MMO: The Holy Trinity

How would you make the Holy Trinity more interesting without killing it?

What would new roles look like?
What would encounters look like?

just fucking kill it

Its the same thing but you control all the characters as a Tactics RPG. So you only have yourself to blame instead of some fuck who went to get a smoke.

Return to the original trinity of Healer, Crowd Control, Tank. Make everyone DPS.

We already fixed it
Do it like in runescape where people can act as anything at anytime without forced classes

And replace it with what?

That's not the "original" trinity that's a new shittier trinity for shitters.

EverQuest's original trinity was Cleric, Warrior, Enchanter, because it was the only 3 classes that could accomplish anything in-game.

>delete rangers, druids, necromancers
>trinity + support/hybrid is literally perfect

Why did no one take a note from Everquest?

There’s no tanks I real life. Just dps and healers. Remove tanks

remove healers
give dps and tanks support skills

there, every class is more fun to play now that they have more buttons to press

if they don't use their support skills everyone dies. Problem solved.

Classes that provide bonuses that make the game easier and more tolerable for everyone. Bards that can play music that alters the flow of time and makes grinding faster so there's less waiting, with the top-tier bards turning hour-long battles into mere minutes for people that don't want to wait.
Perhaps merchants that raise the chance for various good bits of loot, including gold and various other forms of currency and can provide buffs to other players if they want to 'give up' some of the increased chances of loot for massive bonuses.
Negotiators that can try and work out deals between the players and NPCs for a small cut of the loot themselves. Perhaps once the boss is at half health and he knows he may not beat all these players, he can call a truce and start bartering to see if he'll give up his desired loot and give up, or if they'll give the boss a chance to heal and buff mid-battle to raise the chances of getting topper-tier stuff.

>no tanks in real life
That's wrong, people can take a lot of damage and be very resilient to it with the proper training, damage that would kill the average person.

Unironically this. Bard spell twisting was an interesting mechanic.

There should be more support-style characters with interesting mechanics.

Never should have come here

"Elemental" weaknesses and strengths and a greater focus on stat based classes.
Instead of trying to shy away from the "reliance" and "complexity" of the approaches like so many MMO's do, maybe try embracing it?

FFXIV erased their elemental effects with the reboot and made every class shoehorn themselves into the 3 role system for the sake of "not having to rely on black mages for every fight". But it made for some awkward fits with the traditional FF jobs, and a lot of classes feel very much the same outside of some small rotation gimmicks.

Remove classes and use a freeform skill system like Asheron's Call and Ultima Online (alternatively, make classes capable of any particular role and hybridization of attributes and skills, such as Elder Scrolls Online). Make everyone VERSATILE. One trick ponies and min/maxers are fucking dumb.

Make healing a team effort / personal responsibility. A player can spec towards healing, but he will not be a "dedicated" healer who can outpace damage received, and can't min/max so hard that he can't do anything else. Implement the Downed state in which anybody can revive, but it takes a long time and isn't often viable in combat, such as the system in Guild Wars 2.

No dumbass "aggro" system. Take a hint from both D&DO and TERA, have active player skill-based blocking/evasion to neutralize most/all damage and bodyblocking to prevent enemies from passing the tanks and attacking the squishies. Placement and using the environment to your advantage becomes paramount, and not because of big retarded red telegraph circles appearing on the ground.

So like Battleon's sort of combat like structure, where enemies have certain weaknesses, stats, and resistances to elements?
Like how there are enemies that are strong against Earth attacks and Melee, but weak against magic and fire, so you'd either need to be a warrior with a magical fire sword or a fire mage to easily take him down, with earth melee magic doing barely anything but other elements doing varying degrees of success, with you prepping your weapons for the foes rather than a simple damage race with the same weapon?

Sounds similar to FFXIV 1.0.

It did not end well for that game.

Basically.
Sort of how I remembered XI, but that was a long time ago, and from what I hear the game changed a lot sense I quit.

