MMORPGs and the trinity (+ other stuff)

[Jenvas1306]

Quite a while ago I started playing World of Warcraft, that was shortly before Cataclysm got released. It held my interesst for long enough to get to lvl 80, but then I played less and canceled my subscription.
Since then I tried quite a few free2play MMORPGs, but only got back to playing one when Guildwars 2 went into beta.
Even it is a great game and does so much right, it still has some flaws.
For example the development of ones character: Some classes have very little choice what traits to go for, but even for the others, your character will end up feeling no special at all, as there arent many ways to build special mechanics or the like. By level 20 you got all you weapon-skills and not all of them have the same worth when it comes to damage output. GW2 hasnt got the usual trinity of damage, tanking and healing, so a necromancer in light armor can easily be more tanky than a warrior in heavy armor.

Forcing players into that Trinity isnt a good thing, but removing it and offering nothing to fill the gap doesnt quite do it aswell.

So what I would like to see is a class-less MMORPG, you can be a magic user in heavy armor, you can be an off tank who also deals damage, or a full tank with less damage output, have some healing, or focus on a balance of it all.
So your character could work in a very unique way, being speced just for the playstyle you like, while a jack-of-all-trades is still as viable as a specialist, while not as strong in the department of that specialist. The trinity forces yout to be a specialist, no trinity forces you to be a jack-of-all-trades, but the really interessting characters are inbetween of those extremes.
But most important is a system that allows you to easily build a character that works well, but still offers opportunities to get skills for special mechanics. Guildwars 1 did that well with having the chance to learn different skills at different places and even capturing skills from enemies. While capturing might not be optimal, I think it could be nice to go to find special events, certain trainers or hidden scrolls to get special skills, that are in themselves not stronger, but offer more diversity.

So, what do you think would be a benefit for the MMORPG-branch, what could make the better game of tomorrow, what could improve games that already exist?

 

[BloatedGuppy]

I can't believe there's a thread about MMOs and the holy trinity and it wasn't started by Eternal Nothingness.

Look, there's nothing wrong with the trinity. It works. It's just very, very stale. GW2 tried to shake it up, and had...mixed success in doing so. That doesn't mean "Well fuck, we tried, back to the trinity I guess". Innovation and evolution takes time. There will be iteration, there will be trial and error.

What you're describing in your suggestion is not a classless RPG, it's an RPG with a lot of hybrids. And really, we already have that.

 

[Jenvas1306]

I can't believe there's a thread about MMOs and the holy trinity and it wasn't started by Eternal Nothingness.

Look, there's nothing wrong with the trinity. It works. It's just very, very stale. GW2 tried to shake it up, and had...mixed success in doing so. That doesn't mean "Well fuck, we tried, back to the trinity I guess". Innovation and evolution takes time. There will be iteration, there will be trial and error.

What you're describing in your suggestion is not a classless RPG, it's an RPG with a lot of hybrids. And really, we already have that.

I never suggested to go back to the trinity. What I ment was a system that doesnt require you to choose a class, your character would evolve to one or be a hybrid. And if that already exists, then you could tell me the name of a game to successfully pulls that off.

 

[DoPo]

I can't believe there's a thread about MMOs and the holy trinity and it wasn't started by Eternal Nothingness.

Yep, I had to double check myself to be sure I'm not misreading names here.

OT: With the possibility of being wrong, doesn't EVE do this? I mean, doesn't it not have the holy trinity? I'm not really that much into MMORPGs myself, so I can't really think of any other examples of where and how the matter was handled. The World of Darkness MMO, if we can believe whatever sketchy information there is for now, wouldn't have classes (although it had starting...aptitudes or something) and wouldn't be focused too much on combat, either. So that might be another contender. Maybe, eventually.

 

[Jenvas1306]

Just to clarify, I'm in no way affiliated with Eternal Nothingness and this is not just about the trinity, its about everything that is good or bad in typical MMORPGs

 

[skywolfblue]

Forcing players into that Trinity isnt a good thing, but removing it and offering nothing to fill the gap doesnt quite do it aswell.

So what I would like to see is a class-less MMORPG, you can be a magic user in heavy armor, you can be an off tank who also deals damage, or a full tank with less damage output, have some healing, or focus on a balance of it all.
So your character could work in a very unique way, being speced just for the playstyle you like, while a jack-of-all-trades is still as viable as a specialist,

1) Without classes, there isn't a while lot of reason to re-roll or level alts. If you can respec your main at will, then that alt experience isn't as fresh or new.

2) As you said "your character will end up feeling not special at all". Rather then being a unique class in a raid, you're exactly the same as everyone else. Anyone else can re-spec into your tasks, you bring noting extra-special to the table.

At least that's kinda how I feel about it in general.

3) I think WoW itself should probably be a good testament as to why Jack of All Trades vs. Specialists usually results in terrible balance.

