Star Wars: Breaking the Trinity
I’m going to quickly piggyback on top of an article by Frank over at Overly Positive, in which he discusses how or even if The Old Republic will have the “holy trinity” of Tank-Healer-DPS.
My two cents? It’s not going that way. I’m 97.5% sure it’s not.
I think that the MMOscape at large is starting to cringe away from the holy trinity, because it’s a limiting group format that harkens back to a more archaic system where some classes are “needed” more than others, and a specific group balance must be achieved to tackle more difficult content. Nowadays, you have games on deck like Champions that promise to let any player adapt to fit a specific role depending on the situation, and recent games like Warhammer which promised to make healing “exciting” but for the most part stumbled. I don’t have much faith left in this system, even though I play games with it — healing never will be as exciting as combat for a majority of players, and we’ve simply outgrown the old days of MMOs requiring specific group compositions in order to proceed. The new mantra should be, let players roll whatever class they like and give them a variety of ways to achieve the same goals, but don’t require any one setup over another.
From everything we’re hearing about TOR, there’s no reason to assume that there IS the holy trinity. The fact that you have faster combat, only 4 classes per side, and the issue of needing all classes to be as cool as Jedi means that if they created a “medic” class, it would be so woefully underpopulated as to render it meaningless.
Instead, I think we should be looking to what I’ve mentioned previously — how BioWare is going to let us develop our character the way we want, to fill whatever role we like best. Maybe all classes will have healing abilities (KOTOR had medkits and a “Cure/Heal” force power to cover this) so that they can heal themselves and not worry about a healbot trailing them. Maybe a Trooper can don heavier armor for a tank role, or lighter armor for a quick-moving scout role.
Maybe it’s just time to let the trinity go. It served its purpose, but it’s certainly not the only way to organize classes and roles in MMOs. It’s okay to have roles and specialities, don’t get me wrong, but let the player choose the class and THEN choose the role — don’t bind them together.
- Posted in: Star Wars: The Old Republic
Thanks for the pingback!
Part of the reason I think people are concerned is because with the age-old system will come age-old problems – of DPS doing too much….well, DPS, of tanks not having a clear role, and of healers either being too overpowered or underpowered from a mitigation standpoint.
Even the KOTOR games had a bit of a loose set of archetypes, but they never really shoehorned you into them. Part of this was because eventually you’d be a Jedi or a Sith and it wouldn’t matter, but part of this took a page from paper and pen RPGs where you were basically given a whole set of skills and then were set to creating your character.
No MMO yet that I’ve played has really mastered having a classless system without making the archetypes bland.
Man, why you doing this to me…two Awesome Star Wars posts. Must not get all hyped…must not get all hyped!
I will say this: Warrior Priests are fun and exciting in WAR. Can’t speak on the other healer types, but I like my role.
“It’s okay to have roles and specialities, don’t get me wrong, but let the player choose the class and THEN choose the role — don’t bind them together.”
I’m not sure how this “breaks the trinity”. So you pick you Jedi/trooper/wookie/whatever, and specialize yourself for healing. viola – you’re a healer. Now do the same for survivability (tanking) or damage dealing (dps). The trinity lives.
NOW, this is not to say that breaking up the trinity that was established decades ago in MUDs is not a bad idea – hell, it’s something I was pondering this morning. But I’m not sure that we have any solid evidence (or even grounds for speculation) that TOR will be the MMO that breaks the trinity. Odds are it will fall in line, just like 99% of the games out there.
@ Andrew – Hm, I think I had overlapping thoughts here. I think that we could discuss roles that go beyond just tank-dps-healing, such as support, crowd control and pet management, but my thought is that if you eliminate the necessity of having three distinct roles to handle a harder situation (tank to hold aggro, dps for damage, healer for life support) and instead require just a certain number of players who each can handle themselves in the situation in a variety of ways (smugglers using cover for protection, troopers using armor while both doing dps in different ways) while taking care of their own healing, then you have eliminated the trinity.
“Support, crowd control and pet management” abilities/classes – traditionally speaking – always come tacked on to a class that conforms to the trinity model.
To make sure I’m not going off the deep end: I assume the end point that we’re searching for here is a way to have epic encounters that do not conform to certain players filling the tank/dps/healing slots….. NOT a system under which everyone has the potential to fill each slot but has to “lock into a role” for each major encounter. Correct?
City of Heroes actually accomplishes this relatively well. I’ve played two distinct sets of characters with my group, and not a healer to be found. Have another friend who has to grit his teeth to play in any group that lacks a dedicated healer, though.
@Andrew: There’s a big difference between being able to specialize a character, and requiring specialist roles. Most MMOs are built now to where healing is such a massive force multiplier it has to be balanced for, so damage overwhelms any group without a healer. Likewise for tanking – most mobs hit for so much damage that anyone without really high defenses goes splat fast. If they don’t, then that optimized character is untouchable.
