Spurred by a recent “Pick Up Group” experience in Allods Online and a couple of articles (OK, and doing the WoW Druid Bear art for BBB), I wanted to write a bit again about tanking and the Holy Trinity of MMO combat. Here are a few great articles to prime the pump as well:
Overcoming the Fear of Tanking (Spinksville)
Rethinking the Trinity of MMO Design (Psychochild)
I’ve written about this sort of thing before. Long story short, I’m highly in favor of breaking the trinity affording greater player customization and flexibility, hopefully making for more interesting combat.
Mostly, it’s because I want to be flexible when I’m playing a game. I don’t want to have to depend on other people… though I’m happy to help other people. That’s my particular brand of soloist play; I want to do my thing and have fun without needing other players… but if I want to help others out (and I often do), I want it to be fun and easy enough to get to do. (Note, not necessarily “easy to do”; I like challenge in my games, after all. I just don’t like fighting the UI or having insufficient tools to deal with idiot players. I don’t like fighting other players, either; I’m all for cooperative PvE ventures.)
Perhaps a story will help illuminate.
I’ve been playing League side in the Allods Online beta as a Gibberling Psionicist. I have characters of most races and classes for experimentation, but I picked the Psionicists as my “main” for the beta so I could push through to some non-newbie content before the beta ends. The Psionicist is a DPS/Support class, designed somewhat along the lines of the Guild Wars Mesmer, where I find ways to control foes and the pace of combat, while burning them down with psionic blasts. So far, it’s been good fun, if a bit repetitive. (Finding my optimal “rotation” took all of three or four fights. Certainly not several levels’ worth of fighting. That’s another rant, though, and such design is certainly on par with other modern MMOs, so it’s not a glaring flaw unique to Allods.)
There is a “boss” fight on the League newbie island. It’s a super powerful Wisp that requires at least three players to tackle; a tank, a damage dealer and a healer. It’s the same old dance of “deal damage/mitigate damage/heal damage”. As long as MMO combat is based on hit points and damage, we’re pretty stuck with these core roles in some form. There is nothing crazy about this particular fight, then, it’s just a fight that requires a group (GASP! I PUGged!) or an extremely overleveled soloist.
The first time I fought the boss, I just shot at it to see what it would do. It chased me and pretty much ate me for lunch. Gibberling nuggets, extra crispy.
A level later, still saddled with the quest to kill the boss, I answered the call of a tank who needed help to take it down. A healer met us at the boss rock (it’s an open world boss that just putters around a rock in a circuit until a fight), and we proceeded to beat it into protoplasm… slowly. The tank took the brunt of the attacks, I did my best damage from short range (so I could work in a dagger stab or three while skills were on cooldown), and the healer kept us all alive. The healer’s mana actually died out close to the end, so he just moved in and started stabbing as well, but we were close enough to victory that it wasn’t a terrible breach of etiquette, and nobody fell but the baddie.
Yay, quest finished, experience earned, congratulations and thanks all around, group dissolved, chalk one up for the good guys. (At least, until the respawn.)
A few days later, I’m one level older, slightly more powerful (though with no new abilities), and about to leave the newbie Allod. Someone is spamming LFG in the zone chat, trying to get a party together for the same boss. I figure, sure, I have a little time and would like to help. I get there only to find three other DPS characters (two Hunters and a Druid). OK, sure, just burn the boss down fast and hope it works, right? Nope. Nobody wants to try, and it turns out, for good reason.
A tank finally shows up after ten minutes of zone spam, and we go to town on the boss. It turns out the tank didn’t actually tank, but just spazzed out in flaky DPS tango mode. I get “aggro” because I’m doing solid DPS with my now-rote rotation, and the Big Bad Wisp proceeds to fry me again. I’m soon followed by a Hunter who was also doing solid damage. The tank disappears, the healer says the tank was incompetent, and we sit around for a while waiting for another tank. Eventually, I give up, and move on. (I still wonder about throttling my DPS, but the healer was pretty adamant that the tank wasn’t doing her job.)
So much for helping other players. It’s a good thing I didn’t still need that quest; I’d have been more annoyed. As it was, it was grist for the blog mill, so I was happy enough. I won’t do that again, though.
The fight failed for lack of a tank who actually tanked. I blame the game design just as much, though.