There are plenty of hybrid classes like Shaman or Druid that have both healing and DPS spells. There were times when blizzard balanced the class on having both, and their DPS suffered. Then blizzard buffed the DPS, and then DPS classes (rogues mostly if I remember ) complained that they were getting left out because why bring a pure class when a hybrid can do as much DPS AND bring some utility/healing as well?

If I remember right it wasn't really until WotLK that they finally decided "eh screw it, lets make hybrid specs do either pure DPS or pure healing, not both".

I'd kinda be interested in seeing a game try for a Quadrinity: Add a 4th role - support/buff/debuff. Like, a class that uses stuff like Anti-magic shell to protect the whole group at specific phases of the boss fight, and stuff like Heroism to buff the DPS. Pallies and Shaman were vaguely something like that way back in vanilla WoW but they kinda suffered from some clunky design choices.

 

[Smooth Operator]

Well there are plenty of MMOs out there that mix things up, the end result however is the very same.
No matter what sort of system it is things get boiled down to the top builds because you just got nothing better to do, playing a game 1000+ hours will always end up getting really bloody old.

 

[Scarim Coral]

Regardless how creative/ unique you want your character to be during a fight, it still got to be balance out in the end. I mean there has been countless Guild Wars updats to nerf down the skill set to created by players when they found exploits (farming and etc) when using a certain set of skills. I just guessing the whole "make whatever you want" character will take alot of time to test for balancing.

 

[BloatedGuppy]

Just to clarify, I'm in no way affiliated with Eternal Nothingness and this is not just about the trinity, its about everything that is good or bad in typical MMORPGs

Yeah whatever, Eternal Nothingness, we're ON TO YOU BUDDY.

I never suggested to go back to the trinity. What I ment was a system that doesnt require you to choose a class, your character would evolve to one or be a hybrid. And if that already exists, then you could tell me the name of a game to successfully pulls that off.

As long as you have a structure of damage mitigated by tank healed by healer, you have a holy trinity. Plenty of games have allowed speccing into multiple roles on the fly, if they didn't already have classes with that baked right into them (WoW Druid springs to mind). Hell, games like Rift allowed you to have essentially every possible role in the game in a single character, never more than a button push away. It's been done.

If you want to get away from the trinity, you need to change the mechanics, not just dilute the roles.

 

[ultrabiome]

RIP City of Heroes

the design largely revolved around making it so any combination of the 5 classes would be complimented, and not necessarily with healing (up to 8 players and the spawn sizes scaled). in fact, there were only a few classes with ally heals, and only one of the dozens of powersets focused on ally healing. although healing was always welcome, only players with the holy trinity mindset were insistent on needing healers or tanks or ranged damage. so many combinations of crazy powers, and all could work together to completely destroy huge mobs quickly. sword-wielding regenerators, energy punching ice armor tanks, illusion controllers with radiation emission, fire blasters, and force-field electric defenders...

even at the high end, a solid mixture of all 5 classes were the best steamrolling teams.

 

[DanielBrown]

LOTRO has the trinity, but you can also play as a burglar, captain or lore-master, who serve as debuffer/buffers and crowd control. Makes it much more intresting and I would like to see that implemented in more MMOs.
Rift had something simular to that with Archon and Bard(probably more classes), and since I love that playstyle I went for it in instances. Problem is the WoW crowd all run with dps meter addons and start kicking/taunt you because you aren't dpsing.
Even if you're signed up as support.
And are actually making the others a lot stronger while offering average dps.

I really liked the game and was especially in love with Archon class, but the crowd drove me away just like with WoW earlier... >.<

 

[someonehairy-ish]

I'm not entirely convinced that its possible to get away from the trinity in your traditional MMORPG, because the combat in those games is built around a few assumptions:

1) Both your team and enemy players or NPCs have health.
2) At least one member of your team will be taking damage, because most attacks can't be avoided.
3) Health doesn't regenerate very fast.
4) Players, once dead, will stay dead for the rest of the fight; barring one-use-only rezzes and similar.

If you change one of those assumptions, the trinity wouldn't be needed any more:

If you had no health 'bar' or something similar you couldn't die - presumably combat would require you to simply kill things before some kind of timer runs out, meaning there'd be no need for tanks or healers.
If no member of the team had to be taking damage, it would logically follow that all attacks are dodgeable or something. So you might have Dark Souls type combat: Avoid damage and wait for safe opportunities to deal damage. With this set up, most players would spec toward DPS, more cautious players would move toward a tank-type set up. There'd probably be no need for healers.
If health regenerated quickly, you'd end up with fps style combat; duck out of cover to deal some damage, then hide again and wait to heal up.
If players didn't stay dead for the whole fight, you'd just need to have someone running around reviving people and you'd be all good.

So yes, you could get rid of the trinity by changing one of those core assumptions, but it would either make the combat terrible (think about how not dying ever make every fight in that Prince of Persia reboot completely redundant) or it would make combat feel very, very different to usual MMORPG combat.

 

[WoW Killer]

I think you've picked up on two separate issues which aren't necessarily all that related.