I tried getting into mmos but most of them are glorified DDR games where you just smash hotkeys the whole time like WoW or FFXIV which are fucking boring as shit

Also tried more action skilled MMO's like Tera/Black Desert but while those have more fu n combat those ruined by being boring korean grindfests.

Why arent there any good and fun MMOs

It didn't, but it wasn't the reason
1.0 had a lot of great ideas but 99% of the reason it was despised was the hilarious amount of lag and other dumb shit like the fatigue system

I don't know why people have this obsession with "killing the holy trinity". No matter what class/noclass system you propose, the game is always going to be reduced down to "how can I build a character that can take the most damage, deal the most damage, or heal the most damage". If you could do 2 or all 3 of those things, the community starts bitching about how unbalanced the game is. You won't kill it.

Larger groups with every character being a hybrid. So instead of having a tank you have a tank who also buffs and a tank who has some form of heal abilities.

There is no single good and fun MMO
The ones that are good in gameplay are pay2win
The ones that have good graphics have bad gameplay
The ones that are actually good need sub and since you claim that "pressing hotkeys" is a bad mechanic, then there is no single MMO out there for you. MMO's aren't for you I guess.
The only MMO i have played that doesn't use hotkey system is dead frontier and it is super pay win sub trash.

I still play battleon from time to time, and if there was an option to remove the battle animations, it would be the perfect game to dumbly autopilot on for hours at a time. You invest into stats to spec your character how you want it, but always have to keep a backup of weapons and armor in case you encounter -that one fucking enemy- that your build can't face, since your item slots are restricted specifically so that you can't face down everything perfectly
You can have one of each element type weapon, but you can only have melee, ranged, or magic types. So if you're only a melee weapon fighter, when you come up against something that has 100% melee dodge, you're fucked unless you decided to pack an armor that converts your attacks into another type, or has special moves that can carry you through the battle, or boost your accuracy.
And all weapons and armors have chances for special attacks that do cool shit like extra damage, and every character gets a limited amount of healing and mana potions even though you can learn spells that restore health and get skills that restore mana to perpetually tank forever IF your skills do that.
And, of course, all the things that apply defensively for the enemies apply to the character as well. 'Okay, I have good earth resist, but I'm not gonna block or dodge any of his blows because this armor slows my melee dodge the fuck down, but I can block ranged attacks just fine.' So in the case that you fight a ranged person of any element, you could do even better if you're simply just lucky at dodging or have high dex and luck, or you could simply tank through it with high resistances and lots of endurance. It's good stuff.

>most of them are glorified DDR games where you just smash hotkeys the whole time like WoW or FFXIV which are fucking boring as shit

Mabinogi has a slow and measured combat system that will punish you for spamming attack on even the lowliest mobs.

WoW was fine before they ruined it in WOTLK with cross realm and dungeon finder

They could have continued with quality of life improvements and had an amazing game, but they slowly ruined it.

I'd say the best example of Battleon is that it lets you switch your shit on the fly by using the armors to determine your shit, kind of like that one final fantasy game? I'm a Wizard, but I'm also a maxed out Assassin. Wizards are pure damage but are also great because they can regen mana almost indefinately, and turn every single attack into a magic blast attack, which also results in them being able to heal. But all of their attacks rely on magic and being the wizard of the element you are trying to fight. A fire mage trying to fight a fire elementalist is not going to have a fun time, especially if it's healed from magic. So you pack maybe two. Maybe you pack fire and ice kit, so now you're a fire and ice wizard. Well, now you encounter an electric elemental, you can kill it with either fire and ice with no real boost, but maybe you want that wind wizard cape so you can try and balance out between all nine elements, so you also grab a light wizard robe. That's 4 fucking robes out of your 8 slots, plus the first one that has your 'generic' armor (if you're good, it's some crazy awe shit that is just good at blocking everything)
AT that point, you need to think 'well fuck I can't just use magic to blast my way out of shit'. So I picked assassin, which is sort of a class that does general stuff. Mostly melee, but has ranged attack capacity and super high dodge, as well as some badass delayed-damage stuff and a minor health-drain attack, as well as the ability to create a secondary weapon of your element to add on an extra weak attack.
It's really a good fucking game, mechanically-wise.