If any of us were able to step up into the tank role, regardless of class, we could have shuffled around and tried with someone else at point. This is why I love the Druid class in World of Warcraft (or the Paladin or even Shaman, maybe even a Warrior). Played well, a Feral Druid can either take point and tank in Bear form or shift a bit and start scratching backs in Cat form. No respecs (though Dual Spec is nice to extend the flexibility), no gear swapping, just role swapping.
I would have happily stepped up as a tank if my Psionicist were able to do so. Sure, it would probably mean some sort of “dodge tank” or “mesmerizing tank” rather than the traditional “hit me, I can take it” tanking, but that would be fine with me. That wasn’t an option, though, so I wound up frustrated. Sure, I had a stun (on a long cooldown, and the boss is apparently immune), a magic shield (on another long cooldown) and an “AAAH!!” button (a clone that takes aggro and then dies), but those aren’t really tanking tools when I’m puttering around in cloth armor holding a little dagger. All in all, it just wasn’t working. One guy in the group even wandered off to quest for a bit while we waited for a new tank.
Again, I don’t like depending on others. I would have gladly put my head on the chopping block to help other people, even if it would have been more difficult to do, but waiting for someone else was something I didn’t do for long. I’m not sure what it’s like to need a DPS, but I’ve also had occasion where needing a competent healer made for frustrating gaming, too.
When I have the ability to shift into different roles as occasion demands, I’m a LOT more likely to enjoy playing in a group. I can plug holes and adapt to tactical situations. I do that in Puzzle Pirates when I’m out sailing my ship with other people. I let them pick their favorite stations, then play whatever still needs to be done. I get and sympathize with the tanking philosophy, and the utilitarian moral of doing what the group needs. I don’t like it when the game arbitrarily makes that depend more on the class (or even the build) than the player.
Short story long:
Tesh goes on 2 PUGs, one good, one bad. Still tired of the Holy Trinity and inflexible game design. Recommends the ability to change roles at the drop of a hat, even in combat.
Hybrids won’t work. The problem isn’t so much needing a tank, it’s that only certain players like to tank at all. Even with a flexible system that enables people to switch to a tank, few do so.
In FFXI you could make a lot of jobs tank decent enough to serve in a party or against a named monster, even ones like dancer or red mage. Not enough people do, mostly because enmity management is both tricky and dull. Maybe if tanking or enmity holding were made more attractive to play it might lure people.
I’d just as soon get rid of the trinity itself by allowing everyone to be their own self-contained trinity or even just going with an attrition style of combat and get rid of combat healing (a core mechanic that changes a lot of things). If we’re going to be beholden to the trinity of roles, though, there should be more flexibility for players, and yes, each role could be more interesting.
How would one make tanking more attractive to those on the fence? I, for one, would like to learn the traditional “sword and board” tanking, as well as other combat roles (I’ve never played a healer, for instance), but I don’t want to grind up new characters to do so. I want to invest time in a single character that could do anything so I can shift around when I feel like trying something new, since making new characters is a time sink I just don’t have time for. A hybrid is as close as I can get to that flexibility. (At least, in a WoW world; I can experiment with different classes in Guild Wars fairly painlessly, though I’m limited to PvP.)
Honestly, the trinity doesn’t bother me, in some cases I feel it’s almost necessary. There was a time in warcraft I know where a druid could actually heal itself and do decent enough damage to solo some crazy content (trust me, this wasn’t a long period of time, but I do remember it) Blood death knights on launch could solo raid bosses and in a group by themselves could just eat through all the content. The problem with taking the need for other people in the game is…….well the people that can solo well, -do-, because they get better rewards (You probably didn’t -have- to finish the quest you did, you just did it because it was a quest that probably gave you a bigger reward than grinding monsters or doing a non group quest would.) The best players get better, the crappy players get left behind, and in the end it becomes diablo 2 over again. Hey there are other people here, it’s easier with them here, but if I want something I’ll spend x hours by myself farming it because well, why fight others for it?
Making others required for more challenging content, and needing roles tries to ensure that not everyone can go the uber leet staff of uber leetness, and in the situation you described, a boss roaming the world, not having a wait timer (I’ve seen this in ragnarok online, we once had 32 groups waiting for one boss on roughly a 6 day wait if people were being nice and letting others have it but you can imagine how that went.)
