How do we fix the holy trinity?

How do we fix the holy trinity?

It's called the holy trinity because it's effective. Why do you wanna change it?

Because it ruined every modern mmo into the most dull gameplay imaginable.

Meanwhile games like Mabinogi that don't use direct class systems and don't depend on healing or tanking at all and instead reward combat skill are superior.

GW2 did away with the holy trinity and it's awful

GW2 is awful entirely.

>Because it ruined every modern mmo into the most dull gameplay imaginable.
So?

What games have a different model for classes?

buuuuuuurp

How many games have solid all rounder classes that dip a little into all 3?

mmos ruined themselves it had nothing to do with the classes.

every mmo that tried to do "classless - you can BE ANYTHING!!!" failed and was terrible.

as long as most people can solo their dailies or whatever, why does the trinity need to be changed?

every member in a raid running around "tanking" and "healing" each other is fucking gay in a tab targetted game.
If every mmo became action combat some monster hunter thing then yeah tanking would be dumb and pointless, but it's not there yet, and most "action" mmos are total trash so far

>4 DPS
>Some clearly greatly better than others just by own definition
People are fucking stupid.

I think healers are the main offender here. Tanks are nice because not only do they damage sponge but they also have supportive abilities. Dps are usually viewed as the default class because they do the most basic thing: dealing damge.
Healer is the only one that has one purpose and that is sucking the other two's dick.

Not much can really be done about healers since healing is literally the main point of the archetype.

Classes that focus on debuffs.
Classes that focus on buffs.

most games have a class that can pull of 2 of those, the WoW druid was pretty good at 3 of them.

Literally worthless on both ends.

Let's boil down some fundamentals. Most MMO's revolve around bringing health bars from 100% to 0%, while making sure yours doesn't drop to 0%.

Tanks soak up enemy hate, but ultimately play an uninvolving role beyond casting hate generation. Healers exist to fill the Tank with health so they don't die, sometimes they also heal DPS players when they mess up mechanics.

So what we're left with is DPS players, who are dealing as much damage as they can while worrying about mechanics.

In order to simplify this further, we just remove tanks and healers in their entirety. Enemies can't autoattack you, and instead the whole experience boils down to dodging AOEs while using your best DPS macro.

You have 3 hits, if you get hit more than 3 times then you are dead until the group wipes.

There I just fixed the holy trinity.

That implies there's something wrong with it.
There isn't.
I'm not interested in playing a DPS class, and I never have been. I've always liked playing tanks. I have friends who enjoy playing healers and other support roles.
Why should we not get to play what we enjoy because 90% of the MMO community just wanna pound buttons in the same order until the end of time?
And why should I have to suffer through the bad class design that is DPS mechanics just to play? Why not play a tank, which is more involved? I have to worry about aggro, taunts, cooldowns, panic buttons for certain boss phases. So on, so forth, the list goes on.
And you know what?
I put out damage numbers as well. Not as much as a DPS, but 10k damage vs 1k damage really are the same thing, since the numbers mean precisely fuck all to begin with.

You can't fix the imbalances of tank/healer/dps with more classes to do the roles. WoW proved that a long time ago. Every new class has been a tank, but I still get instant queues.
You can't even try to motivate people NOT to play DPS by making hybrid role switching easy. Again, WoW proved that.
Even adding in-game financial incentive doesn't work.

So it seems to me that the only way to fix the imbalance between the archetypes is to get more DPS to play the other two roles. That would require a cultural shift. That won't happen.

And so I get instant queues.

It encourages better teamwork, which makes it better for cooperative pve than something like mabinogi or runescape or gw2
Hell, even in real life people are more efficient when they specialize in something.

The trinity is fine, the reason it feels shitty on occasion is because of poor dungeon design. 1/1/3 is inherently imbalanced. It'd be better if encounters were designed for 1/1/1, or 2/2/2.

naw you'd have to bring back EQ style buffs that are ridiculous. like bard/shaman/enchanter haste are extremely worthwhile.

WoW diluted buffs though so every MMO has shitty 0.01% increase in mana regen or some shit buffs now.

We can't. Modern """"""gamers"""""" want their hands held too much to ever be able to build party comps and strats without a restrictive role system making all the decisions for them.

Pretty much what said
Also, I know none of us really liked Final Fantasy 13, but that game had a good focus on debuffing.

It's fine as it is. Just make it a soft trinity. In Guild Wars 1, you could have wacky things like melee monks, necromancer healers, elementalist tanks and assassins capable of solo farming entire areas.

