Why did MMORPGs never evolve past "tank", "DPS", and "healing"?
>>727786406No-life autists min-maxing the fun out will always be a thing.
>>727786406because it's the best system cooperative online games. only problem is that most don't go far enough. tank - dps - healer - debuffer - cc
>>727786557>minmaxing the fun out>NOOOOOOO YOU CAN'T PLAY LIKE THAT, THAT'S NOT FUN, YOU ARE NOT HAVING FUN, ONLY MY WAY OF PLAYING IS FUN AND EVERY OTHER WAY IS WRONGwhy are casuals like this
>>727786406Solid foundation to design encounters around, which for an MMO that has to keep making encounters is a nice foundation to start with. If you add too many roles/niche combos then you're going to have someone find a way to break your encounters at some point(they will anyway but still) and then you got to start juggling your encounters around those and it just becomes an increasingly difficult mess on an already increasingly difficult task in creating continuous encounters that arent the same thing for the 30th time(which they eventually will be anyway at some point)
>>727786406Because health bars.Emptying the health bar, filling the health bar backup, funneling the health bar unfilling, and then what.Ultimately it's all about that fucking bar, and there isn't that much you can do with a single value that can only go up or down.Add more bars (that actually matter), or more complex values than just smaller/bigger, and new roles will appears even after optimizations.
>>727786836Because they suck at the game and when they inevitably get turned down from pugs for being grey-parsing shitters, instead of realizing they need to improve, they instead blame someone else (the evil nasty "MIN MAXERS" in this case) for their own shortcomings
>>727786406But it did?Guild Wars 2 completely omitted tank tole.There was also the gook pvp focused mmo where everyone could self heal and there were no tanks.
RIFT tried to add a 4th role, "support", but it kind of failed because you're essentially a glorified cheerleader that is only there to provide buffs/debuffs, and nobody wants to do that
>>727786756>>727786892Also this, the support role is usually as far as you want to go in adding a role and sometimes you can just merge these into another of the 3 main classes, a healer can be a support via buffs or cc, same for dps/tanks in being given buffs/debuffs/ccsPure support you often just end up with >>727787121 or its a support + healer/dps as a secondary because pure support is generally aids with nothing to do once they buff/debuff
>>727786406Every other will require thinks like reading or non-combat roles and we are talking about mmorpg players...
>>727786406but mmorpgs devolved into the trinity...fucking zoomers.
>>727786406Because you don't need more.
everyone should just be DPS with different flavors of support attached
Try to imagine a new color OP.
>>727787037 Exactly. They don’t want to get better, they want the game to bend around their lack of effort. Then they cry about "toxic elitism" when someone doesn’t want to carry dead weight through content they're trying to actually clear. It’s the same energy as someone showing up to a group project, doing nothing, and getting mad when no one wants them next time.
>>727786756This is dumb because you're essentially taking away the cc/buff toolkits of the other roles and making new roles who's sole purpose is buffing and CCing. As if playing the main three wasn't boring enough, they would have even less to think about and do.
>>727787037>parse faggotColor me unsurprised.
>>727787886They started out as nothing but grid-based and text-based shit where you pretend you're doing different things but in reality you were just rolling dice. Real games require real systems.
>>727786406>Evolve past You mean, why did TTRPG groups evolve into the holy trinity? You already know the answer. What is the point of this thread? >Random bullshit parties (ignoring that most tables will naturally have a vaguely balanced comp) where anything can happen, and the dm can (and should) fudge the rolls Fun >Random bullshit parties where the game rules are predictable and deterministic Recipe for frustration.
>>727786406MMO players think they need this system to facilitate teamplay but that couldn't be further from the truth. All it does is force groups to have certain group compositions, the players themselves just press their buttons and automatically serve the function of their chosen role, this isn't teamplay. Teamplay is when players communicate strategy, encounter mechanics, who does what at which time or thinking on their feet mid battle to save their teammates. You can have all of that without a trinity, maybe even more so because players will be able to act outside of the rigid confines of their role and generally do more things to facilitate teamplay.
>>727791030but AO and FFXI already had more shit going on before the the genre devolved into cookie cutter WoW trinity stuff, and they weren't text gamesand yeah all RPGs are just your computer rolling very complicated die for you, if we want to reductive about everything.???
