How can there be no trinity?

[Lothaeryn]

People seem to misconstrue that Any form of role is set in stone via a Trinity system. If you have the ability to mitigate damage, you are a tank, if you can heal yourself and your allies, your a healer, if you can stop your opponent from attacking, your a CCer/Controller.

But that isnt necessarily true, look at ret paladins for instance, retribution was meant to be a DPS spec, yet for a good amount of time, Ret was able to do great offhealing that could rival that of a healer. But just because he could heal well, doesnt mean he is a Healer specced character.

The trinity system literally means that there will be a person who specifically heals, a person who specifically mitigates the damage of the enemy from reaching others, and there will be one person who does damage and prevents enemies from doing excessive damage to others by controlling them.

ergo, this means the trinity provides people will three roles to fill, Tank, healer, and DPS/CC.

The problem with this sytem is that these roles literally bind the player into ONLY fulfilling one role as their best form of contribution to the team, that means a healer can only heal well, but cannot dps or tank well. A tank can mitigate damage well, but cannot necessarily heal well or dps well. A DPS can do damage, but cannot heal or mitigate damage like the tank or healer.

^ This is the trinity system at work, you cannot deviate from this format, period. If you chose a role (lets say dps for this example), you are stuck with it (unless you respec to another one), you cannot do anything but this role well, and while you may contribute a heal or two, or tank the mob a little bit, you are not expected to do anything else but DPS.

In Guild Wars 2, this is not the case. The healing system in GW 2 prevents any one person from being able to heal others continuously, instead, everyone has a handful of self-heals, each of them may have different effects, some may protect you, some others. Some may even heal others if they are close enough to you, but you cannot sit there behind everyone else and heal them for the duration of the fight.

The same applies to Tanking, as we know so far, no class can withstand continual punishment, each class has about the same amount of limit as to how much punishment they can take before going down, and since there is no official healer who can keep them up since the healing system prevents it, no one can sit there and take a beating for an excessive amount of time during a fight.

That leaves the DPS/Controll system, from what we know, every class has control abilities, while some may be more effective than others, every class has the potential to shut down an opponent for a small amount of time, leaving an open window for them to help others or fight another opponent altogether. Since there is no tank or healer however, DPS must find a way to keep themselves alive while dealing with their opponent who is attacking them, this may involve kiting, CC, creating a barrier between them, or even letting another player take a few hits. Because of this, ALL players must cooperate with eachother and coordinate wisely in order to overcome a powerful enemy, because no single person can tank or heal continuously throughout the duration of a fight.



Therefore, if no one can tank an entire fight, and no one can heal an entire fight, that means there cannot be anyone assigned to those roles and be good at them, therefore, there is no Trinity System.

[Racthoh]

Hopefully mobs won't have any sort of threat table or target preference. They could just cycle through players at random and as for healing, I guess every class will have the survivability to live through whenever the boss decides to focus on him.

[Jaerin]

Zeek: That sounds like fun, but to me that sounds like its going to be utter chaos.

If there is no tanking how do you know who to put the shield on? You have to know who's going to get hit right to preemptively stop an attack? How is that an different than pre-casting a healing knowing the tank is going to get hit or even better yet a disc priest casting their shield. It's still damage mitigation on way or another.

If a person is so self-reliant what is going to prevent people from steamrolling content? The level of coordination of the group? If that's the case is vent/mumble going to be an absolutely requirement? If not why wouldn't they basically be required to make content easy enough for some common denominator?

[IMonstrousI]

I see a lot of terms thrown around and the base concepts are all still there the only real difference is that I see is everyone is hybrid.

You said it yourself. Everyone is a hybrid. nuff said

[Primal Zed]

I've seen it a good amount in a few games. It's mainly a few individuals getting an inflated sense of value because they are fulfilling a role that few want to (tanking in WoW for example). They feel it makes them special and unique, which is one of the main reasons they did this. I had a friend that always wanted to play whatever class/role was "most needed", because he enjoyed the feeling of being needed for what role he fulfilled, not necessarily anything else.

I've definitely seen the attitude.

I like to be a tank because I like to be in a position to make a big difference in how well the run goes. (Depending on how the game is tuned, I might be able to do this as DPS as well, but for the difficult 5 man runs in which placement and pulling really mattered, I very much preferred tanking.)

As a long-time tank, the proposed new group dynamics is one of the things in GW2 I'm most interested in. I'm not worried about losing importance; I'm excited to be able to show my skills at playing and be useful to the group in any situation. I'm excited at challenging content being based on seat-of-the-pants reactions and coordination, not on stat numbers and pigeon-holed roles.