Restrictive classes actually makes things harder.
If everyone was capable of healing or drawing aggro, there would not be any danger to a key party member dying.

Games themselves made buffs fucking worthless by making DPS Tanks and Healers demigods without it because MUH BIG NUMBERS.

If game designers weren't fucking retarded and they made a buffer / debuffer class like Dancer / Bard a REQUIREMENT to clear dungeons, it would break the holy trinity and make more advanced gameplay

However... it would simply make the trinity into a square of 4 required roles.

But at least in this case, some dungeons could be set up to benefit better from buffing teammates and some could be better benefited from debuffing enemy stats / causing status ailments / element resistance weakness exploitation, etc.

>tank is pure damage sponge, little damage output, can aggro effectively
>brawler has tanking potential while still dealing reasonable damage, excelling against trash mobs but relatively weak against bosses, can still provide aggro to some degree
>DPS is a damage middle ground, neither excelling nor failing, requiring the assistance of tank/healer moreso than the other 2 damage classes to be at max efficiency
>Assassin is pure damage, being able to make quick work of bosses but suffers against large groups of mobs due to lack of long term survivability
>Healer heals, duh
>Mage provides AoE support, either in the form of boosting damage or debuffing enemy stats
>each class clearly defined and can stand well within the meta

Not sure what you're getting tripped up about.

Can be divided into four categories: Offensive Buffs, Defensive Buffs, Offense Debuffs, Defense Debuffs. So buff and debuff could even be separate roles.
It really depends on how complicated the developers are willing to make the class or dungeon instance.

I think half the retards who stand in fire right now aren't actually retarded, they just play the game on toasters running at 15 frames per second attached to rotary telephones with 500 ms ping.

Why this is a problem with RPGs and not with cawadoody, I'll never know

>You can't fix the imbalances of tank/healer/dps with more classes to do the roles. WoW proved that a long time ago. Every new class has been a tank, but I still get instant queues.
>You can't even try to motivate people NOT to play DPS by making hybrid role switching easy. Again, WoW proved that.
>Even adding in-game financial incentive doesn't work.

Because most people's mental idea of having a fun time fighting a dragon doesn't consist of staring at it's leg and screaming for 10 minutes.

Having or not having a trinity is absolute irrelevant to making an MMO combat system good.

Even a tab targetting one can be good, as long as the MMO is challenging. Thats why every single modern MMO is absolute shit they are not challenging at all. They treat leveling as a solo experience where you are expected to grind to the 'challenge' of dungeons which are either zergfests or just HP sponges followed by more leveling until raids which are supposed to be the 'hard' content but are again just zergfests but this time avoid the red circle.

EvE for all its shitty flaws has a functional trinity for PvE content. And its fun because the game is fucking hard even in PvE.

I can bet a million dollars not a single MMO exists today that has a challenging leveling experience, and thats why the trinity feels like absolute shit. No matter what role it is if you know you cant die or lose then there is no reason to feel like your role matters because it doesnt.

Main problem with a separate buff class it that the healer class doesn't have enough to do if the party is actually good at the game. So they're given the buff role too so they can be useful in more situations.
I can see a separate Debuff class working well though.

>its bad because its bad
>i am butthurt nobody likes my super edgy game

You barely look at the screen when you're looking at the ninety pie plates anyhow. Anyone who makes this argument forgets that you're literally just looking at the rotation and making sure you don't fuck it up.

>MELEE MAN
>single target damage, taunts, crowd control, party buffs, durability through equipment

>MAGIC MAN
>aoe damage, healing, enemy debuffs, dungeon manipulation, longevity through magical aptitude

>RANGED MAN
>mixture of single target and aoe damage, scouting, exploration, niche utilities, immunity through evasiveness

I fixed MMOs for you. You're welcome.

Its a free-to-play gacha mobile shit but Final Fantasy Brave Exvius is actually very impressive in my opinion in the way they have diversified the combat mechanics of RPG roles. Especially the support department.

There are so many different support / buffing /d ebuffing mechanics in that game and each "trial" or hard content boss is so different from the next you will have to swap out your party entirely.

Granted, this is to force you to summon a ton of variety of units, but the point still stands. You actually have to change up classes/roles constantly and have good knowledge of the game's content.

Things like
stats buffing, "damage mitigation", elemental resistance, enemy stats debuffs, element weakness debuff, MANY status ailments... raise and re-resurrection, HP barriers, provoking and cover tanking, magic damage tanking separate from phys damage tanking...

Not to mention damage itself is heavily dependent on unit composition as well due to chaining + finisher damage.

