Iterating on the holy trinity

[J1M]

Much effort has been put into new MMOs to try and avoid using the holy trinity of tank/dps/healer. I'm guessing their motivation is the declining subscriber base of traditional MMOs.

Personally, I am tired of the trinity because I am drawn to other roles where usually the difficulty is a little higher, but so are the rewards.

That said, I'd much rather see roles added or replaced than see things stripped down to a self-sufficiency model. (See guild wars or diablo.)

DPS is probably the only role of the trinity that can't go anywhere. As long as the goal is extinction-level conflicts, things will need to die and therefore someone will have to specialize in doing that. It would be pretty funny to see an MMO with the primary conflict resolution as diplomacy though.

Tanking and healing are where changes can be made more easily. There has been a strong push recently to make everyone responsible for their own well-being. I consider this a flawed goal. Certainly, surviving should be a team effort, but the role of protector is natural and common to see in real-life military and sport. Now, remember that protector does not mean the job has to involve being punched in the face repeatedly with a nigh-infinite health pool. The most interesting abilities to use while tanking are things like Taunt, Third Eye, and Shield Wall. (Force the enemy to target you, completely negate the next attack, and reduce all incoming damage by 50% for 10 seconds.)

The job of the tank should be to mitigate incoming damage to the party, not just to sit there and soak it. In addition to soaking damage, the tank should be harrying foes with things like tripping, bolas, nets, etc. Another interesting idea from FFXI was the paladin's Cover ability. If you used it and stood between an ally and an enemy, you would intercept the attacks intended for your ally.

Tanking becomes boring and formulaic when unlimited healing reserves are introduced. If the healer's total healing capability for an encounter is equal to the number of hit points they start the encounter with instead of a hundred times that, all of the sudden it matters a lot more that damage be avoided and reduced and healing the tank will result in that mana going a lot further than healing the dps.

As far as healing goes, WoW moved from the general concept of mana restrictions to now where healers are primarily restricted by throughput. It is not very interesting to heal when people are in a binary state of either having full health or being dead from not being at full health for a few seconds. Other attempts have been made to move healing into a passive side-effect of holy damage. This either results in a dps character that does less dps because it also heals, or a false promise where any real challenges require falling back into a standard trinity role.

I'd argue that this is the wrong approach. You don't want people who want to dps feeling like they are forced to play a healer because that is what is effective and you don't want to build a game that lies to a player about what their role will be until they hit the level cap. That said, the almost necromantic damage = healing approach can be an interesting variant for dedicated healers and should probably be supported as such. A talent tree or set of abilities that does not suggest in any way that a healing style will be producing output comparable to a real dps class is the right way to go.

The question then turns to what should the healer be doing if they aren't spending all of their time popping moles as green bars turn to red. The core of the healing role is helping other players, in particular saving them from their non-catastrophic mistakes. It is a support role and I think it is a mistake to think that they should have to be pressing a button every second the way a DPS character wants to. In addition to pressing buttons, there are other things that matter in an MMO fight. The healer class or another role should provide support for these situations too.

Some of these likely belong on a new 'support' role which needs a catchy name instead of a healer. Since I'm not actually designing a game, I'm just going to leave this as a collection of ideas. I will reiterate though that I think adding a fourth role to the trinity is essential to 'fixing' it.

Movement and Positioning:
-Aside from damage and healing, player location matters and awful lot. A set of powerful, but short range, situational auras would make where someone was standing as important as which spells they were casting.
-Temporary buffs that allow other players to move faster
-Allow the placement of zones that are beneficial to party members
-Slowing/rooting of enemies
-Pushing/pulling of enemies

Resources:
-DPS classes are often capable of burning extra resources for more output. Allow a support class to channel these resources into an ally to boost their performance. The obvious trade-off is that you can't heal someone while doing this, etc.
-Sapping resources from the enemy. Reduce the frequency/power of enemy special attacks.
-Mutating resources. For example, swap someone's health and mana pool. Tinker with the cooldown timers of self and allies. Drain allies to reach a state normally unobtainable. (Eg. A character with a small mana pool that regenerates extremely fast for normal usage can drain an ally to reach 200% mana and use a clutch ability.)

