The MMO Trinity.

Spottswoode

Emma_Eunjung wrote: »

The Trinity needs to just go away. Why?

1) It makes it difficult for the devs to scale dungeon difficulty down to duos and solos.

2) It makes grouping hard to accomplish because of the need to fill specialized roles.

3) Reliance on healers and tanks makes players lazy and careless.

The great thing about ESO's classes is that all of them are capable of doing all roles, so why not leverage that fact and get rid of the forced specialization?

Ransom Olds and Henry Ford both figured out that giving a job to one specific person and dividing the labor up was a much more efficient method of accomplishing goals. As it relates to this, if the game was designed with non-specialization in mind, a specialized group will make very short work of any task. Ultimately, you'd end up with natural specialization anyway; that's just natural selection. Sure, you'd have more usable builds but the game would be ridiculously easy or absurdly difficult for them.

I think most of the problem comes from http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/CripplingOverspecialization
The five slot builds and gear sets are mostly to blame for that. They enforce a certain code to builds in order to be competitive. I'll post some more on this later when I have some time to type it up.

redspecter23

No

Lately I've been doing vet pledges with just whatever group comes together in guild that will work. 3 dps/1 healer, 4 siphoning nightblades, 4 self sustaining dps, etc.

Just did vet Crypt of Hearts with 2 healers/2 dps.

If you're sensing a theme, it's that traditional tanks are in short supply for me at least. I'm already adjusting to the new changes, not by changing tanking style but by just removing it from the equation, at least in pledge content.

Muizer

Other

Emma_Eunjung wrote: »

The Trinity needs to just go away. Why?

1) It makes it difficult for the devs to scale dungeon difficulty down to duos and solos.

2) It makes grouping hard to accomplish because of the need to fill specialized roles.

3) Reliance on healers and tanks makes players lazy and careless.

The great thing about ESO's classes is that all of them are capable of doing all roles, so why not leverage that fact and get rid of the forced specialization?

Yep, sort of. A PvP build pretty much needs either 1) the ability to sustain lots of damage 2) the ability to escape from a fight. I suppose that may get in the way of the min-maxed trinity builds.

EDS604

Yes

Vaelen wrote: »

TBH, they need to rename Guild Wars 2 to Zerk Wars 2, since all PvE is Zerker gear only, link or kick...

and that is the exact reason why i left GW2..

Winterpsy

Yes

I dont think the trinity is an artificial thing.

It was the gamers reaction to challenges, a naturally occuring thing.
It is a result of compromises. The compromise that you cannot be the best in everything. You sacrifice this for that. Eventually, you either end up doing this rather than that.

So. When you face a bunch of pixels breaking down your char's pixels, you need to have someone "healing you up". Similarly someone who takes all the damage instead of you.

It evolved like this.

I doubt it can be altered as this would be the natural response to gamers.


Hybrids sacrifice even more for something. Becoming jack of all trades. The question is, four jackofalltrades equals four specialists?

IMHO the need of hybrids is mostly the natural reaction to in game communication problems, for instance problems finding groups, language barriers, voice chat problems. When you cant find anyone, you have to get to solo and be self-sustaining in everything.

My vote's a yes. Unless the whole game mechanics are redesigned to something different role will still be there. And the trinity is practically the most basic most naturally occuring role setup.

Rune_Relic

No

Emma_Eunjung wrote: »

The Trinity needs to just go away. Why?

1) It makes it difficult for the devs to scale dungeon difficulty down to duos and solos.

2) It makes grouping hard to accomplish because of the need to fill specialized roles.

3) Reliance on healers and tanks makes players lazy and careless.

The great thing about ESO's classes is that all of them are capable of doing all roles, so why not leverage that fact and get rid of the forced specialization?

You cant have "hybrids" without "extremes".
You cant have "variety" without "hybrids".

I agree you should be able to run 3x hyrbids OR tank/healer/DPS specialists too.
So all classes have to be Tank/Healer/DPS capable.

The problem is... 100% Tank + 100% Healer + 100% DPS ...hybrids.
Zos just cant seem to isolate the 3 aspects.
We need balanced... 33% Tank + 33% Healer + 33% DPS ...hybrids.
You shouldn't be able to exceed 100% capabilities overall.

