Should SW:TOR start de-emphasizing the trinity?

[ccoolmint]

In any case, the blame is on the developer, for not planning this "laziness" you describe, and opting for a trinity nevertheless.

They addressed that with companions. And we shut up. It was in 2009, before they made so that companions are useless for challenging fights.

 

what do you mean useless i can take down champs with my sith sorcerer and tank companion.

Edited February 20, 2012 by ccoolmint

[Derekloffin]

what do you mean useless i can take down champs with my sith sorcerer and tank companion.

 

I guess his idea of challenging is set at flash point bosses with significant movement requirements. I know I've had my companion tank 4 man heroic bosses several times, and even some of the flash point bosses so long as they don't have tough mechanics that need an actual players attention to handle.

[Ethern]

what do you mean useless i can take down champs with my sith sorcerer and tank companion.

Heroic modes and raids.

[Dirtybomb]

In any case, the blame is on the developer, for not planning this "laziness" you describe, and opting for a trinity nevertheless.

 

Yes, you can always blame the developer for having a specific design intent. The intent here being people rolling different classes to fill specific roles.

 

You think there is a design problem with the game and I don't. Neither opinion is less valid than the other. I, however, have the advantage of not being bothered by the design flaw you have perceived. I have never had to spam LFG for anything, and I've seen all of the content.

 

So I guess that begs the question, is one of us doing it wrong?

[ccoolmint]

I guess his idea of challenging is set at flash point bosses with significant movement requirements. I know I've had my companion tank 4 man heroic bosses several times, and even some of the flash point bosses so long as they don't have tough mechanics that need an actual players attention to handle.

 

Yeah I've done all the way up to the foundry two man with companions.

[ccoolmint]

Heroic modes and raids.

 

you want to be able to do group content solo?

Edited February 20, 2012 by ccoolmint

[Ethern]

I guess his idea of challenging is set at flash point bosses with significant movement requirements. I know I've had my companion tank 4 man heroic bosses several times, and even some of the flash point bosses so long as they don't have tough mechanics that need an actual players attention to handle.

Really? I'm astonished. Precisely when the tank companions have been nerfed after the beta. They are not supposed to tank efficiently such encounters. I might investigate.

[Drewser]

Their design didn't lead to LFG spam. The fact that so few players want to play tanks and healers is what led to it. Honestly, this is the result of a lazy player base.

 

Or, it is also possible that the same issues that wow had followed us here to swtor. There may be plenty of tanks and healers, but they just don't wanna deal with the annoying pug community. I stopped running pugs a long time ago because of this. In my guild, we actually have the issue of having too many tanks. Kinda sucks when you have to sit, but I'd rather have that problem than not having enough tanks for the guild to clear content.

 

Edit: grammar fail

 

Our guild has had tanks/healers respec to DPS because we had too many of each for our operation runs.

[Ethern]

you want to be able to do group content solo?

Nope. That's not what I said. I meant in the case of trinty shortage. That's the topic of this thread.

If one tank or healer is missing and you are fed up of waiting for one, the developers told you could use one companion. Less trinity dependency. I'm not seeing that happening, except for the rare case mentioned above.

[Ethern]

Yes, you can always blame the developer for having a specific design intent. The intent here being people rolling different classes to fill specific roles.

 

You think there is a design problem with the game and I don't. Neither opinion is less valid than the other. I, however, have the advantage of not being bothered by the design flaw you have perceived. I have never had to spam LFG for anything, and I've seen all of the content.

 

So I guess that begs the question, is one of us doing it wrong?

Just because you don't have any problems, does not mean that everyone is in the same boat as you. Hint: hundreds threads begging for a cross server LFG tool since the Early Game Access period.

 

In a trinity based system, you cannot complete the content, or you are not supposed to, if one of the three archetype is missing in your group. That, per se, is a problem. You do'nt have to be Einstein to understand that.

[Dirtybomb]

Just because you don't have any problems, does not mean that everyone is in the same boat as you. Hint: hundreds threads begging for a cross server LFG tool since the Early Game Access period.

 

In a trinity based system, you cannot complete the content, or you are not supposed to, if one of the three archetype is missing in your group. That, per se, is a problem. You do'nt have to be Einstein to understand that.

 

Whenever somebody says "per se", I think of the vampire kids from South Park

 

But what I'm doing is not a secret, magic or particularly hard. Everyone could be in the same boat as me if they wanted to be. Instead of complaining until the devs try to make everyone happy (impossible task btw), the community has the ability to solve their own problems if they choose to.