Its turn based VS an mmo but these gameplay elements would easily fit into an mmo. Chaining and finishing damage would be so unique to mmo gameplay and make DPS players ACTUALLY HAVE TO PLAY instead of steamrolling the keyboard while staring at their character looking cool and letting healer and tank carry them.

You are saying WoW and FF14 are actually fun to play and have rewarding / well designed combat mechanics?

Nice bait lmao.

Instead of more roles, why not less? Everyone should be DPS like in Monster Hunter.

Most of these roles will be eliminated from the meta unless the devs are VERY careful about designing encounters.

It's called metaphysics user. These options arrived naturally because they're the best, not because they were artificially pushed

You would have to do away with Auto-Grouping systems.

They serve to reinforce the trinity, as each class must be randomly assemblable into groups that can clear the content.

Really though, what can be done about it other than giving all the classes similar damage dealing capability?

Even if you make an MMO where everyone can spec as they wish into the same huge tree of skills, people will have to specialize and roles will evolve.

Non-MMO Final fantasy games have always had good combat for the genre.
It's a shame they're severely lacking in the RP aspects of an RPG.

Role playing to Japan means something different to the west. Neither is right or wrong

The "holy trinity" can work in theory, its just that games like FF14 that use this system religiously also suffer from having hands-down the most boring gameplay in mmos ever fucking made. Literally so dull and monotonous that entire dungeons can literally be planned out hotkey by hotkey and classes are literally condensed down to a .JPEG "skill rotation" sheet you just follow over and over.

They work better for team play. Less exclusive roles makes cooperation pointless or too easy.

It never goes away unless damage is completely avoidable. Doesn't take much thought to realize this.

>You barely look at the screen when you're looking at the ninety pie plates anyhow. Anyone who makes this argument forgets that you're literally just looking at the rotation and making sure you don't fuck it up.

I think maybe you just got to the root of what's ACTUALLY wrong with MMOs

The holy trinity exists largely due to the fact that MMO combat is largely not up to player skill but instead player stats. Consider a typical PvE fight in WoW. You stand next to your enemy autoattacking while he autoattacks you in turn. There are no fighting/action game elements like timed blocks, manual dodging or anything like that. You just stand in one place and whether your character blocks or dodges is entirely dependent on a dice roll based on your stats. This means no matter how good you are at the game, your character WILL take damage. And if you're guaranteed to take damage, then obviously you want that damage taken by a party member with really high health and armor ratings. So you'll have a guy who specializes in being as tanky as possible. And you'll want another guy who specializes in healing the first guy, in order to maximize the benefit of his damage reduction without making him split his perks between healing and damage reduction. That just leaves the rest of the party, who hide safely behind the first two guys, never having to fear injury (unless the first two guys suck). Thus it is most economical for them to invest all their energy in DPS.

Go back to before WoW overused the term "tank"

you have to make the genre more action combat and no one has done that worth a shit except maybe vindictus and black desert (pve sucks in BDO)

It gets the RP part of the MMORPG better than any other modern game.
You could have both, honestly, they're not mutually exclusive, and FF games definitely have the budget for it. Witcher 3 KINDA did both.

They can still all work well regardless of scenario, while providing additional ways to play to alleviate the staleness of the "trinity".

Let's say your group went ahead and created a team comp comprised of brawler, mage, and healer.
With Mage, the brawler is provided with damage buffs along with enemy debuffs to the point where he no longer suffers that one particular weakness, bearing in mind that it requires full dependency on that class. And healer doing the usual.

But that's not what final fantasy is, it's never been like that and they have an audience that doesn't go for that

Surely buffs/debuffs come under that?

change tank/healer/dps classes into tank/healer/dps skills with long cool downs to encourage group rotation

by making it a star of david with hybrid classes

City of Heroes managed to make a game where a straight healer was the least effective, most worthless support character in the game.

Crowd Control >>> Debuffs > Buffs >>>>>> Healing

already done m8

XV already had aspects of it. If it had even a little bit of a branching main story, then it could make it fully RP in the western sense.
XII was kind of an MMO anyways, could just as easily have let you chose how the story goes.

>Tank
>Offtank
>DPS
>Single Target Optimized DPS
>Heal
>AoE Optimized DPS

>It encourages better teamwork
It does not, though. It encourages you to 'do your job' without actually taking into account what other players are doing. You might as well be playing a single player game at that point.