The trinity comes from server limitations. In an MMO the servers have to handle hundreds of mobs individually, and so amongst other things the AI has to be pretty basic. That's where things like threat mechanics come in. You'll notice GW2 has a different take on threat, which is evidence of the improving server technology (along with things like proper projectiles and collision detection).

One of my issues with the trinity was that it created this disconnect between solo and group play. You could go through a whole game up until cap playing solo, and then when you go to run a dungeon you're playing an entirely different game. In some cases (but not all), I think GW2 was much improved for this. I remember when I was playing the beta I found myself in a DE chain solo when a few other players showed up. The mobs scaled a bit, more mobs appeared, but I carried on playing just like I did before. I didn't have to adjust my strategy even though I was technically now in a group situation. I took out some mobs, the other players took out some mobs, and it all felt very natural. On release the scaling sometimes didn't work quite so well, due to the sheer number of players I guess. Again, with the server limitations, there's a limit to how far you can increase the number of mobs in order to make content harder, as opposed to having the same number of mobs just with buffed up stats. So you often had this weird situation where either mobs could one-shot you, and it felt cheap, or they couldn't one-shot you, and it felt too easy. Graphical clusterfucks were the icing on the cake of course, but they weren't the entirety of the problem.

So I think GW2 went in the right direction, even if it didn't quite get there. Future games will refine the ideas, and ever improving technology should help out too. As regards to group mechanics, what I'd like to see is a bigger emphasis on crowd control, and particularly crowd control as a group effort. In GW2 they had that thing where elite mobs would gain immunity to CC effects until a number of stacks had been taken away (by CC effects). It was a bit too random due to the clusterfuck nature of the combat, but with a bit of refinement I think something like that is along the right lines. What you need is a CC mechanic that's present on each and every mob (so that the same mechanic is being used while solo, for learning purposes), which is then made more difficult for group mobs. Then you have that a group mob requires a team working together correctly in order to be locked down, and that whole mechanic can replace the traditional notion of tanking. Edit: Just to clarify, if you make control and the controllability of a mob a stat, then this is something you can scale to the number of players as opposed to raw damage and HP. End edit.

But I don't think that's entirely related to the lack of customisation in GW2 (which is the other issue you raise). I've played trinity based MMOs that had much deeper progressions systems. My issue with GW2 was that the progression was mostly passive. As you say, you unlock most of the active abilities very early on. Your only chance at customisation comes from the trait system, which is predominantly passive stat gains. So that's why you have members of the same class feeling all the same; you might have different stats, but you can "do" all the same things.

Probably the best MMO I've played for build customisation is DDO. Obviously it's based on D&D so you've got all those multiclass options. There were still clearly right and wrong choices though, and when you get to endgame there was very much still a sense of what was a min/max build and what was a flavour build. What was different, and this is crucial, was that there was still a good amount of content a non-min/max build could take on and be rewarded for doing so. In fact, a "flavour" build could sometimes be highly optimal in taking on certain content. For instance, the guild I was part of was essentially a guild of soloers; we all had builds that were more optimised for solo play. That didn't mean we never ran in groups, but when we did we would play more with a solo mindset. The sort of content we excelled at was lower level group and raid quests, played with a smaller number of higher level characters. Say, we would run a level 14-15 raid quest (intended for 12 players) with two or three level 20 characters. The important point, and why this worked for us as a guild, is that DDO had a different take on gear and quest rewards. It wasn't a case of item X is better than item Y. Items could have very unique and niche uses. What that meant was, there were a lot of lower level items still worth using at max level. Note I haven't played the game for a while (mid 2011) and I know there's been some major updates since then, so I don't know to what extent all of this is still true.

So that's the key I think; it's about the content and rewards as much as it is about the build choices. It's not that in a game like WoW the min/max raiding builds are "better" as such, it's that all the best rewards come from the same set of content, raids, in which min/max raiding builds excel. What you need is more varied content that emphasises different build styles, and rewards from such content that are worth striving for. If you have endgame solo content that's worth running, two man content that's worth running etc. then you can have a reason to have all these different builds.

 

[Sion_Barzahd]

As someone already said, the trinity will never leave as the trinity is the best logical solution for surviving and killing things. Even in the random events of GW2 which strictly threw away the trinity classes you see people falling into the roles, one kiting the enemy and dodge/defending another either throwing down heals or picking up the fallen and everyone else going all out for damage.

However it isn't the only solution, i've done full runs of instances in WoW with a gaggle of mages just freezing, sheeping and aoeing everything. It worked, but it was sloppy.

I would however like something that allowed for speed-based tanks. Someone who dodges and taunts rather than takes it on the chin. Akin to how you used to be able to tank as rogues back in TBC. This would require you having to manually dodge attacks ala GW2 and TERA style (and TERA does have dodge tanks, i just think it doesn't handle very well)

 

[Jenvas1306]

Ah alright. I made a big mental note to never mention trinity again, cause this isnt what I wanted to start...
I sought to start a discussion about what could be improved, not just the trinity, even thats probably a big part.
classes, weapons and skill systems, quests etc, all that could be discussed aswell...