 

This game is based around the trinity. We all know it is too late to change that, and honestly, I wouldn't want them to. I like it. We already know that BW is working on a xserver LFG tool. Once that is in, there will be qq threads about the length of the queue for DPS vs tanks/healers. There will always be a higher demand for tanks/healers in the pug world until more people roll tanks/healers.

[psandak]

I always fail to understand why people want to remove even more distinction from the classes. Doing this won't improve grouping, it will just as bad because now people have to good at 3 tasks instead of just one (or the game is just boring and is just a pew pew fest to beat a timer). It also is just going to alienate those that like tanking/healing roles.

 

I understand it because I play tabletop RPGs with players who feel "classes" are too restrictive. An example of this that I recently encountered is the "sneaky fighter" in D&D. There are some players who want to wear the armor and wield the weapons that a fighter can AND be able to sneak around and be opportunistic like a rogue. However, the current rules of D&D severely restrict a fighter's sneakiness and a rogue's weapon choices. In a "classless" system a player can customize a character to do both.

 

In a tabletop game this is feasible because the GM and player(s) can work together to meld classes together to suit what the player(s) wants. In a computer based RPG (not just MMOs), this is just not as workable.

 

I also played in a SW tabletop game where I created a medic character and his abilities as a medic were so unneeded (high level campaign) that I changed my focus to other support abilities that the rest of the group did not have.

 

However, the fact is that 99% of computer RPGs are combat oriented so taking skills in communications and navigation don't make any sense. But I could have put some points into blasters just as easily. The point is that the system did not relegate me to uselessness.

 

I played a priest in WoW (among other characters, but my priest was always my main). I leveled him in legacy/vanilla WoW and throughout TBC to be a healer. That being said, I set up my talents so that I could do some damage as well (helped with soloing more than anything). I only ever respecced to tweak my one set (before dual spec my respec fee never got above 15g). Then in Wrath, Dual spec came around. I had never specced as shadow, but I wanted to give it a shot. one night my guild had one too many healers and one too few DPS for a 10 man raid. I agreed to switch to shadow, and from that point until about six months ago, I was exclusively a shadow priest in raiding - because I was good at it .

 

I also played a cleric in EQ1 (between shadows of luclin and prophecy of ro). And back then clerics were THE BEST heals but THE WORST DPS in the game; you NEVER saw two clerics in a group because it was pointless. At one point, I had gotten so good at healing that I actually began working to improve my DPS as a cleric. But on my best day, I was still THE WORST DPS in the game.

 

The point is that in EQ1, as a cleric, I could only ever excel as a healer, no matter what I did or what my guild needed.

 

THIS above all else is what a lot of RPG players have issue with regard to classes in games. And currently in SWTOR, once you chosee your advanced class you are stuck with it and respeccing your "talents" requires you to go to trainer. This is what players complain about.

[Calei]

That is pretty much ALL it can devolve into. Your instinct is exactly correct here.

 

You have 2 viable strategies for defeating bosses in non trinity games.

 

1. Dps the boss as fast as you can before it kills everybody in the group.

 

2. Dps the boss as fast as you can before it kills everybody in the group.

 

As appose what?

 

DPS the boss as fast as you can beofre it kills the tank or the healer falls into a hole?

 

Funny how when the tank or healer is an idiot and dies the whole group is dead. In a non trinity system, we'll just keep going without them. Sure it'll be much more difficult when shorthanded but, at least we'll be able to keep playing and not call a wipe or in TOR's case; EXIT AREA.

 

LOL EXIT AREA GUYS THE TANK DIED!

[JeremyDale]

Whether you like the game in its current state or not, you can't argue that the tank/dps/healer theme-park content isn't starting to get stale, regardless of how creative they get with things such as boss fights. Guild Wars 2 and WoW (in its upcoming expansion) are slowly beginning to move away from a system where min/maxing you character and spamming button on your UI in accordance to a role you determined at level 10. While there is variation to how you play your role, (respecing to a different role if your class allows it or a tree that handles it damage output through different abilities) it doesn't change the endgame experience to a significant degree. Dpsing as a merc-aresnal is going to follow all the same tactics in a fight as a merc-pyro, they will simply spam different buttons.

 

The point here is an MMO in 2012 "late to the party" in the theme-park trinity gear grind?

I'd argue it is; looking at WoWs subscriber decline is good evidence of this. While certainly the expansion struggled with an identity crisis, (Blizzard trying to cater to hardcore players and casual players at the same time) it didn't add or remove very much from the game, in terms of now ideas and concepts. The year long bleed of subs I'd wager is more in-part to people being flat out tired of getting a new area to kill stuff and loot for "epics". While most gaming genres take a long time to innovate, they eventually do change (RPGs when Zelda:OOT and Halo:CE for FPSs<---/flamesuit on). MMOs were a niche market before WoW, and it was WoW that set the standard for attracting investor money to the genre. However, this was almost 8 years ago, and if asked "Do you want more WoW with nicer graphics and maybe one core-mechanic tweaked?" Most MMOers would say no.