O% tank + 100% heal + 100% dps shouldn't exist.
100% tank + 0% heal + 100% dps shouldn't exist.

Eg.
Player 1 - 100% heal 0% dps 0% tank
Player 2 - 0% heal 100% dps 0% tank
Player 3 - 0% heal 0% dps 100% tank
Overall - 100% heal 100% dps 100% tank

Eg.
Player 1 - 33% heal 33% dps 33% tank
Player 2 - 33% heal 33% dps 33% tank
Player 3 - 33% heal 33% dps 33% tank
Overall - 100% heal 100% dps 100% tank

notimetocare

Yes

nobertpaulb16_ESO wrote: »

With the next patch going live tomorrow and the controversial changes be implemented, is the MMO Trinity still viable in ESO, or do you see a large number of Hybrids on the horizon?

(FYI... The Trinity is... the Tank, the Healer, the Damage Dealers)

Games without the trinty suck hard. Look at Guild Wars 2. Boring as cleaning a table with a toothbrush.

Merlin13KAGL

No

Until CP's soar into the horizons, the basic need for what the roles do will never go away.

Also, you''re never going to be as effective 50/50ing anything as you will be with a dedicated role.

By mere definition, you're going to spend <100% of your time doing something other than your primary intended function.

Aett_Thorn

The problem is that people look at doing away with the Trinity as making is to that each character can do everything. And that's not the only way to get things done in regards to this.

My very first MMO was City of Heroes, a game that started out with five classes, but many powerset choices within those five. And while certainly, you could make a group that relied on the Trinity, you could also get different class combos and still achieve the goal quite well.

You are always going to need to do three things in any MMO:

1) Prevent damage (mainly to squishier targets)
2) Do damage
3) Heal damage that does get through

What CoH did really well was it allowed different Archetypes (classes) to do a variety of those three things, but none could do it all at once (well, at least not at the beginning, end game power creep eventually let you become basically a god, but that is neither here nor there).

Preventing damage could be done with either a Tanker, a Controller, or a Defender.

Doing damage could be done with either a Blaster, Scrapper, or a Controller/Tank depending on powersets.

Healing damage could be done with either a Controller or Defender, depending on powersets.


It wasn't that the Trinity was gone. The Roles were still there. It was just that you could perform those roles in a variety of ways. And that's how this game should have been built.


The four-person team also hurts things, especially with how the Devs have balanced the content around that. There is very little room for off-build characters. You need to be either specialized to do damage, tank, or heal. There's no room for a "support" character that mainly does buffs and debuffs. There's no room for a character focused on CC (especially with the CC immunity timers). As such, you are limited to the three roles that we can do.

TGWarlock

No

Emma_Eunjung wrote: »

The Trinity needs to just go away. Why?

1) It makes it difficult for the devs to scale dungeon difficulty down to duos and solos.

2) It makes grouping hard to accomplish because of the need to fill specialized roles.

3) Reliance on healers and tanks makes players lazy and careless.

The great thing about ESO's classes is that all of them are capable of doing all roles, so why not leverage that fact and get rid of the forced specialization?

Wile I will agree on points 2 and 3, point 1 begs the question, " Why should devs scale 4 man content for 2 or 1 players?" It's 4 man dungeons, and with them scaling to the party leader, it's clear that ZOS doesn't want you 2 manning or soloing them.

Now one of the reasons I love TES is I could play a heavy armored mage with fire in one hand and lightning in the other, but we all know that doesn't work so well in ESO.

corrosivechains

Yes

I voted yes for the Trinity having a place and honestly I think there needs to be more and more done to expand on it. Bring controller options back to the paradigm, we need more instances of crowd control, buffers, debuffers, etc. Also there needs to be greater emphasis on encounter designs which discourage flat out dps races, like bosses which reflect damage or call in swarms of adds the more DPS they take. Games that have removed this become samey, arcadey, and feel like single player games.

