Originally posted by Deathage

Blending all classes into a formless blob of dps and heals is not the answer, at least not if you want to promote a dedicated, intelligent playerbase at the high end.

Let's be sure we're following this properly--premise: specialist roles yield complexity.

The greater the number of specialist roles, the more complex the game is? (This premise just might yield a result greater than 3, by the way).

Reduction to absurdity, of course, is to point out that at the ultimate level of specialization, each player is responsible for using a single ability in a party. That sounds complex as hell from a logistical standpoint (herding these 300 cats though an instance), but horribly simple from an individual standpoint ("I cast "fireball" twice per run, otherwise just suck my thumb and collect loot").

Reduction to absurdity in the opposite direction; a single generalist character capable of every ability in the game.  The Self-contained TankMageHealer. I think most people can (try) to explain why tankmages are historically recognized as bad for RPGs.

Sounds like no pat answer applies.

Originally posted by Antiquated

Reduction to absurdity, of course, is to point out that at the ultimate level of specialization, each player is responsible for using a single ability in a party. That sounds complex as hell from a logistical standpoint (herding these 300 cats though an instance), but horribly simple from an individual standpoint ("I cast "fireball" twice per run, otherwise just suck my thumb and collect loot").

Reduction to absurdity in the opposite direction; a single generalist character capable of every ability in the game.  The Self-contained TankMageHealer. I think most people can (try) to explain why tankmages are historically recognized as bad for RPGs.

Sounds like no pat answer applies.

Agreed. As someone said earlier in this topic, there is more than one way to skin a cat. But, as you said, the ultimate level of specialization in the direction of the trinity as you reasoned it was absurd, and is not what I or I think anyone else is advocating. However, the reduction in the opposite direction, ala GW2, has been implemented. What I am advocating is the creation of secondary benefits within the greater scope of the class's specialization/role. While not necessarily vital to the completion of the dungeon/raid, they may be desirable in a certain situation.

I think the Trinity is not the problem but how its implemented is.

Rift does it right, the fact that you can switch your build from fight to fight as more tanky, more healer or more DPS depending on soul combinations, to me thats the way to go. Obviously Rifts system is not perfect but its a step in the right direction of giving all players the opportunity to participate as multiple roles.

Originally posted by CalmOceans

I see some people complain about the holy trinity.

That's fine, but realise that the holy trinity from Everquest, which was based on D&D, created one of the most successful MMO communities ever, a community that grouped and was much stronger than the fast-paced action games we see now.

So people who say

"the trinity is boring, we need something new"

That's great, but unless you are able to offer something as compelling as the trinity then I'll remain playing games with a trinity.

Don't fix what isn't broken.

D&D never had a holy trinity.  A party with 4 magic users is just as viable as one with 4 fighters.  I have never understood why this has to be different in mmos.

ASHERONS CALL

This game threw out the holy trinity yet people grouped. You could have any combination of skills you wanted. When grouped everyone DPSd, everyone healed, everyone tanked. People had completely individual builds yet still needed numbers to accomplish goals/quests. No "raid" or quest required X tanks, X healers, X DPS ect. It also allowed groups larger than 6......

While this game was not a smashing sucess as measured by subscription numbers. Anytime this game is mentioned you hear nothing but rave reviews of people who played it for YEARS(not weeks/months). If only it had a better graphics engine......

Originally posted by Eir_S

Originally posted by Dexter2010

Originally posted by aSynchro
1) EQ didn't have a strict Holy Trinity. And sorry but its the first time i heard "EQ community was amazing *because* i could play a tank!!"

2) The Holy Trinity IS broken. Tank in pvp? Healer when doing solo quest ? Having to wait 1 hours because your group is missing a tank ? Having your healer friend enable to play with you because you are yourself a healer ? Please.

4) D&D doesn't use the trinity. There a long thread about it somewhere on these forums. Basic idea is: you heal *after the fight*

3) Non trinity mmo already exist and are/were succesful. You should check UO EVE or GW2 and its +3 millions boxes sale.