 

Is logging in once a day to do a quest you've done more times than you care to count fun at all? What about killing a raid boss you've killed for weeks on end? Removing the mundane holy trinity is a good stepping stone to move MMOs into a new era. While it can't solve all the issues of an over-saturated marketplace that this game suffers from in my opinion. It would be an easy stepping stone to differentiating this game from the crowd, because as it stands now, the only thing this game offers that is different is a unique leveling experience, but that doesn't entail subscriptions, as any MMO needs to stay relevant.

 

I only read the first few sentence but I think I get the gist of what you saying and I agree with you. I"ve been complaining about this for some time actually, even before this game came out.

 

The whole Tank/Healer/DPS model needs to go. It's old, stale, and it's way-past time games got a little more creative and starting coming out with a more cohesive and complex combat-role system. I hear Guild Wars2 is attempting something like this. It will be interesting to see if they can make it work.

 

But aside from even those aspects though, it creates an over-reliance on certain specs also - specs which are often-times rarely played (like tank) and that can make grouping a pain in the ***.

 

So it's bad design from many angles. It's time it was left in the past where it belongs.

[Megaphys]

rotate aggro, kiting, use x/y/z are also tactics that can be used by trinity teams. Everything a non-trinity team can do, a trinity team can do better. That's why so many people go with that type of team, and because it's so effective, devs build their raids around trinity teams. If they built a raid to be handled by any random 4 players, a trinity team will destroy it.

 

LOTRO has bosses which require rotating aggro. Raids bring along 2 tanks to handle the aggro rotations. When a tactic calls for kiting, it's one of the tank classes that handles the actual kiting. Tanks are simply DPS who have traded some damage for defense.

 

I have seen many ideas of replacing the manner in which players fill the classic trinity roles, but the only idea I saw in this thread on replacing the actual trinity system was by giving players access to all 3 roles simultaneously. This takes away the variety and personalization that players like in MMOs.

 

Trinity system: Players who are best able to handle incoming damage take on the role of tank. Their job is to be the primary target. Players who have abilities for the survival of their team (such as heals & CC) take on the role of support. Everyone else focuses on doing damage. This is refined down to the bare minimum of tank, DPS, healer.

 

There are lots of different tactics for taking on encounters, and many of them will work just fine, but the trinity tactic works best; it works better every time than any other team composition, and its the easiest. Even if your boss encounter calls for kiting or rotating aggro, the encounter will still work better with tanks handling the kiting/rotating backed up by healers repairing the damage than if you had nothing but DPS. You could still do it with nothing but DPS, but not as easily as the trinity team.

 

the only reason that you think trinity is always the best way, is because developers designed them to be the best. If all you can do is tank you probably hate some one who can tank and heal, because they make you less valuable. If all you can do is heal you hate someone who can support and heal because they make you less valuable.

 

If you ever played ffxi, you would find that at many level ranges people prefered red mages(hybrid) to white mages (pure healer) because they could support, and heal good enough for many encounters. point is

 

the reason why hybrids tend to suck in games is because they design the games so that hybrids suck.

 

Also the reason why they dont make classes that can specialise on the fly, is because it tends to make pure classes mad.

 

they just nerfed changing stances from shadow, because people disliked the fact that they could change their weakness. (never mind tree usage energy cost and gearing limited its effectiveness)

[Calei]

So, you'd rather have a DPS zerg fest? Also, you'd have to get rid of Gunslingers/Snipers altogether due to them being so stationary.

 

You call it a zerg fest as if the trinity system is any different.

 

Without a tank and healer, each player is responsible for themselves. In addition, poistioning now becomes extremely important if you want boss fights to be challenging. This means everyone will HAVE to be aware of thier surroundings at all times. You can add multiple layers of complexity and encourage team work.

 

Class 1 uses an ability that enhances the power or helps Class 2.

 

Example:

Class 1 force pushes Class 2 towards the boss for an increase in charge damage.

Class 1 pulls Class 2 to save his life.

Class 1 creates a portal for Class 2 to walk through.

Class 1 errects a rock from under the ground to create cover for Class 2.

 

I can keep going...

[Tal-N]

Offense. Defense. Support.

 

You see it in every kind of team sport, in bussiness and in the armed forces. The fact is that you cannot get rid of the trinity without watering down strategy. If you want more tank and spanks then fine, but personally I'd prefer the complexity demanded by these three roles needing to work together.

