Modran, I loved Titan Quest. My Hunter/Storm guy was a blast to play. Torchlight is fun, too, just a different sort of fun.

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!

Will check M&B.

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.

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?

http://www.direct2drive.com/holiday/

If it’s $5 or less I’ll buy it….. you seemed more enthusiastic for it than me, so perhaps you might take advantage of this one?