The other solution to this would be to limit what a person can do in an encounter, but you have the same problem lets say in your pug example, you could step up as a tank even though you’ve decided your primarily role is dps, if you can easily switch to tank, doesn’t mean you’re good at it, and hey your dps went down, so you still need the appropriate number of bodies, which I’m sure in later content is just as big an issue as a 3 person world quest boss in the noob area (hogger anyone?)
The issue in a massively multiplayer game is that given the term, makes it a need to keep it multiplayer, in keeping it multiplayer you usually want to nudge, push, or give people a reason to group, to -need- other people, if you don’t isn’t it basically a single player or friend only game, that if you’re bored enough can let you play with others?
I’ve never looked or heard of a system, that when implemented in a multiplayer environment that didn’t require or give better rewards for multiplayer, actually remaining multiplayer for anything worthwhile.
Holly, thanks for stopping by! You might find something interesting in my recent Acronymnicon article. “Multiplayer” doesn’t exclusively mean playing in a group.
Even talking about groups, though, which is where the trinity comes in, there are viable ways to play without needing only those three combat roles. They are tried and true, but also tired and overused.
Also, if anything, “bring the player, not the class” design with high flexibility would make grouping easier. That’s one point of my story; I, an avowed soloist, would have grouped up for longer and had much more fun if I could have slotted into whatever role. Sure, I might not be the best tank, but as it was, I couldn’t be *any* sort of tank. That’s what I’m thinking needs to be changed by introducing more flexibility.
oh, I know, I read, but like I was saying, when you give people the option of soloing basically everything, then that becomes all they do for the important things, which I think in the end would murder mmo’s, anything good in a world map whre everybody could go would be so heavily farmed that it’d be all but impossible to get to. I know this is an issue to a point in normal mmo’s but much less so when the bots have to have 5 accounts to take it down.
And I agree that while there are other options in multiplayer, the base problem most people have with multiplayer ‘I have to sit here and wait for more people, but I want it nooooooow’ will end up happening, maybe just not as bad, what I’d like to see with the trinity, is requiring enough of all 3 roles that there isn’t a need for a ton of one, and little of the other. I hate that dps tends to outnumber the others 6 to 1 sometimes, I think for any encounter it should be even.
And while I read the trinity thing, the main alternative to the trinity I’ve ever seen implemented was the skill system in Ultima Online. I also remember sitting for 14 hours waiting to actually be the one to ‘tag’ the boss I wanted due to bots being able to solo farm it and there being a ton at all the spawn points. I also remember being very alone as an animal tamer, in a world of warrior mages wielding a polearm and electrcuting things. Often being mocked for not taking the most ‘optimal’ role, when I could often do as much if not more than them.
In the end, I think my issue here, is you’re talking about mmo’s, and there’s something about the term massively multiplayer, that tells me it should be multiplayer. When I think of letting you be able to solo that I want to just call it a multiplayer game, like diablo, or g uild wars (henchman anyone?) And in all honesty I probably wouldn’t play an MMO that didn’t require a group to tackle the ‘best’ content. If I want to spend hours farming by myself for good things, I’m just going to go play a single player game, time to pull out final fantasy 10, sit back, and enjoy being the god of all creation for a while, you know?
I do understand I probably enjoy the trinity more due to it being tried and true, but honestly it’s just hard to picture any alternative that -could- work well in a massively multiplayer option. I see a lot of people reference DnD……but honestly can you think of a campaign where, if you had say, 100,000 people playing, probably one of every role, where any combination could do it, and the trinity couldn’t just basically walk through it so easily that it’d be no fun?
Then you’d have to customize each encounter to what the group has, mayhaps in an instancing or phasing system, but that would require like 150-200 of each scenario, and would be such a tax to developers, and would end up being ‘look you can have any option you want, you can group with anyone you ant, the dungeon scales to what you want to take, but um, we only have 3 dungeons because each takes a year to program’. I’m open to other options I”ve just yet to see ones that are -viable- to a group of more than 100,000, that would still require multiplayer.
and sorry, a more direct reply to your comment would be, that I do think more should allow hybrids, I do think with a hybrid though it should take work to be able to do each role. I like warcraft’s system, the way you described the druid. I also like the spec system, I do wish they allowed 4 specs for the druid, maybe at a 1000 cost per spec, and I like you have to gear for each role too. It’d bother me personally, if I did nothing but tank for 9 months through content, and one dps decides it wants to tank, that -is- a good player, changes, and can be just as good as me off the bat because they’re a good player, and not requiring work to catch up to me a bit. But the latter is just personal preference.