Combo attacks:
-With so many players attacking the same boss creature, it is a little silly that the only synergy that they usually have is the +5% extra spell damage debuff that gets placed on the monster at the start of the encounter. Have a set of abilities designed to both set up other players, and to string together other combos to form longer chains.
-Now that there are combos and chains of combos going on, allow the player who is most responsible for their continuation (aka the work) to decide when they should be executed with a powerful capstone finisher (aka the fun).
-Consider introducing something similar to combos for healing that ups efficiency and longevity (not throughput) that encourages working together

I'm interested in hearing from other people what a fourth or fifth role in an MMO should be. I know there will likely be suggestions for things like a ranged kiter, debuffer, bard, etc. but I'm hoping this discussion will also uncover some specialist role ideas I haven't heard before.

 

[Delterius]

When it comes to combo attacks I can't help but think of Chrono Trigger, where special techniques are a direct combination of people's powers and talents. Super sword cut + ice magic = Ice Super Sword Cut. But I think the logical conclusion of your argument should be that Roles (let's stick with the proverbial three: Defender, Supporter, Damager) should be designed so that each player's abilities, together, form a chain action - not necessarily a combo attack, but a coordinated action of varied kinds. Say,

enemy swings sword at archer (Damager), fighter (Defender) parries/covers for his buddy > the mage (Supporter) uses telekinesis to freeze the enemy in his position of vulnerability > the archer fires his bow, more arrows deal (full damage?)because the target was vulnerable for longer

enemy dragon attempt to eat the party, mage (Supporter) allows people to flee from it with a Haste spell, dragon's head get stuck and the Damagers do their thing; Defenders might have lured dragon's attention earlier so that Damagers are nuking from the beginning while Supporters are helping the Defenders escape/survive

But I'm afraid I'm day dreaming, though.

 

[J1M]

When it comes to combo attacks I can't help but think of Chrono Trigger, where special techniques are a direct combination of people's powers and talents. Super sword cut + ice magic = Ice Super Sword Cut. But I think the logical conclusion of your argument should be that Roles (let's stick with the proverbial three: Defender, Supporter, Damager) should be designed so that each player's abilities, together, form a chain action - not necessarily a combo attack, but a coordinated action of varied kinds. Say,

enemy swings sword at archer (Damager), fighter (Defender) parries/covers for his buddy > the mage (Supporter) uses telekinesis to freeze the enemy in his position of vulnerability > the archer fires his bow, more arrows deal (full damage?)because the target was vulnerable for longer

enemy dragon attempt to eat the party, mage (Supporter) allows people to flee from it with a Haste spell, dragon's head get stuck and the Damagers do their thing; Defenders might have lured dragon's attention earlier so that Damagers are nuking from the beginning while Supporters are helping the Defenders escape/survive

But I'm afraid I'm day dreaming, though.

I agree that what you are saying is unlikely to ever happen. Probably due to the pace at which modern games require player input. Interestingly, your sword cut + ice magic example does exist in FFXI in a mechanic known as magic burst. The melee can chain special attacks together for bonus damage and if the right spells are cast between them and after them they do extra damage.

 

[Delterius]

I think it goes even beyond the speed of input, the proposed system wouldn't work on the scale of, say, WoW's encounters. Even the 5man dungeons might employ around ten monsters at a time, leading to certain confusion. But what if the battles were scaled back a little?

 

[J1M]

I think it goes even beyond the speed of input, the proposed system wouldn't work on the scale of, say, WoW's encounters. Even the 5man dungeons might employ around ten monsters at a time, leading to certain confusion. But what if the battles were scaled back a little?

FFXI managed to have a fun group combat mechanic and you mostly only ever fought one enemy at a time. I don't see a problem with smaller scale engagements.

 

[Delterius]

I too wouldn't have a problem with smaller scale engagements.

Anyway, something I forgot to ask. Was the magic burst mechanic a combo of two characters, a mage and a warrior?