I don't mean ''pressing hotkeys'' is a bad thing. But if it all it is it's just mindnumbing boring. It's just memorizing rotation and smashing those keys mindnumbingly over and over again which I find boring in WoW which is a shame because everything outside of that is done well.

Tera for instance also has also has hotkeys and shit but theres more to it than just smashing hotkeys like directional attacks, dodging and blocking which makes combat alot more fun, engaging and less tedious but Tera itself everything around it is so fucking boring and grindy. and p2w

I like Trinity

It works as gameplay system and ensures group play. I like in WoW swapping to a new role is playing a new game.

I do wish that roles were built into the same character more like FF though.

Games without trinity have stupid fucking dungeons without any aggro management. Enemies randomly target shit and it's a mess

No such a thing as a perfect game. You will never find one, unless you make your own catered to your personal tastes.

>WoW was fine
>was

Cut out the holy trinity simplification bs.

Have actual tanks (a soak is not a tank, stop using the wrong fucking word you mmotards)
Have proper utility mages, not just aoe nukes and DPS casters. Have utility skill rogues etc.

Basically cease dumbed down vidya retardation and use the tech increases over the last generations to incorporate proper PNP into a vidya format instead of downs crack baby versions.

Any game that directly correlates power to the amount of hours spent playing it is a bad game.

Most MMOs are gay shit designed for autists and weebs. Let them all die. Play shooters or strategy games like an adult. Sports games and some sims are also acceptable.

I love that you said a bunch of words like tank and soak that you made up and expect other people to know what the fuck you're saying

i don't think simplification is the product of dumbing down, it's mostly the product of "player slots" and how if you're not a dps king then you're not allowed to participate

that utility mage might be neat in a dungeon that needs crowd control, but once it's time for the boss, they're gonna get the boot

That's fucking stupid
You want people to be weak despite playing for 300+ hours?
If you play for long, of course you are going to be geared and high level, thus way stronger than anyone that just joined.
It seems like you want a FPS where everybody has the same health, they die in the same shots from every pistol and they all can use the same weapons so the only difference between the nub and the pro is pure skill, which doesn't work in a rpg.

Imagine putting 200 hours into a character just to realize nothing you do would make it useful.

FFXIV failed because it was a poorly coded, poorly optimized mess

Like, it was really bad, were that not the case, i think it would have stayed as it was

You're using a red herring
I said
>Any game that directly correlates power to the amount of hours spent playing it is a bad game.

I did not say
>Players should be able to advance their power with effort
I also did not say
>Players in MMOs should have equal power

WoW's issue has been the legendary gimmick.
It's a time gated gimmick that has devolved into "More hours = more power".
If you haven't played the same amount of time as someone else, you will be objectively weaker.
Hilariously enough, the catch up mechanic of badges/points they introduced was done to alleviate the need to clear through lower level content to get to the current patch content, and yet they decided to throw in gear that is based on time commitment.

The mechanic is purely to force active player numbers, not because it's a fun design decision.

Why the FUCK is it called DPS anyway?
"Hey dude, what do you like to play most? Tank, heal or damage per second??"

Why did this retarded shit become a thing? Just say damage dealer/DD

>Mature games for mature gamers like myself

They force time mechanics because it is a sub model mmo
They just want people to keep spending money on subs
That's the problem of sub based MMOs

This is one of the reasons I love Guild Wars 1. You hit max level and obtained statistically maximum gear pretty early on, and after that your power only increased as a result of your ability to effectively combine your limited skills to create powerful builds.
Or your ability to go look up cookie cutter team builds and spam tap+space.

