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Revisiting the "Holy Trinity" of MMORPG Classes
A feature at Gamasutra examines one of the foundations of many MMORPGs — the idea that class roles within such a game fall into three basic categories: tank, healer, and damage dealer. The article evaluates the pros and cons of such an arrangement and takes a look at some alternatives.
"Eliminating specialized roles means that we do away with boxing a class into a single role. Without Tanks, each class would have features that would help them participate in and survive many different encounters like heavy armor, strong avoidance, or some class or magical abilities that allow them to disengage from direct combat. Without specialized DPS, all classes should be able to do damage in order to defeat enemies. Some classes might specialize in damage type, like area of effect (AoE) damage; others might be able to exploit enemy weaknesses, and some might just be good at swinging a sharpened bit of metal in the right direction at a rapid rate. This design isn't just about having each class able to fill any trinity role. MMO combat would feel more dynamic in this system. Every player would have to react to combat events and defend against attacks."
We all know that mages are the superior class, so this article is invalid.
"The difference between genius and stupidity is that genius has it's limits" - Albert Einstein
And my question is: why would you want to do such thing?
If you start with a system based on: Two sides dealing damage to an amount of health, the first to reach o health loses.
You'll reach the roles of:
Dealing the most damage, receiving the least damage, and avoiding reaching the 0.
If you want another set of classes, you'll have to change the system, not the allowed skills.
For example:
- Add one more number to push into the negatives (typically, armor and shield) and you'll have the posibility of creating a class that manipulates that other number (a shield healer of some sort) a class that damages said number (An EMP mage) and a class that endures more damage to said number (A shield...tank).
- Add positional advantage (complex to do in mmorpgs for lag reasons) and you'll have a class that restricts movement, one that gives positional advantage to teammates and one that uses more effectively positional advantage.
etc.
Runescape does, and I believe EVE technically does also.
Offspec (Apologies for the rubbish link quality, but it gets the point across).
You can't make classes "jack of all trades." It doesn't work. Someone misses their cue to fire off a spell because they're in the middle of doing something else, and it's all gone to pot. This fictional game from Gamasutra would be great if many MMO gamers (that I've encountered) could keep track of more than one thing at a time. However, having seen healers run backwards into a new mob, tanks which run around between enemies trying to take aggro from other characters who don't need it, and damage dealers who have no concept of aggro mitigation, I'm susprised a lot of MMO players can cross the road without assistance.
Paraphrasing someone's very famous words: "If it ain't bust, don't fix it."
Finally had enough. Come see us over at https://soylentnews.org/
Rock.
Scissors.
Paper.
Call them by any other name, but thats how you get an ideal game balance.
Fighter, Mage, Archer
Human, Dwarf, Elf
Fire, Water, Air
There's a reason why this simple game is still around after possibly a few hundred years. And everyone knows some variant of it, (acid, well, hammer, chainsaw..... you name it) and also knows that they suck. messing up the balance.
bickerdyke
Pigeonhold the players into one of the 3 style is easy.
Letting the players to pick and choose from an array of strength / agility / defense for their own character would be a nighmare for those who program the game.
I always hated the leveling dynamic in rpg's and the idea that you had to be locked into one class. I'm not likely to have the time to play the game again and it would be fun to play different classes.
So, the Batman analogy. Sure, he's got his standard suit he runs around in. Lightweight for acrobatics, bulletproofing on the chest and weights in the cape so he can hit people but his main defense is not taking hits. But if he needs to tank up, he has heavier suits. His anti-superman suit was basically space marine power armor. He has bat spacesuits, bat diving suits, whatever. The point is, all he needs to do to change roles is change equipment. the trick is knowing what to bring.
Strangely enough, Armored Core got this idea right. You can build different mechs specialized for different roles. Some missions you need heavy firepower for crushing hard targets with bolts of energy with low fire rates, sometimes you need autocannons that spam out shells all over the place to hit fast-moving light targets. You equip to suit the mission.
I'd like to see an rpg take that line of reasoning. You need to do sneaking, you carry your light weapons and black tights. Scouting the woods? Longbow, shortsword, cloak. Have to wade into a big melee? Now you bring out the heavy armor.
But what ends up happening in the online games, and I'm sure the publishers don't mind, people will run several accounts specialized in different roles just to make progress. In EVE people will have industrial characters, pvp characters, miners, etc. And the best part is that if you find you have less time to play, you can't consolidate those characters. Bah. It's a cycle best to avoid by not playing.