 

[Castanova]

J1M, I wonder if you're not trying to polish a turd, here. This whole concept of MMO holy trinity is just an artifact of fundamental deficiencies in the standard MMO combat model. Namely, there's no meaningful character collision and there is no effort put into enemy AI. Taunting/monster aggro is really just an excessively gamist workaround for lack of character collision or, at least, the total inability for players to control space in these games. An actually interesting combat system would involve enemies that pick targets by more complicated ways than simply which player did the most damage or healed the most recently.

That's why these games are all about skill rotations, too. Enemies have basically zero AI and are totally predictable so the only way to increase combat complexity is to increase input complexity. There are no choices to be made when thinking about how to deal with enemies, so the designers give you 10,000 different skills to use. Then it's just a matter of time until the perceived optimal rotation is discovered and then the developers need to throw new wrenches into the proceedings in the expansion.

 

[laclongquan]

Entering the thread expecting a bashing on Torment, Arcanum, and Deus Ex... Turn out it's about MMO.

Thread disappoint and OP is a faggot.

 

[Genma:TheDestroyer]

In the MMO discussion section of the board?

 

[J1M]

I too wouldn't have a problem with smaller scale engagements.

Anyway, something I forgot to ask. Was the magic burst mechanic a combo of two characters, a mage and a warrior?

It required two or more melee characters to do a combo. Melee characters were able to do combos by expending their tactical points, which built up each time they hit the enemy similar to rage in wow. Each special attack had an element associated with it. The element determined which elements of attacks could follow it in order to continue the combo. Each class could use about half of the elements, so this was basically in-place to make sure people were communicating about which combos they planned to use.

This type of combo chain among melee users could continue forever, but in practice the group would run out of tactical points after chaining 3 or 4 attacks together. The bonus damage continued to increase as the chain grew. When the chain completed there was a window of a couple of seconds where the foe would be extra vulnerable to magic of a certain type based on the combo attack used. If a mage was able to land a spell in this window it would do huge bonus damage. This is easier said than done, since often the casting time of the spell they would want to use to complete the magic burst had a cast time 2-3 times longer than the burst window.

All of this is fairly confusing and intimidating at first, but once a group decided on a combo chain that worked for their class composition and people got used to the timing, the same combo could be used in multiple engagements. Some classes would have extra tactical points left over due differences in resource gain and cost, but they can burn those points outside the combo window.

 

[J1M]

J1M, I wonder if you're not trying to polish a turd, here. This whole concept of MMO holy trinity is just an artifact of fundamental deficiencies in the standard MMO combat model. Namely, there's no meaningful character collision and there is no effort put into enemy AI. Taunting/monster aggro is really just an excessively gamist workaround for lack of character collision or, at least, the total inability for players to control space in these games. An actually interesting combat system would involve enemies that pick targets by more complicated ways than simply which player did the most damage or healed the most recently.

That's why these games are all about skill rotations, too. Enemies have basically zero AI and are totally predictable so the only way to increase combat complexity is to increase input complexity. There are no choices to be made when thinking about how to deal with enemies, so the designers give you 10,000 different skills to use. Then it's just a matter of time until the perceived optimal rotation is discovered and then the developers need to throw new wrenches into the proceedings in the expansion.

You might be right about polishing a turd. However, there are MMOs that have collision detection, and there can be more in the future.

The fact remains that working together to defeat a foe when your friends have a diverse set of abilities is fundamentally compelling for a certain group of people in a way that everyone having a gun in an FPS or their own character that can do everything like in Diablo is not.

I want coop experiences where my friends can do things I cannot and where I can do things that they cannot. Planning how to tackle new encounters is fun. "Breaking" certain encounters by using abilities in a novel way is fun. Steamrolling over normally difficult content because everyone is bringing their A-game and working together is fun.

 

[felipepepe]

IMHO Final Fantasy XIII have all the answers, they managed ot masterfull use of different roles for each class, that in no way overlap each other:

Fuck the trinity, here's 6 classes that work together perfectly to achieve the goal, each doing a different thing, but all equally usefull. Add a bit of "spacial powers" to each class, like void zones, auras and aoe damage, and you'll have the perfect MMO class-system.

Here's what chain gauges are, if you're not a desu-bro and didn't played FF XIII:

Both enemies and player characters have chain gauges. The enemies' chain gauges fill when the players attack them, and the rate at which an enemy's bar can be filled depends on its chain resistance. The more resistance the opponent has the slower the party can fill its chain gauge, but the slower it drains.