I agree. I like Rift's idea of every class can fill all roles and the early days of GW1 where healers can fully dps. I want to be a dps-ing tank/healer or some sort of hybtid that excels in 2 roles. I want to form parties where you can replace a fulltime healer with 2 semi-healers. Soloability is good too...

How is the trinity not broken? You beg or wait an hour for a tank to enter a 15 min dungeon then find out he's undergeared or no good and he's got a God complex. People steal gear -your gear- outside their role. The trinity restricts gameplay and makes for more grinding. Wanna tank instead of healing? Need on the tank's gear and people shout Ninja before kicking you. Wanna dps a raid with defence gear cause that's all you got? You like being pigeon holed for being best geared healer? You like people rolling need on everything cause they have 3 specs?

Well to be fair, that's not really the trinity's fault, that's the fault of dev's who think there can only be one kind of loot distribution system.  Why not have a system that allows progression but also one like GW2's where everyone gets loot from a chest?  Hey maybe it's not what you wanted, but you can always try again, just like any raid, but the chances of you getting something increase exponentially. 

In addition to that, I guess maybe you could also spawn different gear based on what spec you're in at the time.  The whole Need roll is the problem in my opinion, not the trinity, though that's a bit broken itself.

This alone would solve countless problems and I've asked for it for years but WoW won't even consider it.

That would be an imperfect idea as getting initial gear could be problematic.

Originally posted by Antiquated

in the opposite direction; a single generalist character capable of every ability in the game.  The Self-contained TankMageHealer. I think most people can (try) to explain why tankmages are historically recognized as bad for RPGs.

 

A tankmagehealer is not really bad if done right.
 What adds depth to it is making abilities effictiveness highly situational. Obviously noone plays a six-handed god who can multitask all roles at the same time. What a group of tankmagehealer players does is play holy trinity by situation: the person who gets attacked goes into tankmode, the rest divides themselve into dps and healer, some might even switch between depending on need.  Ideally the fight is highly dynamic with mobs switching targets, silencing schools which forces to switch to another role , or simply going into x dps or group wipes to force all playing offensive.

Think like switching to different stances depending on if you get attacked , a friend gets attacked and you need to heal him or you got your hands free and can go into dps mode.

Most current holy trinity games already implement this albeit in a form where the primary choosen role is much stronger then the others.
 

The bottom line is the "holy trinity" is just another way of saying classes are specialized.  This type of play only comes in games that stress group play over soloing.  EQ had CC on top of Heals, Tank, DPS, but again all were specializations for specific classes, but it wasn't a holy trinity.

Soloers want to be able to do it all...have a party in their pants so to speak..so they aren't dependent on anyone else in game.  But this type of mindset is what has made MMOs crap IMHO.  People play the game to solo and have a chat box to entertain themselves in these games.  "Forced grouping" MMOs end up being much richer due to the social element of actually having to work as a group with people that may be located all over the globe to solve in game challenges.  This social interaction is what leads to friendships and a hook to keep players wanting to log in. 

The MMORPG genre needs more specialized classes "forced grouping" games as the industry if just full of solofest games..very few left that require good group play to advance in game.

Originally posted by Giffen

The bottom line is the "holy trinity" is just another way of saying classes are specialized.  This type of play only comes in games that stress group play over soloing.

Wrong.  Again, Tabletop games don't have a holy trinity and they stress grouping.  MMOS sprang out of D&D, so why must they have a trinity?  I have never heard any valid reason why.  Some game designer decided it would be a good idea and it works, but why must EVERY game follow that model? 

Originally posted by JRRNeiklot

Originally posted by Giffen

The bottom line is the "holy trinity" is just another way of saying classes are specialized.  This type of play only comes in games that stress group play over soloing.

Wrong.  Again, Tabletop games don't have a holy trinity and they stress grouping.  MMOS sprang out of D&D, so why must they have a trinity?  I have never heard any valid reason why.  Some game designer decided it would be a good idea and it works, but why must EVERY game follow that model? 