I'd personally do this:

>DPS: Focuses bosses and primary mobs, utility is loaded into damage enhancers.
>Tank: Does tank things as per usual, buffs are related to party management as a whole (movement speed buffs when people run towards them, blocking damage in a line, etc.)
>Healer: Healing stuff, sole provider of anti-debuff abilities such as removing Poisons, specific raid mechanics, etc.
>Support: Intersection between Healer and DPS. Gives specific buffs to healers, does a bit of mitigation themselves and generally handles the strongest buffs.
>Utility: Deals with secondary mobs, trash, etc and do very specific roles. Tankier than everything besides tanks, they also handle roles that involve less combat or more independent tasks such as going off somewhere to fight a group of munchkins/pull a lever to stop a mechanic, etc.

Can't think of anything else. I just feel like the roles we have now are too broad.

Then you design fights and classes so that you avoid this scenario. Maybe the boss fights need CC as well. Maybe the CC class gets single target debuffs that pure DPS don't have. If you're making a utility class then you give them a varied toolkit that gives them options.

You measure them by DPS so it just stuck

Support and utility should be 1 not two.

ez

I would make healing only work out of combat

I just want supports like buffer and debuffers but it looks like most MMOs now want to remove that type of class.

What is brawler for? assassin is useless

Utility is more like an off-tank/secondary tank (an actual off-tank, not just a second main tank like current MMOs) which a Support wouldn't fit.

The jobs assigned to the roles would be harder to manage to compensate spreading it out over different people.

Explain riot shelds then? Only the like1-3 guys in a swat team will have them the other guys have huge guns

Healers are the real worthless unreal class

>Paramedics are useless

What games actually use this? Almost every RPG I can think of also has a debuff role, a buff role, and a crowd control role.

>I tried getting into mmos but most of them are glorified DDR games where you just smash hotkeys the whole time like WoW or FFXIV which are fucking boring as shit

You're an even worse brainlet than your picture.

People would still be subbed
WoW needs to inflate its player numbers to support the servers, so they create incentives to always be playing

I don't even like that model. I want to be able to progress my power, but it shouldn't be timegates by pure hours. If I have a bunch of people get me crafted gear, and then run me through a raid where I'm going to get every piece of gear that drops for me, then all the power to me.

Capping weekly valor points to upgrade gear was one of the most cancerous things I've ever had the pleasure of doing

>assassin
>against bosses/minibosses/annoying targets
>useless

brawler is more of a mix between tank and dps, sort of an aggro class

Sounds like something a dps can do at the start of a fight as long as they don't have evasion bonus or similar.

You make everyone dps with different secondary utility abilities so you can set other people apart. Kind of like monster Hunter. Hunting horns can still output good damage while buffing the party and can knockout the monster temporarily

assassin excels at fighting bosses
brawler excels at fighting swarms

DPS can do both, but not as well as those 2 can

Seems like unneded content
Like you would remove aoe attacks from a dps just to force a brawler and special attacks that do high damage like the assassin could have from the DPS to force the class
Mage is justified because AOE needs to be their own thing, but these two things you suggest are easy to do in the same character.

Merge the classic "healer" with DPS and SOE's buffing classes from EQ and Star Wars Galaxies.
What you end up with is a support class similar to support in MOBAs with some light healing abilities, that provides very strong buffs for the group, but for the most part, follows a dps rotation.
In a builder spender type class, DPS abilities build resource, and buffing/healing spells spend it.

Oh, and leave the Tank and Damage alone. They work fine.

Instead of getting rid of the trinity, you could work on making each class fun and more engaging.
Maybe make the effects of using inefficient spells/resources more apparent and punishing, but have (limited) ways to recover from it.
Make encounters that aren't just do max dps til dead, like maybe add incentive for defeating encounters in special ways. If your tank keeps this debuff for some time better loot drops, and a healer can't do that alone so a strong buffing class is needed.
Those are some really basic ideas, but there's a lot of ways to go about it without getting rid of the trinity. I think it's an interesting dynamic for a game that just hasn't been fully realized.