When the player fills the enemy's chain gauge fully it enters a state known as stagger and its chain resistance falls to zero. The player can rake up chains much faster and, depending on the enemy, it may have other advantages, such as being able to launch it into the air, or it loses its immunity to certain types of attacks.

That way even a Saboteur casting debuffs, something MMOs don't focus on allowing players to do, is contribuiting a lot to the battle, helping the chain gauge go up, so the "DPS" can do more damage, all while diminishing the enemies abilities.

 

[Delterius]

The Codex is funny sometimes. If D&D nerds hate 4th edition, someone here thinks it would be a good CRPG; If JRPG fans don't like FFXII and Lost Odissey, some would claim those to be great JRPGs; etc. But really,

IMHO Final Fantasy XIII have all the answers

how come someone haven't murdered you yet? I get what you mean, and it may even work. But FFXIII is up there with DA2 on the list of shall-not-praise.

Also, I wonder if these would actually work like full blown classes. From my understanding, FFXIII didn't create a rigid framework of development, characters could swing in between those paradigms as the players want them to. Another thing, how exactly does a Sentinel shield a ally?

 

[felipepepe]

how come someone haven't murdered you yet?

I live very far away.

Anyway, FF XIII was indeed the most linear game ever, decline!, took 12 hours just to finish the tutorial and all that. BUT STILL, it's combat system was very interesting, and I'm a monocled individual enough to reckon that (and buy FFXIII-2).

From my understanding, FFXIII didn't create a rigid framework of development, characters could swing in between those paradigms as the players want them to.

Yes, you could faceroll most random battles and just go full "DPS", but any tougher fight would have you changing classes a lot during combat. And since you had only 3 characters, with limited number of classes for each one, you cound't just go full "tank" when the enemy was charging his attack, so close coordination was very important. Not to mention you lose a turn to change classes.

The whole "chain gauge" thing meant that going full defensive to heal, buff and shield meant leaving the enemy unchecked (some attacks can interrupt enemy attacks) and taking minimal damage. A good fight had you doing whatever possible to keep party menbers alive, the chain gauge going up and some buffs/debuffs happening. Couple that with the ATP turn-based system, where you can make a quick early attack or wait for a more powerfull one, and you have a very interesting combat system.

Another thing, how exactly does a Sentinel shield a ally?

Mostly what J1M praised, with skills that draw attacks to him, negate part of the damage from the next attack, or even providing a 1-turn defense bonus for the entire party. They had some counter attacks as well on higher levels, and could regen a bit of hp.

 

[Zetor]

All I see in that FF13 table is self-buffing dps, enemy-debuffing dps, tank, debuff/cc, support, healer. You can find all of these roles even in WOW specs right now if you wanted to. BTW, the original (EQ) trinity was never about damage-heal-tank, it was cc-heal-tank. Everyone could do damage, but you needed these 3 archetypes to actually succeed. In fact, there were classes with entire skillsets dedicated to debuffing and controlling the enemy while doing relatively little damage. There were also dedicated support classes. (also, EQ and EQ2 suck.)

The only game I saw do something innovative with this system was City of Heroes... back in 2004. There you had tankers who tanked stuff, controllers who controlled stuff, sturdy scrappers who did a lot of damage to stuff up close, frail blasters who did a lot of damage to stuff from afar, defenders that buffed the group (healing was just one way of 'buffing the group', and far from the best one) or debuffed the enemies. Later you got stalkers (scrappers++), brutes (tankers with a 'rage' mechanic), dominators (controllers that could do decent damage), corruptors (defenders++), masterminds (weaker defenders with multiple pets that could tank pretty well), kheldians (tanker/blaster/controller hybrids) and arachnos soldiers (scrappers or blasters or controllers with support).

The way it worked was that you could go with a traditional tank-dps-healer setup (using a defender or controller as a healer), but it was not very effective. It was much better to use multiple controllers and defenders to almost completely neutralize the enemies while the scrappers and blasters nuked them without fear of getting splattered. One of the best COH task force groups I've been in had 5 defenders, a controller, a stalker (basically a scrapper with sometimes-stealth), and a blaster. Everything just got debuffed to hell and melted... with boss enemies we had to do some kiting, but it wasn't bad at all.