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
It's funny; I played RPGs for a couple of decades or more, and until I got to MMO RPGs, had never really heard the terms tank and dps.
The reason that the MMO genre has devolved to these reductionist archetypes is because MMO gameplay is about one thing and one thing only: doing damage to kill monsters before they kill you. That's it. Pen and paper RPGs have many, many alternative ways to tell stories and player choices.
Few MMOs I've ever heard of offer anything in the way of goals that don't boil down to killing some stuff. Sure, you might be reuniting two warring factions...but never through discussion or negotiation, generally it's about rescuing someone from some monster/prison/boss or bringing them 10 worg hearts (involving killing many more than 10 worgs). Is there ever any possibility that you could sneak into the enemy fortress, steal the Big McGuffin, and get away WITHOUT killing anyone?
If your gameplay can be boiled down to a function including monster health, monster damage, player health, and player damage, you're going to get players naturally 'gaming' the characters to fit that function as efficiently as possible.
-Styopa
i just finished dragon age origins. again there was the stereotypical class definitions and mechanic that made little sense.
a 'tank' which is horribly strong enough to stop a dragon by holding a shield, but it suddenly became less effective when you gave him a huge 2 hander to swing around, despite all the strength (in practice) it should have because stopping anything with a shield requires huge strength.
arch demons, strong and smart enough to marshal entire armies stupidly attacking some party member designated as 'tank', and getting its ass spanked. 'threat' my ass.
the forced stupidity that says a ranged class, especially archer/ranger, should be less effective a damage dealer and should have pathetically low range to make melee classes viable. crossbows which were strong enough to punch full plate + chanmail sets of armor from close range to instantly kill knights does 'damage' to them instead. archers are able to only shoot effectively at 42 yards range. as if agincourt has never happened. the feeling of a real ranger/archer which lurks in a forest/area and snipes the enemy from afar without enemy ever being aware of him/her, is nowhere to be found in games, despite they were a common occurrence in real history and is a frequent occurrence in fantasy fiction.
insanely powerful, stupid mage class. press a button, and freeze 10 enemies to sleep or something. spells 'ignore' armor. the 'crowd control' stupidity, which has never existed in any real battle situation, hell even in no legend/lore the earth civilization has had up to this point, including the later fiction works, leave aside ancient legends. pitt a party of 4 against 10 enemies to create 'challenge', and then be obliged to put the stupid 'crowd control' concept into the game. if you were going to let me freeze 8 out of 10 enemies with 'crowd control' and deal with them one by one, why did you put 10 enemies to challenge me in the first place ...
weapon inconsistencies. the hilariously stupid 'dual wield' thing, which does more 'dps' than other weapons. dual wield ... something that has never been a reality or practicality in entire world history, even including the daggers 17th century musketeers used to wield in left hand for extra control and exploiting occasional openings in duels. go 1-2 centuries backwards, and you will find that lighter weapons which can be wielded in one hand couldnt do shit against heavy armor, and every knight either used swords +shield combo or heavy 2 hander mauls or maces to penetrate armor and negate it, if they were not mounted with a lance. yet, for some reason we have this 'damage' dealing dual wielding nonsense in every goddamn game.
stupid classes. a 'bard' class, that noone can say what it practically does. vague lines to distinguish it even the rogue set it is supposed to belong. 'sings and entrances enemies'. really ? i mean, really ? you sing, and you entrance a demon with your song and freeze it. but isnt that definition of some kind of magic ?
stealth nonsense. going invisible in broad daylight in open field and moving towards an enemy and 'ambushing' it. total hilarity. and that's despite the success Thief series had in gaming industry. they still didnt wake up to the fact that more realism means more excitement for the player.
no flexibility. you HAVE to have a tank, a healer, a controller and a damage dealer. the same old shit everywhere, every game. no variation. no room for an all melee warband or all archer bandit squad. you need to rinse and repeat the same ancient, derelict format in every game. no room for error too - you have to increase tank's defenses, resistances so that it will hold the insanely stupid archdemons, you have to get cc spells for your mage so that it will be able to negate 8 out of 10 enemies you are presented for 'challenge'.
and the 'dungeon' concept. it was fun back in 1980s, but its not fun anymore. fighting and killing 13182356216 random mobs and 2 mini bosses and a major boss at the end o
Read radical news here
Ahem.
http://tf2wiki.net/wiki/Medic
http://quakewarswiki.net/wiki/Medic
Plenty more where those came from...