Of course, I'm not thoroughly convinced at ArenaNet's success in breaking the holy trinity, and won't be until we can see how the hard-modes of the dungeons play out with hundreds of thousands of players running them and sharing their strategies.

You said it yourself. Everyone is a hybrid. nuff said

Considering how much variance there is in what is considered a 'hybrid' in an MMORPG, I think elaboration is in fact required here.

[Jaerin]

So you are playing Skyrim- you have all the aggro seeing as how it's single player, your doing damage to down the mob, and then you notice your companion NPC is low on health so you toss them a heal. Now would you say your character fitted in one of the Holy Trinity in the WoW model? At most you could say they were "tanky" if you build your character with survivability in mind but they are notthe same as WoW's idea of tanks. Now imagine that with four other players-each able to fulfill either role but not zoned in that role exclusively and switching to the encounter's demands- I believe that is what GW2 is going to play like.Will there bespecs leaning torwards to a certain role? I have no doubt there will be but even at that they still need to be versatile as it's notgoing to like a blood dk charging in and holding aggro until the boss dies.

Who said that any one person can only be 1 role? The holy trinity does not require those roles to mutually exclusive. I never said that...

I'm saying that just because I can't define myself ONLY as a tank does't mean the 3 roles still exist. WoW has tanks and offtanks. Those offtanks are DPS unless they are tanking. It doesn't matter if you are talking about requiring 1 tank or 5 tanks rotating between each other there is still a tank.

As for the 5 mesmers, one of those people were getting hit by the mob...*edit* correction the person healed themsevles the others supported that person. Who was taking the damage and who was supporting could be changing every second of the fight, but there is still a tank and still a healer and still a dps. The point is if ANY 5 people with a given level or gear requirement can complete ALL content then what makes any one class special?

Why do I care if I'm a sword swinging badass when I'm going to be panzy ass healing as much as the next guy?

[Zyzzyx]

Zeek: That sounds like fun, but to me that sounds like its going to be utter chaos.

If there is no tanking how do you know who to put the shield on? You have to know who's going to get hit right to preemptively stop an attack? How is that an different than pre-casting a healing knowing the tank is going to get hit or even better yet a disc priest casting their shield. It's still damage mitigation on way or another.

You have a big old mob. Big old mob has to move to other players. He also has to turn to face melee players. He will likely have a "tell", even if it is quick, to say "I'm about to stomp the crap out of this guy, shield him".

If a person is so self-reliant what is going to prevent people from steamrolling content? The level of coordination of the group? If that's the case is vent/mumble going to be an absolutely requirement? If not why wouldn't they basically be required to make content easy enough for some common denominator?

Having tanks and healers, to me, makes content even more restrictive and harder to play around. Because players know exactly where a mob is going, who it's hitting, who is healing, they get pigeonh..eld? Pigeonholded? (edit, I think it was just pigeonholed) Whatever- They don't really have much freedom is what I'm getting at. Games with "trinities" are stupid easy, because every single thing is a predictable pattern. WoW bosses, even hard mode bosses, aren't challenging because of mechanics. They're challenging because you have 10-25 retarded people you have to rely on to press their buttons harder.

I love this system, it might actually make people think. They can still make it difficult, just not tailored for specific compositions.

[Umbra]

From what I see it will be highly disorganized. What if everyone in your group decides to heal or tank and not dps? or vice versa? Just seems like it will take a lot of organization to make your group play optimally.

Then you're all going to die. Hopefully, that should tell the group that something is going wrong.

On the same note, a GW2 player can't say: "I want to heal people", because they can't. There's no directed heals in this game, so they simply can't heal people. If they try to tank, they'll either quickly be beaten to death or use their skills to avoid being killed through other means, like say blinding the enemy or dodging out of their way. There, you have the embryo of a Control aspect, which is part of GW2's class design philosophy.

[Primal Zed]

Zeek: That sounds like fun, but to me that sounds like its going to be utter chaos.

If there is no tanking how do you know who to put the shield on? You have to know who's going to get hit right to preemptively stop an attack? How is that an different than pre-casting a healing knowing the tank is going to get hit or even better yet a disc priest casting their shield. It's still damage mitigation on way or another.

If a person is so self-reliant what is going to prevent people from steamrolling content? The level of coordination of the group? If that's the case is vent/mumble going to be an absolutely requirement? If not why wouldn't they basically be required to make content easy enough for some common denominator?

I think chaotic encounters sound more fun! Being able to react and alter what you do on the fly will be the mark of a good player. Scripted fights for the snooze.