Ugh – the idea that multiplayer means people play together – even if they don’t actually like each other and do so simply because the game blocks content from them otherwise *shudder*
I’ve got an article on that.
http://philosophergamer.blogspot.com/2009/12/grouping-isnt-always-healthy.html
Other than that, I mostly agree. But this confuses me
“but we were close enough to victory that it wasn’t a terrible breach of etiquette”
??
It doesn’t matter whether it’s the effective move, it matters whether it fits etiquette? Even where etiquette is just ineffective and essentially a bad move? I mean, he was OOM – it makes sense for him to start stabbing? But it’s more important to follow etiquette than to make sense?
Hybrid classes who can at least do two-three things are on the rise for this very reason, the mentioned flexibility. This was also the prime rationale behind dual specs in WoW.
I wonder if expanding the Guild Wars system and SEVERELY limiting healing abilities, plus spreading mitigation and self-heal abilities over all classes, would work out. The “protection” line of Monk abilities is more interesting than just pushing up red bars anyways. Guild Wars never had a real “tank” class, and warriors never worked like that anyways. It also did not have taunt-mechanics (newsflash: they are considering to give the by now underpowered tactics line of warrior skills some taunt effects, not sure if this is a good thing or not watering down the design thanks to their junior designers who grew up in a world ruled by the trinity, sigh), but people still managed to create TANK builds for various classes.
Brian “Psychochild” Green wrote an excellent article about the evolution of the Holy Trinity and how it came into the MMO world. I guess you know the article, I think he linked to it on his blog.
Now I am – again – hoping for GW2. It carries so many hopes by now that I am afraid it can nothing but disappoint.
Among my hopes are:
* Free to play & well done, fair microtransactions
* An evolved GW1 combat system that allows for more true soloing without NPC support
* “EVENTS” replacing the generic quest and standardized MMO grouping issues
* Much more “open” instances than in GW1
* Basically, nothing else than the next generation of MMO design
I really hope they don’t go too much back to the roots. Recently I was really amused by the fact that so many persistent world MMOS like LOTRO and WoW focus more and more on instant action in instanced areas/dungeons. The same things GW was bashed for left and right upon release. The reasons why it is not a true MMORPG. Smilies do not suffice for this, a /facepalm combined with a smiley might describe my feelings best.
Blizzards new LFG tool solves the “lfg” issues to get the three parts of a working group for trinity based games together due to their huge player pool. But it does not address the core of the problem at all, the basis on which the trinity works: You need all three parts to make the system work. Basically, this enforces grouping and prevents grouping or playing together if you do not fall into the category needed by the other 2 parts of the trinity already present in a party.
We also need to get rid of the tank-heal-dps mentality our fights are set up. It is highly idiotic and only works because the mob AI is as dumb as bread, actually this is insulting brainless bread.
The Trinity only exists in PvE – in PvP, the tank is a rare and often not that promising concept. Healing is omnipresent, as is DPS – the “kill stuff” component.
I remember MechWarrior games where I had limited armor and ammo, nobody repaired or restored my armor and ammo during a fight magically. Often I could not even repair after a fight before moving on.
There are two ways how to do it: DIABLO-style – every class could kill and some could heal/support a bit, there was no real “tank” or dedicated “healer” concept.
The other way is to reduce combat. We are constantly fighting in our MMOs. But this would require a virtual world that is still interesting without button mashing mobs to death over and over and over, and that permanently.
For the near future, I see Diablo-style looming on the horizon. Tank and Healer roles just get eliminated in this system, but we get different flavors of melee/ranged dps and utility instead of them.
Long story short :
! I’m with you !
*chuckle*
Callan, that’s just my pithy little stab at the sometimes idiotic “rules of etiquette”, both in real life and MMO grouping. I thought it was perfectly appropriate for the mage to do that, but some elitists tut tut at a healer doing melee damage. (So it’s a dumb joke, in other words.) That’s a great article at your place, by the way.
Longasc, thanks, I agree with your comments, and indeed Brian’s article is fantastic (I linked to it up there). BattleTech has loomed high in my mind as well. It’s still combat, but with a very different flavor. I find I prefer it.
Thanks, Modran!
Oh, sorry – for all the bandwidth the internet has, it has zero bandwidth put aside for tone! I get you now! And thanks for the compliment
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