What is inherently "wrong" with the system itself? The focus of the raid-focused EQclone is that the combat itself is rarely the main priority of the game.
They are tab target nightmares designed mostly as a team exercise than individual mandate on skill. Obviously a team is made up of individuals who require a specific amount of skill. But the point is mostly that the classes themselves are not really the focus.
It is a lack of mandatory team-working that is the weakness of most "modern" (15 years or so) MMOs.
But, ultimately, the direct combat is rarely what people were sold on in most MMOs. This is quite obvious from the various attempts at more "actiony" combat MMOs.

There wouldnt need a "DPS" class if it was already split into two.

if you have a good tank you dont need a brawler
dps has worse dps than assassin and offers no utility like the mage
ideal comp is a tanks, however many healers, 1 mage for debuffs/damage boost, and the rest assassins

your solution to the trinity was to add a hybrid tax. world of warcraft did that and it didnt work you fucking retard

Healers absolutely have to take into account what other players are doing, especially if they suck.

That's actually completely false, at least in the case for FFXIV if you want to play well. Paying attention to what's on cooldown or what buffs are active is pretty important. I can tell you straight-up that no one likes the types of players you're describing.

I'm okay with the idea of:

>There's a beefy dude who can take damage
>There's someone who can mitigate damage
>There's someone who can dish out lots of damage

My issue is when games shoehorn classes into those specific 'tank/healer/dps' roles and designs the content around a predetermined composition. That's when it gets stale as fuck.

Look at FFXIV vs FFXI. Both have tanks, healers, and damage dealers. But XIV splits its jobs into roles and forces a strict DPS/DPS/Tank/Healer comp for all of the content. This leads to both content and class design feeling pretty samey. Where as XI didn't do this at all and let you bring whatever worked for the job. You could go BLU and perform any role based on your subjob. Warrior's could be damaged oriented or tanky. Some content you could go ham and bring straight DPS and ignore proper comp at all. You also had classes like BRD which were straight support and nothing else

I'm fine with the trinity concept as long as it's literally not there just so the devs can make a shitty content finder and automate everything

I can say for FF14 that it definitely has pretty rewarding mechanics. NIN and SMN are both pretty satisfying for me. Just remember, people thinking something is fun is not bait.

They absolutely were artificially pushed. Early era MMOs absolutely required crowd control as a main function of a successful group/raid, Classic WoW included. What happened was they kept reducing focus on those tools to the point where only a couple of them existed, and they had diminishing returns to the point where its more effective to just stab them. Meanwhile, EverQuest kept living with Tank, CC/puller, healer, and dps roles.

It's called the middle ground, dumbass.

You mean 5 dps and 1 healer.

Tank does little dps but it's still dps.

Could be optional and call it 6 tanks, as in you can heal-tank yourself something. It's all a matter of perspective.

Nigger, Red Mage in FFXI was one of the most useful classes to have around.

>tfw RDM casts Refresh
>can suddenly chain mob after mob forever

In XIV's case it's more like

>DPS
>DPS
>DPS than can take hits
>DPS that can heal

Even healers spend 60-70% of their time dealing damage in XIV

Make healer a CC guy.

Well there you go.

Also as WoW's new Discipline Priest.

>Ranged DPS
>Mage DPS
>Assassin DPS
>Tank (who thanks to "balance" also DPS)
>Disc Priest (Heals by doing DPS)

middle grounds tend to either be
A/ to good
B/ to shit
There is very little wiggle room to be balanced between both. Specialists lose to much in certain areas to justify a middle ground being to good. Usually meaning they end up being quite bad, or just overshadow everyone else.

Make every role enjoyable and engaging. Too often tanks are boring because they only have a few moves and healers are dull routine dotted with moments of extreme stress. So spell variety and tricks to do.

Also if its for questing there needs to be multiple solutions not just murder. Games make the solution to everything DPS so everyone rolls up a damage dealer to get levels fastest or to farm, etc. A good game is going to have solo content and multiplayer content if you make all the solo content for DPS everyone makes a DPS.

So its not the trinity that is broken its the piss poor questing and game design around it that is often what sucks donkey dick.

the biggest problem in MMOs is either the game is compeltely broken and retarded, or it's WoW clone and way too polished and boring.

hell you can't even turn invisible that much like you used to in EQ.

No one needs to know map layouts or where shit spawns, because you only goto a dungeon like 1-2 times ever and never again.
You never need CC or charm or root.

Hell even modern EQ has wacky shit no other mmo has like swarm kiting, reverse charm killing, double invis, bard speed, 10year old items being Best in slot, clearing in-era dungeons in literal seconds with the right class combos.