Tabletop games are for small groups. MMOs are not. So what if MMOs sprang out of D&D. Things changed. Video games sprang out of Pong. Do you see many similarities between Pong and games you play today?

Now, i do agree there is no reason why trinity is needed in all games. But D&D is not the reason. There are obviously other combat mechanics that will work in a MMO setting. For example, FPS.

Originally posted by aSynchro
1) EQ didn't have a strict Holy Trinity. And sorry but its the first time i heard "EQ community was amazing *because* i could play a tank!!"

EQ did have a strict holy trinity, in fact that's where the name comes from, it was Warrior, Cleric, Enchanter.

Highly unbalanced classes compared to other classes. It was called that because they were powerfull classes, something peple now would scream bloody murder for because they were extremely unbalanced classes, which is actually good up to a point. You want your classes to be specialised and slightly unbalanced.

People later changed this to Tanks, Healer, DPS even though the Enchanter is CC. Which for me is the same thing, 3 specialised base classes you build a group around.

2) The Holy Trinity IS broken. Tank in pvp? Healer when doing solo quest ? Having to wait 1 hours because your group is missing a tank ? Having your healer friend enable to play with you because you are yourself a healer ? Please.

PVP players need to start realising that specialised unbalanced classes are the reason people group. If you make everyone a jack of all trades like some PVP players ask for every time, you end up with the current solo games mistakingly called MMO.

4) D&D doesn't use the trinity. There a long thread about it somewhere on these forums. Basic idea is: you heal *after the fight*

I never said D&D did the trinity.
 

Originally posted by chelan

its so sad. some of you guys should just find a good 3.5 tabletop campaign and experience it.

I haven't had a good PnP experience since the early '90s. A former friend started a DnD club in university and pleaded 'til I joined. Most members cared more about stuffing snacks in their faces than playing and they took three 3 hour sessions to pick a class.

The holy trinity is boring because it puts you into roles where, for the most part, you can stand in one place and spam the skill you're supposed to spam (taunt, heal, damage).  Sure, some games (especially in raids) make you move around more to avoid AOE attacks and the like, but avoid them and its back to spamming your skill.

Guild Wars 2 isn't a failure because of how it was designed.  It is more of a disappointment because the game allows you to do just about everything solo except instances, and the difference in difficulty between the two is so far apart.  The game never teaches you how to function in a group.  You don't even communicate in the "open" world.  Throw a whole bunch of people that have no group experience into an instance and you get what most people complain about with GW2 -- people run in their own directions, they aoe everything in sight, and they don't always help downed teammates.

If you're playing a game with the holy trinity, you can have easy solo play and still go into instances with a group that can survive because everyone can fall back into their role and they don't really need to think much about what to do.  Spam heal, spam taunt, spam damage.  To be honest, the most fun I've had in holy trinity group is when someone screwed up or we didn't see a patrol when we pulled.  I know that some players will scream that the team screwed up even if everyone survives, but sometimes those are the most fun to me because you step out of your cement shoes and scrambled to come up with a victory.  I'm not saying a group of incompetents is more fun... but these days you can't really tell how good a holy trinity group is until something goes wrong.  (I will admit that this doesn't apply to big raids because one screw up is usually enough to kill everyone.)

I think there is still better gameplay than the holy trinity.  Maybe you remove tanking... it has a mechanic (taunt) that doesn't work in pvp, so change it so that it makes more sense.  Maybe tanks are knockdown specialists, or maybe they can protect weaker players by intercepting attacks rather than yelling "Hey, over here, attack me!"  I've said this in other holy trinity threads, but I don't understand how getting repeatedly hit (mauled or stabbed through the gut) while being healed equates to any epic battle I've ever pictured in my mind, read in a book, or saw in a movie.

I really don't think spamming healing makes for an epic battle either, but at least it is a mechanic that works in both pve and pvp.  I really don't like full heals and I think dots make for a more challenging battle (you'll recover as long as you don't get in too much trouble for a few seconds).  But I can't say that removing healing completely from a game makes the most sense.