So by "of course" you mean, "of course i don't really know anything about the subject, but I'm going to run my yapper anyways."
Oh right, slashdot...
I hate healing for a simple reason: it screws up item scaling balance horribly. Take a healer with 10k health and 800 HPS against a damage dealer with 1000 DPS. The healer survives 50 seconds. Now make the healer 12% more powerful. Bam, there's a 100% increase to survival time. If you let healers be more powerful than damage dealers (and you have to do this if you're going for a pure class/role system), killing a healer is reliant on preventing him from casting for some time, something which does not make for fun gameplay.
Not the programmers. They work with their array of stats and thats all. Wizard and Tank are exactly the same code. The only differ in the parameters.
It's the job of the gamedesigners to decide, how much of those stats should be accessible to the player. It's like AD&D. and it's easy to become a jack-of-all-trades charackter, who is completly useless in a game. So thats what classes are for. They are predefined sets of stats. But predefined by the designers to simply work.
If the designers are lazy, they can offload the job of finding good stats combination onto the player. To one player thats a huge degree of freedom, to the other it's a chance to mess up and make the game unplayable.
bickerdyke
When I was a kid, we were so poor we only had rock and paper.
You are welcome on my lawn.
True. That's not the problem for the programmers.
But highly customizable characters are pain for story designers. In story player encounters the monsters with not some random stats - but the stats which reflect the role the monster plays in story.
Just recall the NWN1 where they had the magic button "Recommend". During character creation and level up screen, hitting "Recommend" was defaulting to properly leveled warrior and guaranteeing that player wouldn't hit an obstacle s/he can't overcome. Because playing custom character means that there might be monsters you can't defeat alone. And for some exotic classes there were even specialized modules, allowing you to play in full force, because default campaign was designed for a warrior. (Even playing as barbarian, due to its low persuasion, one would miss many interesting side quests.)
Essentially, exotic/custom classes increase game complexity on both sides. Making a campaign becomes more complicated as many classes has to be taken into account. Playing with a custom class requires quite a skill of knowing and expoloiting strengths and weaknesses - your own and monsters. That's not something average gamers might expect - many are way too used to bashing stuff with a sword or annihilating everything with a magic.
All hope abandon ye who enter here.
i play runescape for the reason that you aren't constrained to one class, you can do whatever you want!
Wanna come play an MMO with me? I'm always the third guy from the right in the frontline shield phalanx. There was this one time, where i was sitting there, like usual, and this calvary got to close, and I was like *block* and I totally kept him from getting through the frontline.
It was awesome.
Whether or not there is some sort of god, I'm not supposed to say/god is a word and the argument ends there-Smog
It's called a nash equilibrium, and what it means in a nutshell is that no one's single strategy can beat anyone else's provided the strategies are fixed (i.e. a fighter cannot take on the attributes of a Mage).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nash_equilibrium
stuff |
Well, there ARE those of us who consider learning fun. There are several ways to learn things. Being told exactly how to do it (rote memorization). Being shown how to do it and then asked to repeat it. Or learning completely from scratch.
I quite like a mix of number 2 and 3 in those options. Give me two hundred kg of assorted LEGO bricks, and I can have quite a lot of fun. Give me blue prints for some designs, and I'll still have fun. Tell me I am only allowed to make those designs, and I won't want to play.
This is why I like the Fallout series. No classes. You can do anything, just not everything equally well. Meet a lock you can't pick? Try to blow the doors off the hinges. Really really bad with explosives? Steal a key. Really bad at stealing? Tough - you won't get past that door. Practice and come back later if you want to get in there. Or you could try to hire someone who's good at getting past doors.
That way you don't have to fit into a neat little box labelled "Tank", "Healer" or similar. If you wanted to, you could be the "Remover of Obstacles" through picking the locks or the use of rocket launchers and other explosives. Rather handy when you break the last set of lock picks.
It is like the #2 or #3 MMO depending on how you count...
Skill and equipment based "combat triangle" anyone can max any stat, but the gear you are wearing keeps you specialized in a given fight... Metal/heavy armor makes Melee vulnerable to Magic, resistant to Range, Dragonhide armor makes Rangers vulnerable to Melee resistant to Magic, Magic armor gives magic boost and spells are really powerful (including AOE, and life leaching) but they are vulnerable to Range and Melee
There is no practical way to heal others, but when a group goes after a bigbad, there are often roles, but get this: Every player in a successful group will ROTATE ROLES.