 

[felipepepe]

All I see in that FF13 table is self-buffing dps, enemy-debuffing dps, tank, debuff/cc, support, healer. You can find all of these roles even in WOW specs right now if you wanted to.

Where? You can't even debuff things in WoW, apart from PVP, every decent enemy is immune to everything, most you get is CC, that is completly different from being able to destroy an enemy boss, leaving him blind, mute, desprotected, paralysed, and all that. Not to mention that the debuffer here doesn't do ANY damage (except from poison), but helps increase the chain gauge, that in turn allows the DPS for more damage.

The only two real DPS you have in FF XIII are the Commando and Ravager, a melee and a caster, respectivly. But they still work very differently, with the Ravager having more AoE attacks and increasing very fast the chain gauge, while the mellee focus on one enemy and "consolidates" the chain gauge. This is very important, as while everytime the ravagers and the debuffers attack the chain gauge goes up a lot, it also falls very quickly after, UNTIL a commando hits the enemy to "consolidate" it and make it decrease slowly. This is easy on one enemy, but juggling multiple chain gauges on multiple enemies or bosses with various "parts" is a real challenge.

Anyway, there are two key elements here that we must debate as well:

Party Number - A 5-man in Wow is 3 DPS, 1 heal and 1 tank, with the game itself not allowing you to escape from that. If you were to do that with FFXIII system, one class would always be left out, probably one of the support ones. But if you go down to a 4-man party AND make everyone able to change between 2 classes mid-battle, things get a lot more interesting...

Battle Design - One thing that beats MMO designers down is how everyone has to have something to do all the time. If you're fightng a dragon and he flies, you have to spawn some ground mobs for melee DPS and tanks to attack, or they'll just sit down and watch ranged DPS fight. However, if everyone has two swappable roles, they'll have to adapt to whatever fight you designed, to a point where you can make entire battles that can't be tanked or healed, or even a no-dps "survival battle".

 

[Zetor]

Well yeah, talking about 'now'-WOW with the super-streamlined everything is a bit more difficult. But you could still say something like this:
commando - rogue, fury/arms warrior, deathknight
ravager - hunter
sentinel - any of the tanks
saboteur - warlock (in BC I could CC 4 different mobs in one heroic pull... and quite often I was required to do this to avoid wiping. I basically did zero damage except for maybe a dot or two. Note that in BC, heroic trash pulls were harder than bosses.)
synergist - any of the healer hybrids (ret paladin, shadow priest, balance or feral druid, ele or enh shaman)
medic - any of the healers

For a more straightforward breakdown, take a look at LOTRO:
commando - champion. Heavy melee damage.
ravager - hunter. Heavy ranged damage.
sentinel - warden, guardian. Tanking.
saboteur - burglar, loremaster. Heavy debuffs on enemies (loremasters have at least 5-6 critical debuffs and a host of smaller and more situational ones) along with CC. Their damage kinda sucks to compensate for this.
synergist - captain, loremaster (kinda). Captain is basically a pure support class with group-wide buffs you can time for best effect.
medic - runekeeper, minstrel. Healing.

And like I said in COH (excluding the elite hybrids):
commando - scrapper, brute, stalker
ravager - blaster, dominator (kinda)
sentinel - tanker, brute, mastermind
saboteur - defender, corruptor, controller, dominator, mastermind (kinda)
synergist - defender, corruptor, controller (kinda), mastermind (kinda)
medic - defender, corrupter, controller (kinda), mastermind (kinda)

The chain gauge thing is just an incarnation of combat pacing. This is already present in MMO group combat, trinity or no trinity. EQ2 and LOTRO have 'group maneuvers': you can initiate a group attack (either by getting lucky or through moderate-cooldown skills), and depending on what button everyone presses (and in what order), a special super-powerful attack happens. The effect is the same: you want to pool your resources and stack them in a way that benefits you the most. Even WOW has this in a really simplified way, since you're saving your big damage cooldowns and trinkets / etc for when the really powerful raid cooldowns like bloodlust are used (in your example this'd be everyone syncing up their biggest attack moves when the chain gauge is full).