People keep talking about the death of the MMO, or how the genre is dying, and then they whine about the stuff that made the genre take off like a rocket in the first place. They have seemed to forgot what the acronym stands for. Massive Multiplayer Online being the first half, should be exactly that. A game in this genre shouldn't be scaled down so that two people can do group content. There are plenty of games for that...hell the past 30 years of videogames have been explicitly designed for 2-3 player gameplay, everything from Mario and Streets of Rage, to Call of Duty and now even Grand Theft Auto.

The second part of the acronym, RPG...ROLE-Playing game...as in you are taking on a role within that game to accomplish your goals. Those roles have been standard for the genre since the 70's, as has already been pointed out in an earlier post. And like I said previously, the genre needs to do more to expand the available roles and encourage diversity of gameplay, to discourage the "DPS Meta" or the "PvP Meta"...it's fine if that's what you want to focus on, but such players need to understand that Meta doesn't mean "best"...at all.

Honestly what made this genre take off originally was that it made you interact with other people, get to know them, develop a sense of community. If you were struggling people helped you out to better understand your role. If you were a consistantly rude player, you'd develop a name for yourself and it became harder to get groups together to do things. It wasn't the settings or the worlds that kept players hooked...it was the other players and that sense of community. The genre should never have become so focused on the arcadey, DPS high score mentality it's devolved into.

/rant over

Inactive Account

corrosivechains wrote: »

I voted yes for the Trinity having a place and honestly I think there needs to be more and more done to expand on it. Bring controller options back to the paradigm, we need more instances of crowd control, buffers, debuffers, etc. Also there needs to be greater emphasis on encounter designs which discourage flat out dps races, like bosses which reflect damage or call in swarms of adds the more DPS they take. Games that have removed this become samey, arcadey, and feel like single player games.

People keep talking about the death of the MMO, or how the genre is dying, and then they whine about the stuff that made the genre take off like a rocket in the first place. They have seemed to forgot what the acronym stands for. Massive Multiplayer Online being the first half, should be exactly that. A game in this genre shouldn't be scaled down so that two people can do group content. There are plenty of games for that...hell the past 30 years of videogames have been explicitly designed for 2-3 player gameplay, everything from Mario and Streets of Rage, to Call of Duty and now even Grand Theft Auto.

The second part of the acronym, RPG...ROLE-Playing game...as in you are taking on a role within that game to accomplish your goals. Those roles have been standard for the genre since the 70's, as has already been pointed out in an earlier post. And like I said previously, the genre needs to do more to expand the available roles and encourage diversity of gameplay, to discourage the "DPS Meta" or the "PvP Meta"...it's fine if that's what you want to focus on, but such players need to understand that Meta doesn't mean "best"...at all.

Honestly what made this genre take off originally was that it made you interact with other people, get to know them, develop a sense of community. If you were struggling people helped you out to better understand your role. If you were a consistantly rude player, you'd develop a name for yourself and it became harder to get groups together to do things. It wasn't the settings or the worlds that kept players hooked...it was the other players and that sense of community. The genre should never have become so focused on the arcadey, DPS high score mentality it's devolved into.

/rant over

Admirably stated opinion.

TheDarkShadow

Yes

I like the Trinity. When I join a group, I want to feel my job is important. I am a piece of gear in a clock and must take my part seriously to contribute to something "bigger". If everyone doing the same thing, it doesn't feel like a "team" anymore, it's just 4 people happen to farm mobs next to each other, just like what we usually see at those crowded farming spots.

NewBlacksmurf

Other

Everyone who continues to go into MMO games with MMO= seems to have a lot of adversity and opportunities from their experiences.

MMO = a game played online under a server type
MMORPG = an RPG game played online under a server type

Anything else that you try an lump into that is not correct.
Its a server type...thats it.

The features, functions, roles, UI, etc. are all game specific and should not mimic another unless the developer intends to draw direct correlations of a specific model from one to another.

Shimmer

Yes

Gw2 group content was terrible with the lack of trinity.

Mawgusta

Rev Rielle wrote: »

GW2 tried to remove the necessity of the trinity as much as any traditional MMO has done so to date, and overall it did not work very well in terms of getting the community/players to work together.
I think (hope) the Trinity will always have useful place in ESOTU.