In summary, I think there are better options than the holy trinity but most players like the safety of knowing they need to spam heal or taunt and they'll be okay.  I think tanking is the weakest of the trinity and could be tweaked to something more interesting than a taunt machine that takes all aggro.

I don't get this argument.

For me it's never been a matter of if a system is broken or not. It's the limiting factors. You can claim all you want that a trinity adds structure to a game and that without it you'd be left with mindless slogs. You're free to that as an opinion.

As a fact though, you'd be wrong.

Point on this being to look back at previous titles built on the premise of customization of characters. Asheron's Call was a decent example of a game with open-ended design to how you wished to build a character, and before players got haerdcore into the must-haves to exploit game imbalances there was a wide variety of builds you could prototype out and setupf that were actually perfectly functional, and yet could still fall in line with a group.

Or another example, Planetside. Yeah it's a shooter, but for those that actually played the game youi can think back and note how they left progression and specialization as a personal choice. Your class played as you kitted it and no matter the selection, unless you were exceptionally redundant or just rolling with a zerg, you could have a build to benefit a squad because you would have particular equipment to address at least one of the aspects of Planetside's conflict.

It might not be a popular or technically good game, but an additional example can be seen in Champions to a degree. Yes, the game has a healing class design to go along with a tank and a dps build, but you can also equally note that the game allows for character customization to the extent that you can make any combination in-between as well, and blending the class features generally goes a long way to not just building a better player, but a better team, as characters are more capable of cycling through combat and supporting one another.

This is a similar aspect to what people have a habit of discounting about GW2's approach. They simplify the notion to claim the lack of the trinity makes combat scenarios into just a bar room brawl type scenario. I find this claim generally erroneous, as I can note offhand that I see decent teams for raids and even open world play typpically choose their gear and consequently skillsets based on what the other members of the group uses, and that goes a fair way in optimizing the play of the group without them having to adopt a specific role. It's only when they choose to do silly things like all picking the heaviest hitting weapon sets they have or all weilding heal items that you get the pug wipes and spam fests where people dash themselves upon the mobs several dozen times over to complete a raid.

Then there's also one of my generally favored examples that went largely unplayed by the world in spite of the game's quality. Saga of Ryzom. A third title that let players progress in any skill thery wanted and went as far as letting them create the abilities they were using. How did they create team play elements? Well mainly by building a better game with more unique AI, creatures that respond in passive, defenseive, and predatory fashions, and larger combat situations that required co-ordination over simply making sure your role kept a wheel turning.

That brings me to my point really. The problem is the external factor of co-ordination. You can have an mmo with the trinity built into it, like Tera, and that trinity can be utterly useless because you need very little co-ordination to beat any of the creatures in the game, even the world bosses. Y^ou can have all the class definition or malleability you want, but as long as the core mechanics of combat itself is simple, the gameplay is going to be simple.

If it wasn't obvious already I'm generally in disfavor of the trinity. Not as the trinity itself, but the accompanying common trait to class-lock you where I would preferably be able to kit myself out in a scale between any of the game's elements, always meeting a net sum limiting the overall performance to roughly equal. So if you ask me what I'd rather a game have you'll most likely hear me say a 'classless system', but don't mistake that for a disorganized one. I still believe in the value of templates.

It's the complexity of combat itself that needs to be addressed. When the gameplay is simple at the basic level of interaction between you and the world, no amount of class definition or customization will fix the nature of the combat.

Originally posted by Mavek

Originally posted by zipzap

Originally posted by CalmOceans

Don't fix what isn't broken.

so nothing should be upgraded or changed ever?

i'm pretty sure the shape of the wheel has stayed the same for the last 20,000 years.

That's a bad analogy. It implies that the wheel hasn't evolved since whatever abstract frame of time you just named in a vain attempt to be cheeky. There's an entire portion of the automotive industry based around the development of wheels that offer stronger performance or are made for different situations. 