Pay attention to who has the enemy's attention at the given time. That will likely change throughout the fight. Given how a lot of the 'control' skills impact mobility, kiting will probably be a frequent tactic. Help someone kiting by throwing more roadblocks in the enemy's way, or if you have a head start or a skill that will allow you to tank more directly for a brief time, jump in and take the enemy's attention. If you see one person drop a healing area of effect spell, drop another on top of it so people going into it gain greater benefit.

If people just pay attention to what's going on around them, they shouldn't need voice chat. How many team sports do you know of in which players have to be constantly talking to each other in order to play effectively as a team?

Here's an article describing the writer's hands-on experience with one of ArenaNet's dungeon, trying to field the question of just how groups work together:
http://www.killtenrats.com/2011/06/2...e-dungeon-gel/

Here's another addressing how challenging the dungeon was, and the potential for further challenges:
http://www.g4tv.com/games/pc/45299/g...ian-catacombs/

---------- Post added 2012-02-06 at 06:40 PM ----------

Why do I care if I'm a sword swinging badass when I'm going to be panzy ass healing as much as the next guy?

If you want to focus only on yourself and not on what you can do for the team, then I imagine that will indeed be a problem in the system ArenaNet is aiming to design. I'm ok with that.

[Snow White]

This isn't about listening...this is about discussing how it works. Not sure why people are reducing this to whether I'm right or wrong..or if I'm going to play or not. I'm asking questions and providing scenarios to get a better idea of how the system will work.

So all the passion and frustration you guys have about me not listening is pointless. I don't care if you like the game or not. I'm asking how the system will work and what you guys think and question why you think that its going to be any different. I see a lot of terms thrown around and the base concepts are all still there the only real difference is that I see is everyone is hybrid.

You've had at least 5 good replies in this thread explaining how the system works. If you still don't understand it then there is no helping you.

Here's a great reply you didn't bother to acknowledge:

There is no tanking role. There is no healing role. Period. There are heals in the game, there are ways to temporarily mitigate damage, but you can't do either for more than a very short period of time. Even if you use abilities to temporarily heal or mitigate damage, the overwhelming majority of your remaining abilities will be dedicated to doing damage in one form or another. Optimal group play is all about communication and individual skill, as it should be.

So you can stop nitpicking through this thread trying to cause arguments with people and read the information that has been posted for you.

[Deleted]

Post after post in this thread says basiclly the same damn thing over and over again, just with diffrent words, except for Jaerin that is severly wow damaged >_<
And no im not trying to troll anyone, this is pointless, Jaerin wont budge from his belifs that there cant be a trinity.

[Herecius]

The existence of the trinity in gameplay design has its lynchpin in the illusion of a tank being a necessity. Tanks are only needed when mobs hit so hard that anybody that is not defined as a 'tank' dies extremely quickly. If mobs do not hit people for so hard that they die in a few seconds at most, but everybody has the ability to keep themselves alive and avoid damage in some way, then you no longer need a tank. Since everybody has methods of keeping themselves alive, you no longer need healers, either.

In a game like WoW (or SWtoR for that matter), the conscious design choice is being made to have mobs hit hard enough that somebody who is dedicated to eating big hits in the face must exist. That doesn't mean it's the only way, it's just one way.

Consider an action game (Vindictus was an outstanding action-MMO) where the player is given tools to dodge or block damage as it's about to happen, and enemies clearly telegraph when they're attacking. Not all damage is avoidable even then, but players also have tools to recover and escape to a distance if need be, and the mob may lose interest and decide to attack somebody else nearby, because aggro doesn't work as we understand it to work in WoW.

[Chronius]

Hopefully mobs won't have any sort of threat table or target preference. They could just cycle through players at random and as for healing, I guess every class will have the survivability to live through whenever the boss decides to focus on him.

I don't think bosses will actually focus on single players. They will target you with spells, off which you are supposed to dodge. But you won't see anything from classic "trinity" mmo's where you just stand there and soak/mitigate damage.
If there's any maintanking to be done, it will most likely be done by some NPC, where his steady decline of health will be your timer for failure of the event.

[Edge-]

Who said that any one person can only be 1 role? The holy trinity does not require those roles to mutually exclusive.

Actually, it kinda does. It means that there will always be an active tank and there will always be an active healer. Yes it's possible for players to potentially "switch" roles mid-fight, but at that point you're looking at either terrible design because you have made non-hybrids useless, impossible balance issues, or the potential for that system to never be used since specializing will almost always yield superior results in such a setup.

I'm saying that just because I can't define myself ONLY as a tank does't mean the 3 roles still exist. WoW has tanks and offtanks. Those offtanks are DPS unless they are tanking. It doesn't matter if you are talking about requiring 1 tank or 5 tanks rotating between each other there is still a tank.