[ccoolmint]

Offense. Defense. Support.

 

You see it in every kind of team sport, in bussiness and in the armed forces. The fact is that you cannot get rid of the trinity without watering down strategy. If you want more tank and spanks then fine, but personally I'd prefer the complexity demanded by these three roles needing to work together.

 

this i'm still not buying it that the game won't turn into a dps zerg fest

[Derekloffin]

this i'm still not buying it that the game won't turn into a dps zerg fest

 

It will.

 

The problem is, people are under the mistaken impression that getting rid of tank and healer somehow magically makes everyone have the skill set to survive as well as dps. It won't. There is only 2 ways to resolve this, stick with it and watch as people become quickly frustrated and leave, or ease up the content to the point they can get by. Guess which one has the money behind it...

 

A lot of dps can't even seem to comprehend the concept "don't stand in the fire" let alone what do when they are the aggro focus. Even with good players, adding more worries and mechanics to manage will tax them, and that means they have less room to manage mechanics of a fight. People don't have limitless attention and skill.

 

The other method, make everyone hybrids, doesn't get rid of the trinity, and just makes balancing that much harder (now you have to balance every possible class as healer, tank and dps), not to mention limiting greatly the distinctiveness of classes which is already in short supply much of time.

[Calei]

this i'm still not buying it that the game won't turn into a dps zerg fest

 

The Trinity model is still a zerg fest.

 

The only difference is you need a tank to soak the damage or else the boss kills everyone. You need the healer to heal the tank or else the tank dies.

 

Without a tank, the healer is optional and no longer necessary. If threat mechanics still exist, players will have to play hot potato with aggro and use abilities that allows them to change positioning.

 

If threat doesn't exist then there will be layers of complexity and synergy we haven't seen yet. Players will have to use thier abilities in synergy to defeat the boss. Enviromental dynamics also comes to mind.

[Rhaynne]

None of the ideas suggested to replace the trinity sound at all fun...

 

Your basically asking to make each one of us a healer/tank/dps all at once, and it just depends on what skills we activate when we have agro, to "hot potato" it to someone else so we dont get smashed...

 

How is that fun? Sounds overly simplified...

 

How is the trinity bad?... Some people enjoy being tanks, some people enjoy being healer (me) and some people enjoy being DPS. the only negative is if a certain type is a rarity. if the trinity is boring, it is because the abilities uses/tactics of a fight are note very inspiring.

[Calei]

How is the trinity bad?

 

How is it bad? Wow, where do I start?

 

-Chat channels spamming for tanks and healers

-Time in game spent looking for roles instead of other players

-Tanks least played class

-Healers interact with an interface instead of 3D world

-Tank dies, group fails

-Healer dies, group might fail but, usually does

 

When someone says people love to heal; I say they love to support. Healing is an uninnovative and primitive way to support other players. Think about it, you're clicking on a 2 dimensional box in the corner of your screen watching red bars moving left and right.

 

Players say they love to tank; I say they love to control. Tanks control the NPC's and protect other players. The threat mechanic is what enables them to do this. Control is not isolated to threat. A stun and a snare is also a form of control.

Edited February 20, 2012 by Calei

[NermalDetonator]

No. And you will understand why when Guild Wars 2 comes out.

 

Heh. I'm pretty sure you were saying "Wait til SW:TOR" comes out in whatever game you played previously. I hope the game is good, but I've learned to ignore the hype until launch.

[Drewser]

The Trinity model is still a zerg fest.

 

The only difference is you need a tank to soak the damage or else the boss kills everyone. You need the healer to heal the tank or else the tank dies.

 

Without a tank, the healer is optional and no longer necessary. If threat mechanics still exist, players will have to play hot potato with aggro and use abilities that allows them to change positioning.

 

If threat doesn't exist then there will be layers of complexity and synergy we haven't seen yet. Players will have to use thier abilities in synergy to defeat the boss. Enviromental dynamics also comes to mind.

 

Wrong - you will still need healing because someone is going to get hit or developers will nerf boss damage so that it is not even that challenging.

 

It will be a zergfest like CoH. That can be fun but don't act like eliminating tank/healer will suddenly result in some new form of challenging encounters.

[NermalDetonator]

CoH did a decent of job of making 99% of the content beatable without the "trinity". They did it by creating classes that buff/debuff and CC.

 

Yeah, what gets overlooked is that "support" is really the 3rd party of the trinity. DPS is what people who are too lazy to do any of the real roles are lumped into.

 

TOR really should have branked out, with buff/debuff/cc and a multiple pet classes.