BTW, Guild Wars 2 was really big about breaking the trinity, but all they did was take the COH class setup and remove the tank role entirely while making buffers/debuffers/controllers MUCH weaker.


edit: about the other things--
Group size: Again, I liked COH's parties of 8. This could make for very versatile groups (including ones with no tank, no healer, or no 'dps'). I think the worst of all worlds is SWTOR's party of 4 when 2 of that has to be healer/tank.

Battle design / swappable roles: GW2 does this fairly well, since everyone can have a long-range weapon to switch to when melee doesn't work. On my elementalist I can switch between heavy damage (fire attunement), cc (earth, air) and healing (water) with a press of a button.

 

[felipepepe]

The chain gauge thing is just an incarnation of combat pacing. This is already present in MMO group combat, trinity or no trinity. EQ2 and LOTRO have 'group maneuvers': you can initiate a group attack (either by getting lucky or through moderate-cooldown skills), and depending on what button everyone presses (and in what order), a special super-powerful attack happens. The effect is the same: you want to pool your resources and stack them in a way that benefits you the most. Even WOW has this in a really simplified way, since you're saving your big damage cooldowns and trinkets / etc for when the really powerful raid cooldowns like bloodlust are used (in your example this'd be everyone syncing up their biggest attack moves when the chain gauge is full).

Humm... I think is still different, all those you said are based on luck or cooldowns/skills, while the chain gauge is a central part of the battle, that has to be built up by the party during combat. It starts at 100%, where you do 1x damage, and your damage multiplies as it goes up, up to 999%, so it's always important to keep it from falling. And when it reaches a certain level (each enemy has its own) the enemy "stagger", where they get stunned and easier to debuff. Some enemies go as far as being completly invunerable unless under "stagger".

 

[Mangoose]

My dislike of the holy trinity is that - in its existing implementations - it's too simple from a strategic and tactical point of view. On the fundamental level, the only thing a player has to do is do as much as damage or healing as they can while balancing his aggro. Period.

Can this be made more complicated from a strategic point of view? Maybe. But in current implementations I feel we only have bandaid fixes, not true fixes. Boss battles now add arcadey parts, which do add challenge.. but the nature of the added challenge is not one of complexity. Strategically and tactically, you are doing the same thing, except from a perceptive stance you have many more distractions that make things harder. In other words, this type of challenge doesn't challenge your thinking, but rather your reactions and precision. Which is not unwelcome, but I prefer strategic and tactical challenges, or at least a balance.

In addition to soaking damage, the tank should be harrying foes with things like tripping, bolas, nets, etc.

Agreed 100%.

To extrapolate, get rid of aggro, or rather, abilities that can modify aggro. That is so fucking dumb. Mobs should hate who does the most damage to them, or who does the most heals. Tanking abilities should not attract aggro but instead, exert zone of control, as in PNP D&D. Attacks of opportunity, snares, collision detection, etc - These are true tanking mechanics that challenge the player tactically instead of just relying on a set ability rotation.

Then you add abilities for lighter armored fighters to maneuver around the zone of control (a la Mobility & Spring Attack in D&D) and you have a system that rewards players for positioning constantly on the fly, without any need to resort to gimmicky arcadey gameplay. Not that the latter type of boss fights are unwelcome.

Incidentally, the tanks in Warhammer Online had great area of control tanking, except this occurred in PVP and not PVE. If they can get close to you (or you get close to them, rather, while they are protecting a teammate or an objective), they will snare you and knock you down and set their guard on their teammate so you can only do a fraction of the damage to the frail healer.

 

[Zetor]

The chain gauge thing is just an incarnation of combat pacing. This is already present in MMO group combat, trinity or no trinity. EQ2 and LOTRO have 'group maneuvers': you can initiate a group attack (either by getting lucky or through moderate-cooldown skills), and depending on what button everyone presses (and in what order), a special super-powerful attack happens. The effect is the same: you want to pool your resources and stack them in a way that benefits you the most. Even WOW has this in a really simplified way, since you're saving your big damage cooldowns and trinkets / etc for when the really powerful raid cooldowns like bloodlust are used (in your example this'd be everyone syncing up their biggest attack moves when the chain gauge is full).