>That's not the "original" trinity that's a new shittier trinity for shitters.
imagine being this new

Here's my suggestion

Start with enemy mobs, break them into pseudo-categories
>Massive (can only be effectively tanked by a pure tank)
>Large (can be reasonably tanked by an off tank and healer, or pure tank and off healer)
>Normal (non-tanks can survive a few hits before they die)
>Small (you can survive more hits than normal, this may be your weakling enemies, or aoe fodder)

So now you've created an environment of enemies that can force you to have a pure tank, but also allow for someone not dedicated to tanking to take control of certain enemies as well. And it gives room for off healing.

Now we move to gimmicks. The best example WoW ever had for this was the Burning Crusade Shadow Priest. A low DPS class was priceless if they were good.
So let's have some more unique classes like that
>Class that benefits from linking to other players and based on their performance and actions, you get bonuses. Plus you can have support spells for them.
>Classes that deal additional damage/healing by enhancing other people's damage/healing.
>Classes like Shadow Priest that recover resources for people. This could also be something like "A buff that makes your next ability have half cooldown" that you can cast on people, or "innervating" someone, or "arcane power"ing someone like Mages did in Vanilla.
Those are all nice ways to create supports, but lets create non-supports.
The trick to this is uniqueness of class abilities for that class, and uniqueness of encounters that allow odd abilities to shine.
A great example is Gruul's Lair where Warlocks could enslave massive Felhunters, or mages could spell steal shields in order to tank one of the bosses.
>Crowd control that acts uniquely to types of enemies. Low coverage of enemy types is required for them to be unique.
>Pets that can be manipulated in unique ways.
>The ability to "kite" enemies

WoW had so much of this, yet they opted to phase it all out and design it away. They should have gone further.

Then why is healer not HPS?

It's not as catchy, simple as that.

Runescape had it right.
Only tank and dps for bosses, rock-paper-scissors effectiveness for pvp. Heal yourself via items.

just remove healers from the game already ffs

all they do is promote cowardice and heal sluts

Well healers shouldn't be dedicated
They should have some attacks too.

Add in a dedicated support roll who's job is to give a constant stream of very short duration buffs through their skill rotation/priority list requiring good skill placement and skill flow to keep up their buffs permanently.

Also have other supportive abilities such as pull skills to bunch up trash mobs/adds. And some active damage mitigation skills that let you block certain things for your team members.

Sort of agree, don't make a role purely healing. That's extremely boring. Make them low DPS/tanks that add buffs and heals to a fight. Their role could ping pong between killing off weak enemies and healing allies in need.

Add "Trickster."

An illusionist or thief to put the trinity outside the box of "HP management"

I prefer how LotRO had: tank, healer, damage, support, debuffer.

Remove damage and change it to controller or support. Make all roles able to do damage fairly well.

Just make it action oriented. Aggrro can be lost very quickly if the tank doesnt spawm his ability.
Healing shouldnt be instanteous and in worsed case, forcing tank to let off his duty to regenerate health while forcing dps into a defensive/evading stance for some short time.
Enemies shouldnt be braindead.
I really realy liked dragons dogma for its combat and ideas

Add a support role which is half-dps, half-enhancing capabilities of other roles (like mana regen for healers, damage buff for dps, survivability for tanks). But don't ask me how to balance this shit - it's pretty much impossible.

Besides that I like trinity how it is.

>Aggrro can be lost very quickly if the tank doesnt spawm his ability.

That's how TERA tried to do tanking and it fucking sucked, because whenever there's a mechanic that made the tank separated from the boss it all went to shit.