No, these offtanks are still offtanks, they're not DPS. You wouldn't bring a raid and fill it with prot warriors because, "they're DPS when they're not tanking." That's just silly. You don't seem to understand the definition of a tank in a trinity setup. It is the individual who, while dealing the least amount of damage, maintains the threat of the primary target(s) through the use of abilities which generate multiple times their normal damage in threat (or simply generate threat without damage), while actively and passively reducing damage. Tanks have one job and ONLY one job, to get hit in the face. Constantly.

As for the 5 mesmers, one of those people were getting hit by the mob...the others were able to heal that person. Who was taking the damage and who was healing could be changing every second of the fight, but there is still a tank and still a healer and still a dps. The point is if ANY 5 people with a given level or gear requirement can complete ALL content then what makes any one class special?

Why do I care if I'm a sword swinging badass when I'm going to be panzy ass healing as much as the next guy?

The one getting hit isn't TRYING to get hit, and it's not THEIR JOB to get hit. The tanks ENTIRE PURPOSE is to get hit in the face. The healers ENTIRE PURPOSE is to heal the hell out of everyone. There is no place for EITHER of those things in GW2 due to the system they've built.

You claim to be asking questions, yet instead you seem to be trying to tell us that your strange definitions of tanks/healers/trinity are fact and that we're wrong. If you have questions and want clarification, ask away and people on this forum are happy to answer them. But if you come in here claiming, "There is a trinity! There are tanks and healers!" when that simply isn't the case, you can sure as heck expect people to get a little annoyed. Especially when they've explained it many times, many different ways.

[anywherenotes]

The trinity makes no sense.
Why would a monster not simply switch to the most squishy guy first? why does the monster keep trying to beat up the same guy for entire fight?
I think what we have right now is a lazy design, because it would be so much harder to design classes if monsters had half a brain, and picked off weakest links one by one.

[Deleted]

The trinity makes no sense.
Why would a monster not simply switch to the most squishy guy first? why does the monster keep trying to beat up the same guy for entire fight?
I think what we have right now is a lazy design, because it would be so much harder to design classes if monsters had half a brain, and picked off weakest links one by one.

The day have finally come were the mobs will have a decent A.I

[Jaerin]

You've had at least 5 good replies in this thread explaining how the system works. If you still don't understand it then there is no helping you.

Here's a great reply you didn't bother to acknowledge:



So you can stop nitpicking through this thread trying to cause arguments with people and read the information that has been posted for you.

It's not arguments when you are forcing people backup their belief and explain themselves. Point out a single time when I told anyone that they were wrong? Go reread my posts and stop putting words in my mouth. Lack of agreement is not the same thing as disagreement.

Providing counterpoints is not disagreeing...its debating, which means the other side usually responds with their own counterpoint or clarification. There is a difference...

---------- Post added 2012-02-06 at 06:48 PM ----------

Post after post in this thread says basiclly the same damn thing over and over again, just with diffrent words, except for Jaerin that is severly wow damaged >_<
And no im not trying to troll anyone, this is pointless, Jaerin wont budge from his belifs that there cant be a trinity.

Where did I once there HAS to be the trinity...the question even asks people explain how a non-trinity system would work. I like how you guys want to make this more about convincing me that this way is the best way instead of explaining how the system is different.

[Snow White]

It's not arguments when you are forcing people backup their belief and explain themselves. Point out a single time when I told anyone that they were wrong? Go reread my posts and stop putting words in my mouth. Lack of agreement is not the same thing as disagreement.

Providing counterpoints is not disagreeing...its debating, which means the other side usually responds with their own counterpoint or clarification. There is a difference...

---------- Post added 2012-02-06 at 06:48 PM ----------



Where did I once there HAS to be the trinity...the question even asks people explain how a non-trinity system would work. I like how you guys want to make this more about convincing me that this way is the best way instead of explaining how the system is different.

I think you're the one that needs to go back and reread the thread because many people have explained the system and you're the one refusing to accept it. Like I said before, there is no helping you.

[Deleted]

The trinity makes no sense.
Why would a monster not simply switch to the most squishy guy first? why does the monster keep trying to beat up the same guy for entire fight?
I think what we have right now is a lazy design, because it would be so much harder to design classes if monsters had half a brain, and picked off weakest links one by one.

Yea exactly. Immersion in games through realistic mechanics is something which there should be alot of focus on imo. This is the evolution of the mechanics of mmos we're seeing which is a great thing. I'd rather have great mechanical improvements than graphical

[Deleted]

I'd rather have great mechanical improvements than graphical

And i rather have both