@OP, I like the way GW2 and other soft trinity systems do it, because my main issue with the Holy Trinity is the pigeonholing of classes to 3 basic and unmoving archetypes. It's boring, stagnant, and needs to go imo. But that's my opinion. If I pick a heavy class, I want it to be because of the strength of the class & it's unique properties they created, and how fun it is to play that class. NOT the role it's ascribed to. 

The trinity is not broken.  It is simply one of several completely valid and completely relevant styles of gameplay.

Not liking something, does not make it immediately bad or wrong.  I, personally, do not like trinity based games.  Does this mean they are broken or bad?  Not at all.  Nine million WoW subscribers say otherwise.

Do some of us want a less structured playstyle?  Yes, however, we are actually in the minority.  The vast majority of MMO gamers enjoy having a solid, structured, point A --> point B,  environment.

There's an interesting dichotomy between MMO gamers and single player gamers.  I've noticed that the vast majority of MMO players want a very structured game with levels, classes and specificially designated roles.  Single Player gamers, however, tend towards the complete opposite side of the spectrum.  The TES series, The fallout Series, the Farcry Series and, I could go on for a long time here, are all sandbox games.  Very open, very unstructured.  Build the character you want to build, and play the game how you want to play it.

This has never really translated well into an online community for some reason.  Even our best shining example of this, EVE Online, only boasts a tiny fraction of the players (keep in mind subs and players in EVE are vastly different concepts) of WoW and GW2.  Games that have tried this are left in relative obscurity or bashed by the community such as Darkfall which was a great sandbox, but no one played it except for a tiny community of hyper griefing uber pricks.

I'm holding out great hopes for The Repopulation.  It may be the game that I've been waiting for... or it may not, but I'm hoping it gives me a chance to play without the trinity.

Originally posted by Mavek

Originally posted by zipzap

Originally posted by CalmOceans

Don't fix what isn't broken.

so nothing should be upgraded or changed ever?

i'm pretty sure the shape of the wheel has stayed the same for the last 20,000 years.

*looks at tank*

*looks at snowmobile*

*looks at seaplane*

Wheels are great, but they're not the only thing out there anymore.

Originally posted by Eleazaros

The older style wouldn't work with modern gamers.

The ADD nature and "demand" based way games run would preclude most alternate systems from working.  It needs to be consistent and predictable.  If you can't google the answers on "best build" "how to do ..." so on and so forth, most gamers have already demonstrated they'll throw fits.

These common attributes you find across MMO's is due to the same logic as your DPS parser.  The game companies "parse" who does what and build more of what the players do vs just what they talk about - which rarely matches what they stay with for any length of time.

Too much variance off the common themes we see and it won't be acceptable by enough players to make a quality game that can be supported by the game manufacturer.

So what people do as they play limits what they can and will be able to offer with "high quality" presentations.  It costs to make the stuff.

Whoa, buddy, this has nothing to do with ADD and everything to do with better gameplay.  Specialists relying on each other is applicable to real life collaboration, which is why it's typically considered more fun (learning to collaborate in a group is an enjoyable form of play.)

Everyone being mostly the same and collaborating?  Well that's just less of a game, and therefore considered less fun.  It's not devoid of fun, but simply less fun.

Does specialization have to take the form of a trinity?  Not exactly, but the trinity is so simplified down to its pure form (mitigation, recovery, and damage; tanking, healing, and DPS) that you're going to be hard-pressed to find specializations which can't be put into those categories.

For example in Puzzle Pirates a ship needs completely abstract jobs to be done: Rigging, Sailing, Bilging, Carpentry, etc.  From one point of view these share absolutely no similarities to Tank, Healer, DPS.  But when you actually know how all the pieces fit together, you realize Rigging/Sailing are essentially DPS, and Bilging/Carpentry are healing.

So even this game which is absurdly not the typical trinity can be quantified by the trinity because its definition is so broad.