If you need, for example, 5 points of tanking and 5 points of damage and 5 points of healing, right now in most MMOs that means one 5-point tank, one 5-point healer, and one 5-point DPSer. Trying to do it with three people, each with say 2/2/2, and you’re going to get wiped.
Fixing that is the first step of the challenge so that three hybrids can accomplish the same thing as three specialists. The second is adjusting the balance so you need 15 points of capability (which is what Syp suggests) wherever those 15 points come from.
Once more (and I’m reaching broken record status here, I know) I question the ability of the MMO community to accept these sorts of changes, but certainly hope Bioware can pull it off.
Here’s all they have to do: make jedis the healers.
I would LOVE to see the end of the holy trinity and I think a sci-fi game is the perfect example of this. There is no need to make combat require a tank or a healer… why not just have everyone playing an equal role? It will be interesting to see what Bioware come up with.
You can break the holy trinity, but its difficult to not cheese it up. RFOnline (a game I beta tested) went a healer-less route by allowing you to drink potions as often as you wanted. The down side to that is that everything turned into a pot spam fest (including their PvP) and it wasn’t really a matter of skill. It was a matter of how big your bags were and how well you kept them full with a generous stock of potions.
@theerivs
Haha – don’t forget what my blog stands for. There’s not a negative bone in it!
@Ty: Personally, I think the better answer is to get rid of healing entirely, or at least put pretty serious limits on it. It’s a MASSIVE force multiplier, and pretty much every encounter has to be designed with it in mind. Making everyone able to heal themselves only makes the problem bigger, as it increases the quantity for that multiplier.
This will be a hard thing to do, though. Players are accustomed to having that multiplier while their opponents do not, even if those opponents are designed with the multiplier in mind. Even if things are rebalanced properly there’s bound to be a lot of people who think combat without healing feels weak and ineffective.
I think you could break the trinity by only having DPS, sure different kinds of DPS. And different classes have different tactics…
But all major combat accepts that folks are going to die. The unlucky ones, and the dumb ones.
I just re-watched band of brothers…so…
I, too, am curious about this. I am wondering, specifically, about the healer aspect in SW:TOR; I’m revising a post as we speak actually (probably posted on Monday) about my lack of vision in breaking from the holy trinity. Every time I think I come up with some new idea, I realize it’s been done before. I really hope SW:TOR throws me for a loop.
I do hope there is a way for those of us who do actually want to play primarily a healer role to be able to do so. To try to remove that role entirely will make players like me who actually enjoy the current healer archetypes to stick to more traditional games. I’m all for refinement, just give me the same fulfillment I already seek.
I actually went ahead and posted it, Syp, and I linked back to this post.
http://www.professorbeej.com/2009/06/future-of-healer-in-mmorpgs.html
[...]has an interesting post talking about how the healer archetype (as well as the standard tank and the damage dealer—the holy trinity of RPGs) might be going out of style with The Old Republic[...]
i play a healer in WoW and have no issues with its ‘gameplay’.
I also have a warlock for DPS and a warrior that tanks. All three roles are fun in their own way.
Honestly, I think the only people that think healing is boring are people who’ve never played a healer (shadow priests, ret pallies, elemental shamans, and feral druids aren’t healers, btw).
when I rolled my priest, I knew it would be a healer, and leveled as disc (the most I ever had in the shadow tree was 15 points, I believe). When I rolled my tank, I never bothered going fury. I leveled prot (way back in vanilla wow, and again in Wrath).
I’ve seen people in LFG say ‘thank god you’ll tank, I hate responsibility’. Literally. Those were the words they chose to express their situation.
To many people just want to be expendable, so if they die, or decide to leave a group in the middle of a run, they’re not missed, or easy to replace. Those people play DPS classes (and yes, I play one too).
Giving everyone ‘the ability to heal’ won’t make anyone push their heal button to help a teammate (or even themselves), especially when that GCD could be spent casting METEOR OF OMFG.
it’s just a simple fact.
You will always have defined roles as long as the game is making you create a “class” Sure, you can mix it up a bit in each class, but people will still expect things from each class.
Like Warrior Priests were in Warhammer. You can be a 2 hand WP, but people could give a crap about how much damage you did, and they will assume that 80-90% of the healing you did went to yourself.
Until another MMO comes out like UO (maybe Darkfall? i dont know cause I havnt played) then we will always expect certain classes to fill a specific role.
I’ve written more than once about breaking the triangle. I tend to believe that it’s deep in the MMO DNA because it makes players play together, which is what many devs seem to feel is the point of MMOs. I lean to a different philosophy; let every player be self sufficient and incentivize grouping by making it fun and pay off with better rewards, and let players decide on their own whether or not they want to group up.