The guy with the most food/potions for healing will tank, soak up damage, and heal himself till he is low, then the next guy, and so on.
I value MMOs where grouping is optional, and basically strong character classes really hinder that type of mechanic; so if I want to go to fight in God Wars against huge bosses for top drops, I have to group, but I can play on my own at any time too... I can also be a mage one day a ranger the next, and a melee fighter the next... so I tend to only need one character another huge plus (to me).
My T2 drone swarm would disagree. I've swatted a few overconfident idiots who thought they could tackle and burn solo.
Women are like electronics: you don't know how damaged they are until you try to turn them on.
Runescape does, and I believe EVE technically does also.
Actually, EVE goes for a sort of hybrid approach. Your character is completely unconstrained by class considerations, and is only limited by the (real, not game) time investment you put into the game. Basically, as long as you keep your skill queue filled, your character is always improving, in whatever direction you want.
What does limit your character's performance at any given point in time, however, is the ship you're piloting. The attributes each ship has (size, slot distribution, bonuses) pretty much sets its playstyle and role, and you're unlikely to be successful as an Electronic Warfare in a ship that's designed as a missile barge. and a battleship has nowhere near the cargo space required for a trading or mining operation. In my stint in EVE, I eventually set myself up in a star system and piloted two ships. One was a Drake, which is a missile-based battlecruiser, as my combat ship, and I also had a Cormorant destroyer, which was a much lighter, faster ship that I fitted with loads of salvaging lasers and tractor beams, and modified for a larger cargo hold, and which was completely useless for anything except its designated role: scouring the wrecks for salvage after a long combat mission. For that task, however, it was superb.
Then just create a dumb main story quest and add a gazillion side quests. Like Fallout for example.
We have class specialization so there is a reason to use tactics, if not, the game turns into a frag galore.
Love many, trust a few, do harm to none.
Example of Fallout is a good one.
Look at it for a moment from different prospective: how many books you have read which had many intervened story lines. How many you actually liked? Writing such book is by no mean an easy task.
Same applies to game scripts. The fact that Fallout had a flexible story structure, amendable by accomplished quests, doesn't mean it is easy to make one.
Rather the fact itself that Fallout is still remembered, highlights that it is rather difficult to do.
All hope abandon ye who enter here.
"Taunt" is an evil, unrealistic power in a battle scenario.
It turns the warrior into a low-damage pseudo-controller, which is the exact opposite of the concept of a vicious melee fighter. High armored individuals have to be low damage output to make sure they can't kill things easily while, in turn, being very tough to kill themselves.
But several games, noticeably City of Heroes, have shown you don't need a taunting tank. They have it, but they show you don't need it. Why? Because there are tons of other powers for crowd control.
So the solution: Get rid of taunt. Then there is no "tank" per se, just varied melee who can stand up to a few individuals for a limited amount of time, but who also do a lot more damage to compensate.
The CoH "Scrapper" class is exactly this: melee who can cut things down 1-on-1 very quickly, and actually specialize at being a boss killer (boss being not quite the super-boss normally used as "boss" in other games.)
And the monsters are weaker, but there are a lot more. This isn't a problem with modern games, where 25 monsters against 6 people might have been a problem in EverQuest for the framerate.
Death to taunt! >:-( The root of all evil in MMORPG design!
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
That was one thing that I liked about Dark Age of Camelot back in the day. The stealth classes, which most people either love or hate, provided some balance in this area by being able to backstab with poisons for massive damage. In PvP this basically meant that if the stealther was equal level to the healer he could kill the healer in seconds with that first surprise attack. Of course, the stealther was then visible to everyone and vulnerable to counter-attack and depending upon what other players where in the area the healers may or may not have been the most important targets to take out first. They basically decided not to do stealth classes in WoW and IMHO that removes an important balancing element from the game; especially in PvP.
R.I.P. Roleplaying....
Ok, so yeah, I'm an old D&D player. But dangnabbit, I miss just playing my characters. They had quirks, flaws, personalities...
I was never just a fighter, I was a poor guardsman, a greedy mercenary, a disgraced nobleman with a drinking problem. I was a farm boy sworn to get rich and bring my family out of poverty. My characters had motivations beyond Epic Loot.