Dragon's Dogma combat sucked ass for casters.

the "holy trinity" is fucking terrible and shits up mmos. play ultima online instead

i like how GW2 had the aura zone system where if u put down a move of some kind an allys move could do more damage or w/e off of it

i also have a ton of hours in wow playing all the different roles, and the gameplay itself declined in complexity over the years and became watered.

i think we'd have to make a game where every class its able to sustain itself on a minimal, solo-playability level, while also forcing group encounters based on the classes that go into the fights.

maybe design a unique combination system for each class that makes say every class work with each other in unison, so even fire / ice could work together if used by allies - but each combination path is unique between each other.

tl;dr - make a game mostly based on weaving skills together properly, focusing on crowd control, and using a certain combination of unique moves together to sustain, support, buff, and ultimately play the game

>i think we'd have to make a game where every class its able to sustain itself on a minimal, solo-playability level,
Neverwinter and SWTOR solved that by letting you have a NPC companion for solo content.

...

DRagons Dogma didnt get the balance patches it urgently needed which made some classes and mechanics brokenly op or underperforming. Its just a theory which works kinda well.
I dont know about tera but im sure its a fundamental mechanics that arent working as supposed. For example, every class could get a dodge ability that keeps them alive long enough until the tank realigns his position. In case of dragons dogma, its only noticeable when you yourself play the sorc/mag because ai sucks at tanking and often just returns back to you and because the aggro skills dont actually aggo bigger fiends like dragons reliably. Fix that and you can spam your sorc stuff all day which is kinda whack also. Trinity is in itself inperfect why expecting it then in the first place from other games?

true, but the real draw is to get people to play together by making each class do something different based on who is playing what.

What's your definition of tank?

Kill the holy trinity. Make in-combat healing weak as fuck. Balance and design the game around this fact. Tank and Spank is a horrible concept.
This can be done in a handful of ways. Replace healing with damage mitigation, force people to actually retreat in a raid if they want healing, whatever bullshit idea works best.
Blacklist Tigole and everyone who agrees with his garbage views from the industry.

Don't forget debuffs.

Cc isn't a utility mage. Its a cc mage.

Early Aion had the holy trinity but also jobs in between.
The Templar was the main tank but the Gladiator was in between Tank and DPS.
Cleric was the main healer but Chanter was in between Healer and DPS

Just because you're an underage retard who
>cannot into words

Does not mean that 25+ gamers never played DnD ever and do not know the difference between a tank and a soak.

Let me put it in terms your retardation might understand.

The thief with maxed parry skill and feats and evasion feats is a dex tank. Immune due to avoiding DMG entirely.

The fighter wearing ungodly enchanted magically full plate is the 'classic' tank because he's flatout immune to almost everything, wading into melee with impunity because nothing can even hurt him.

The barbarian in a loin cloth raging out wearing a ring of regeneration and having drunk another set of HoT potions is a damage soak because he wades into battle with a million HP ignoring his wounds in a berserk fury. Another way to classify the archetype is 'damage sponge'.

Mmotards have almost no experience with actual tanks since MMOs are dumbed down shit that usually conflates the two different things into one half assed role.

No. A utility rogue is sunk into trap finding lockpicking social face skills etc.

The reason the (un)holy trinity persists is because gamers turn their brains off and refuse to think critically.

The utility mage is off enchanting and potion brewing or crafting wands and shit.

CC mage is NOT 'utility'

Fuck off with that, the fighter is a damage mitigation tank, the thief is an evasion tank, and the barb is a damage sponge, just because you're not familiar with MMO terms doesn't mean they didn't deal with the same concepts.

The original before vidya babbies started misapplying the word to every combat class that wasn't a fragile muhdeeps

GW2
/thread

Again. You're tarding out. Hard. They are NOT mmo terms. They're PnP terms mmo yards have pucked up over the years and slapped onto things willy nilly because they're idiots trying to sound anything other than fucking braindead.

Make it a holy square by making buff/debuff support classes finally relevant.

stacking and spamming abilities off cooldown is how you fix the genre?