EQ had the best mix of jank, it is/was so fun. like when you utterly break Final Fantasy Tactics by using some Weird Old Trick.

Modern MMOs never have tricks like that, it's fucking gay and boring.

I love HPS recycling as a mechanic. Healing through damage dealt is a fairly awesome way to encourage better play.
I enjoyed chloromancer in Rift a ton because of this.

what kind of tricks?

Not only do buff and healers go together hand-in-hand as a single class, but most DPS classes also have debuff skills. There's already a lot of debuffs applied to a single boss, that ruins the point of a debuff class. And if you take away the DPS's debuff, that simplifies the classes too much.
Tanks might seem boring in a boss fight, but they're really crucial for working together as a team during mobs.

imo makes it more fun, usually I don't play healer because it's too easy.

oy vey

How were Rift's support classes?
I know it's one of the few games where it's separate from the healer role.

it dumbs down combat into a game of keeping your specific meter full while everything else is out of your hands. instead of real teamwork it just puts people in their own lanes where you do your one thing and hope everyone else doesn't fuck up doing their thing.

It's a tightrope to balance, which is the issue. Especially when more "traditional" healers exist. Even if a chloromancer did shit DPS, its better than zero from a normal healer. So normal healers had to have good CDs and better crisis management tools.

I can only speak for its launch~1year or so later time frame. But supports were functionally required. A bard and archon (mage support soul) was always required due to their raidwide buffs. A few souls became in and out of fashion that had support tools as well.
The issue is that they were just buff-bots, basically. Although Archon was fun to maximize it's DPS, which required basically terminal autism.

>make your combat deep enough and focused on the MASSIVELY MULTIPLAYER aspect to support pure support roles, debuffers, CCers, back-up healers, etc
>???
>fixed

it wasnt a problem until WoW came along and rotted the brains of MMO players with its shallow shit.

Nah, that's just the classes themselves being too simplified. With tricky timings and punishing CDs, teamwork is even more essential with classes.

We don't.

To be fair, shallow gameplay made it more popular. Having a lot of people helps make an MMO feel more alive.

EQ had epics in kunark, then you get another epic a few expansions later, then in another expansion there's an upgrade to the epic 2 from a really hard raid.

Most people are too lazy, don't know how to do the raid, and it's wayyyy out of era so no one is LFG to do it.
But if you're a necro and you get some people to help you, you can do the raid to upgrade your epic to 2.5.
The upgrade is supposed to boost your epic (mainhand weapon) from 8% to crit to like 10% crit.
but the devs messed up and and the upgrade adds to the slot of the weapon, giving you 8+10%, so 18% crit, making it BiS and the item is over 10 years old i believe.


now this is widely known "trick" but it's just player circulated really, there's not really a lot of guides and it's not explained in the game, obviously

Also you enchanters can AoE root a pack of mobs together, charm one then attack them, once your pet hp is low, you can drop charm through invising yourself (you pet can no longer see you so his charm breaks) and then nuke the pet/mob to get full EXP.

Last year me and my friend went trhough a dungeon with just him as a tank(shadowknight) and me as berserker.
He ran through the dungeon beastmoded out in tanking cooldowns and when he came back I beastmoded in my DPS cooldowns (berserkers add cleaving damage to all their attacks) and we literally shredded dozens of in-era mobs in seconds.
That was just clever use of longish cooldowns most people don't utilize.

They've always POTENTIALLY had good combat
Debuffs are almost completely fucking useless in most of the FF games
Hell, IV had it where Slow was literally the only reliable debuff in the game.

I kinda liked some of the mechanics WoW implemented over the years to break stagnation in the trinity
>Cata had healers use damaging spells as a way to buff healing or regain mana.
>WotLK had replenishment, which while not a break in the trinity, gave DPS a supportive role

XIII had pretty good combat. The speedruns showed how deep it could actually be. Auto-combat was what ruined it, really (besides the hallways and boring cast).

Post MMOs with god tier combat

yeah that is true, but for my own idealism i preferred FFXI, GW, Anarchy Online, etc.

lol to be considered a commercial success, any MMO nowadays has to have a player base of at LEAST a million. to achieve that, casuals need to be appealed to, and the more specialized classes, the less casual and accesible.

It would be very hard to have what youre saying and achieve commercial success. I agree the game youre proposing would be awesome, but casuals wouldnt like it, and so shareholders wouldnt like it.

vindictus is jank and p2w as hell , but damn it did action combat right.

don't tanks also do the most damage in games

hurrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr

Stop using it as a crutch for balancing games.