still favors that) outside of reviving them, I never felt like it was part of a cohesive group.

Compare and contrast to a game like this one with the trinity and what do we have? The ability to debuff an enemy so it deals less damage to the party or the party deals more damage to it, using abilities to protect and support each other, aoeing down mobs while the tank holds them in place... it "feels" much more like an actual team effort in my opinion. I agree with you that it IS stale and convention-driven, but alas that's part of the issue, sometimes popular things are popular for a reason, because they work.

[Shurrikhan]

I actually wanted to add more to this specific part of the post as it was something that really stood out to me in the early days of doing dungeons in GW2. Due to the lack of trinity based systems and your survival/healing largely depending on your own abilities and ability to avoid things I rarely felt like I was actually in a party of players doing the group content or even the open world FATE-style content. Unless I made a mistake and needed to be revived, the other players could have been NPC's for all I cared since a lot of came down to being self sufficient. I could best describe it with the phrase that GW2's role-less system was like "we're all playing alone, together."

Alternatively, you could take undermanned, undergeared content in B&S, where if each player isn't timing his rotations in order to CC-fill, you're all screwed. Both it and GW2 are without any real "healers" (SMN has it tacked onto a couple AoEs in B&S, just as a ranger can take a 180* into Druid on GW2) and the capabilities aren't at all divided by roles (apart from KFM/BM bonus threat skill specs), but because that one has more that can be done, people don't take dodge-spamming and necessary damage taken as "self-sufficiency". Because damage can and should be hard-countered, but no one player can hard-counter everything (except a KFM/BM against a single mob, which to me is still regrettable), none are "self-sufficient".

It's a difference in having things that can be done, and therefore temporary "roles" to be fulfilled or responsibilities to be split. GW2 is simply shallower still, in most cases, than even XIV, because there are fewer tools or meaningful manipulations available. At best, in place of enmity modifiers and taunts it gives back decent kiting. But that's not because XIV is "trinity" and GW2 is "role-less". It's because they're both "low-tool" and therefore "low-interaction". You do not need passively or rigidly set roles in order to achieve division of responsibility; in fact, doing so only limits, outside of player choice, the means of interaction available to the party. I'm not saying specialization should never occur, but as a convention its best use is in long-term parties in games that allow for actual customization—as an MMO convention it streamlines content, sometimes seemingly for the better but usually ultimately for the worse.