Danged Min/Maxers! Someone aught'a make a game with only 5 levels, player made content, and let social structures dictate power, just like in real life. Lets face it, even the most badass swordsman WILL get taken down by an angry peasant mob. And he should.
And permanent character death too!
Stupid kids don't know what they're missing. Get off my lawn!
-T
(Oh gods, I'm only 30....)
I think the jack-of-all-trades is not useless. They're very useful. A lot of MMO players don't see things this way, because they're playing a strategy game where all parameters are known, rather than an RPG game. Ie, they've done the same fight a thousand times, and know exactly what is needed to succeed. So they plan around having perfect characters who fit exact roles. Most of those games demand that you're always the best you can be, giving 110%, gear checks done before you're allowed to join the team, etc.
However in situations where the unexpected may happen, the hybrid character becomes much more useful. Noobs they'll say, some other group will have memorized that particular fight and know exactly what to do. But that's not everyone. Newer MMOs are being designed to attract more casual players who don't raid constantly, who spend relatively more time soloing, and who use almost exclusively pick-up-groups when doing group content. So thinking on your toes becomes necessary, and the particular role your character will fill may not be known until everyone gets together, and the role may change during the encounter.
Tank+DPS+heal is boring. Hybrid is fun. And yet in many MMOs the hybrid characters are looked down on or shunned.
The only MMO I'm playing now (and maybe the last) is Lord of the Rings Online. I've got a captain there, who is incredibly fun in groups. Not the best tank, not the best healer, not the best damage dealer. So it gives out buffs, but in some older more hardcore games that type of character would be dismissed as worthless in serious groups because it's not the best at one classic role. However having a captain in a group makes everything run a lot smoother. You can switch between several roles on the fly (no expensive respecs needed in advance), doing what is necessary at the time. A bit like Druid in WoW, except that in WoW the high end groups would still demand that you pick one role, spec for it, then stick to it (boring).
Look at games like City of Heroes or Champions Online too. The traditional roles can be done, but it's not necessarily the best way to go. Naturally of course, since players will want to be superhero archetypes, not fantasy archetypes in tights. For instance, a defender type can have a "healer" build that directly repairs lost health, which a lot of new players from other MMOs try out, but it's not necessarily the best way to defend the team (preventing damage with debuffs or force fields tends to be more effective than repairing it afterwords).
The whole EQ style of tank/dps/healer is old and creaky and needs fixing, along with the idea of "aggro". You don't see this in most single player games. The tank as a high-armor but low-damage guy with aggro is an MMO invention.
For eve, assume that tank absorbs the healer role most of the time, as electronic warfare is far more significant than healing others. Ewar exists to negate damage, to negate speed advantages, to boost targeting speed, etc., which makes the bard/commander/buff+debuff class eve's de facto third member of the trinity.
Specialists don't succeed solo in eve (in combat). If you are all tank or all damage, you're all useless. A tank with no damage or ewar potential won't get attacked until everyone else is dead. An all-damage fit/skill will get primaried because they die the fastest and they are the biggest threat. All of this is irrelevant if your enemy is stupid of course, but let's concern ourselves with competent opponents here.
Success in pvp (and to some extent in pve) relies on doing enough damage to pose a credible threat while retaining enough tank to actualize that damage. Even in gangs or fleets, there may be a few specialists (tackle/ewar) but the generalists make it happen. Many successful gang arrangements have no specialization; the homogeneity of the group makes individual losses much less significant. Specialist groups can be more effective in the right circumstances (like gatecamping or frigate combat), but the range of situations encountered by a roving gang are hard to address with a group of specialists.
You may specialize in one weapon system, or one type of tank, or one flavor of ewar, but you cannot be called a competent combat pilot if you are missing one of the trinity. Even then, if your specialty is known it can be overcome. There is no invulnerable character, no perfect ship. Everything dies in the end; the more people you piss off the shorter the wait to go visit your cloning tank.
And that's why I play eve.
-1 raving lunatic; +6 subGenius... Things even out...
> So thats what classes are for.
Classes are training wheels for both:
a) designers. They are a hack and a kludge because its is easier to "balance" 5 - 10 classes than 500 - 1000 skills.
b) players. People who don't want to spend the time or effort to specialize their character.
I hate the lack of flexibility when you are forced to pick only "class specific skills." It leads to a cookie-cutter approach.
WoW has regressed even further in that you aren't even allowed to pick where to distribute your stats when you level up.
Ultima and GURPs never had classes, and I am quite thankful that some RPGs just said "NO".