Grandpa Ultima Online was a skill based game that invented too much of what you think mmorpgs are today. There was no trinity. Any one could learn the heal spell or bandage skill. It way better to rely on yourself and know it's coming than rely on someone else and it never arrives. The trinity is an artificial gate, in a genre of social misfits, to gate players from achieving progress.

When it comes to what works bringing communities together. You have no clue. Instance dungeons separate players beyond any trinity. Developers know this. If they wanted communities and systems that brought players together. They would have old scholl dungeons where players meet and become friends. Not a system where you sit in town, judged on some level of achievement, gear, trying to get a group to enter an "instance" that you can't alone. In the old days, dungeons scaled, noobs met at the doors and grouped to move on..

I can't explain on what fathom you don't understand what you're talking about. Bringing people together is the opposite of what developers want. They want us separated. Wishing we could have a group to get some fun. Trying to fit in like high school. Old mmorpgs, brought players together and it had nothing to do with the holy trinity.

Edit: Players were brought together so much so. Often their guild names where named after the dungeons they met in.

Inactive Account

Mawgusta wrote: »

Rev Rielle wrote: »

GW2 tried to remove the necessity of the trinity as much as any traditional MMO has done so to date, and overall it did not work very well in terms of getting the community/players to work together.
I think (hope) the Trinity will always have useful place in ESOTU.

Grandpa Ultima Online was a skill based game that invented too much of what you think mmorpgs are today. There was no trinity. Any one could learn the heal spell or bandage skill. It way better to rely on yourself and know it's coming than rely on someone else and it never arrives. The trinity is an artificial gate, in a genre of social misfits, to gate players from achieving progress.

When it comes to what works bringing communities together. You have no clue. Instance dungeons separate players beyond any trinity. Developers know this. If they wanted communities and systems that brought players together. They would have old scholl dungeons where players meet and become friends. Not a system where you sit in town, judged on some level of achievement, gear, trying to get a group to enter an "instance" that you can't alone. In the old days, dungeons scaled, noobs met at the doors and grouped to move on..

I can't explain on what fathom you don't understand what you're talking about. Bringing people together is the opposite of what developers want. They want us separated. Wishing we could have a group to get some fun. Trying to fit in like high school. Old mmorpgs, brought players together and it had nothing to do with the holy trinity.

Edit: Players were brought together so much so. Often their guild names where named after the dungeons they met in.

Would you be saying then, that the mechanics of the "Group Encounter " need to be rethought/redesigned: to allow for a larger range of Classes to be able to enter and defeat said encounters?

Rikal

Yes

So if the question is "are we still going to have the trinity", I think the answer is yes.

If the question is "are hybrids going to be viable", that's hazy. Even if a hybrid is functionally viable (capable of pulling it's weight in a group under the right circumstances), and I'm not saying they are because I don't know, it's only truly viable if other players accept it. Probably the answer to that is no.

Personofsecrets

I think that the tanking role specifically, in end game content, will be more of a trinity role.

People will still try to do everything with their tank, but it will be more limited.

People will still do tons of crazy stuff in PVP.

Jim_Berry

I'm old-school, and naturally prefer Trinity. However, after playing Final Fantasy XIV and using the "Duty Finder" to find groups to do content (similar to the Group Finder for Dungeons in ESO), it would take DPS classes forever to get into content because there would be a lot of them.

Also, Healers and tanks would have it bad because if they messed up just once, the group talked about how bad they are. I like how ESO is now, but I dislike that a dungeon run could consist of x4 DPS while that Templar refuse to go Healer, making the Nightblade use a Restoration Staff.

Mdl518

No

Just a question....I know that every class can do anything in this game. Nb's can be tanks and sorcs can be healers....so what's the problem here? I understand what your saying about this "trinity" , but doesnt it seem logical that in this setting a group would need a healer and tank? If not then it would just be never-ending dps dungeon crawling and no real variety in the pve gameplay. I think the trinity gives players in a group a role and something to concentrate on rather then just button mashing through every dungeon and boss. IMHO they could have did things a lot better though in terms of balancing the classes and such...I've heard templar dps gets no love at end game and this is unacceptable for a game that only has 4 class choices to begin with

Mdl518

No

Meant to vote other