Humm... I think is still different, all those you said are based on luck or cooldowns/skills, while the chain gauge is a central part of the battle, that has to be built up by the party during combat. It starts at 100%, where you do 1x damage, and your damage multiplies as it goes up, up to 999%, so it's always important to keep it from falling. And when it reaches a certain level (each enemy has its own) the enemy "stagger", where they get stunned and easier to debuff. Some enemies go as far as being completly invunerable unless under "stagger".

Well, that's still pretty much combat pacing. I mean, the gauge is just something that goes up/down based on what the players in the group do, right?

COH had pacing mechanisms like that, too. All enemies had inherent protection against cc: a threshold of simultaneous CC effects you had to pass before you could land any CC effects on them. This meant that controller/defender types worked together to use their weaker knockbacks and such to temporarily overwhelm this protection and finally get a stun/hold to stick against the boss (you could hold almost anything in this way, even the toughest archvillains.. though not forever). In addition, elite bosses and archvillains had periods when they were susceptible to crowd control effects (http://paragonwiki.com/wiki/Purple_Triangles)

 

[Delterius]

Where? You can't even debuff things in WoW, apart from PVP, every decent enemy is immune to everything, most you get is CC, that is completly different from being able to destroy an enemy boss, leaving him blind, mute, desprotected, paralysed, and all that.

Actually, that is untrue and contradictory. CC is the ability to incapacitate a target. To leave it 'blind/paralyzed/mute' would fall in that category, as well as to slow the target, and that is often present in WoW boss fights through the boss' cronies. The necessity to Kite/pull a certain enemy to a certain location is a common gimmick, and it often requires CC. The need to hold all the boss' adds together so that people can AoE them down was also common before the devs added a damage cap to AoE.



In this fight (1:00 mark) the boss summons adds, and for every hit those cause on anyone the boss grows more powerful. To gain time, a ranged character must aggro the adds and kite them while CC'ing them as well.

To debuff is the ability to diminish a enemy attributes, though we are more likely talking about its defensive attributes. And bosses aren't immune to all debuffs. Withing WoW very rigid design, there are certain debuffs that increase damage and that certain classes were supposed to maintain as part of their rotation. This got progressively easier over time, by the way.

 

[Metro]

I liked healing in WoW (can't really play a healer in single player games). Pretty much the only thing I miss about the game were dungeons pre TBC and heroic dungeons in TBC. DPS classes also had to know more than just how to maximize their damage/hit a series of three buttons. Crowd control was important and it wasn't always about topping the meters but whether or not you could CC, kite, etc. It was the pinnacle of WoW. Getting away from the 'holy trinity' just paves the way for dumb shit like 'scenarios' where all you need is three DPS facerolling through a five minute vignette that is only instanced because no one ever goes out into the world.

 

[J1M]

Yes, when wow launched the paradigm was not 3 dps, healer, tank. It was 2 dps, healer, tank, and what I would describe as a clutch character. Usually this was filled by, and you would specifically look for, a paladin or shaman. A druid would also work.

In addition to providing supplimentary healing, these classes were all capable of providing mediocre damage and offtanking. Finally, they also had a mechanic to save the party in a wipe situation. The party would still wipe, but they could quickly resume their adventure instead of making a long run back. (This mattered more when dungeons were longer.)

 

[Mangoose]

^ A rogue was always nice to Sap an enemy pre-combat and disable it until ready. Ah <3 Blackrock Depths

 

[Delterius]

From my understanding, TBC was when the holy trinity became most rigid. Back in Lich King, people would joke about how post TBC players couldn't into low level instances without the correct specialization-roles.

'Scenarios' are another piece in a long process that began when questing became completely soloable, PvP became instanced and PvE became conveniently reached. People don't go to the world because there's nothing to do there, not because groups have defined roles.

My knowledge of MMOs is limited, but since WoW was designed by EQ raiders, didn't it really just synthetize the near dozen of roles that EQ had? As such, adding new roles isn't what the Holy Trinity needs, rather a new dynamic.