>>727791702I've had more fun running dungeons as triple DPS or only hybrid classes than I ever did with an optimal comp so I think you're wrong. TTRPGs are all about coming up with creative solutions to problems, if you're just following the intended way to play then nothing unexpected will ever happen. I think the same is true for MMOs.
i really do not understand the people who say that everyone should just be a DPS. because for a lot of people, pure healing or tank gameplay can actually be enjoyable. mechanically its different, and its good when games have different playstyles. it seems strange to me to get rid of that and just have everyone operate as the DPS.
>>727786406They did, but players hated it.Kitsu saga features many different classes.
>>727794526I wonder why none of them took off, maybe it has something to do with the overly simplistic gameplay where you stand in place watching numbers pop up. WoW was the first MMO to introduce a gameplay system that was actually engaging, snappy movement where positioning mattered a lot, lots of varied skills that did more than just make a number pop up over the target's head. Warriors had to chase and mages had to kite with slows and roots, it was a system where skill mattered a lot more than your average MMO so of course it needed different systems.
High dps tanks. Gives them extra stuff to do if they are 'the best'. If they fuck up and get hit, knock them down and have enemy target the next guy.
>>727794783The vast majority of the MMO playerbase are DPS players and you healers and tanks are piggybacking on them and bossing them around while they're the ones keeping your game alive. They just want their own game where they can be free from your oppressive dictatorship.
>>727794598>muh snowflake build might be shit but it's fun. Again, a company can't build a multi-million dollar project around your subjective tastes in the same way a dm can accommodate you at the table.
>>727797026As a tankfag, you have no idea how much superior to dps I know I am.I don't even consider them humans. They are lower lifeforms than even the NPCs.I will threat you like shit, and you will shut up because otherwise it's back into the two hours queue for you.In PvP however I tend to play healfag and become the pocket medic of some obvious shitter - because I fucking love watching decent players slowly lose to someone they *know* is much worse than them, simply because *I* decided this would be their fate.Fuck, I nearly want to reinstall WoW now.
>>727786406you mean 'why did they devolve into tank/dps/healing. The first generation of mmorpgs didnt have class archetypes. The end result was that hyper competent gamer chads could dominate whole groups of people in pvp and pve. This was extremely bad for subscription based games where every player had equal value in the eyes of the publisher. 1 happy person, going around being #1 would result in -100 subs as they beat the shit out of casuals and garbage players.So for the 2nd generation of mmorpgs, developers started dumbing everything down with the tank/dps/healer trinity. Now your worthless girlfriend has an important role to play (healer), the autistic kid can go get their big number dopamine from being a dps, and your local sociopathic burgerking manager could feel important by being the 'leader' as a tank, a job that was mandatory for all content until dps figured out a meta to break the game's mechanics.
>>727797646The idea is that they shouldn't facilitate you, the trinity is an oppressive design that forces players to conform into a rigid system. We don't actually need it, get rid of it.
>>727786406I've seen the alternative in Lost Ark and it made me realize the Trinity system is perfect and doesn't need to be changed
>>727797894Counterpoint:WoW's lifetime rev (trinity)Vs GW2's lifetime rev (non-trinity)>b...but money doesn't mean it's good. True, but companies exist to make money and companies make games.
>>727786406if you have an enemy that can deal unavoidable damage you need someone to soak itif you are having someone take unavoidable damage you need someone to heal themif the healer has mana you need someone to deal damage so the enemy dies before the healer runs out of mana
>>727798281What happened to those games have happened in a span of 20 years, we're living in a different time now and MMOs are stagnating if you haven't noticed. We need to come up with new solutions to these problems, not just endlessly rehash the old.
>>727798393What if the damage is avoidable? THINKINGEMOJI.jpeg
>>727786406The more variation, the harder it is to balance. These days MMO players minmax everything so any role that feels less impactful than others will never be picked.
How did the French manage to make the best MMORPG of 2025?
>>727786406people think they want "support/buffer/debuffer" roles but they dont
>>727798925You're probably thinking of classes, roles are something else and they always get picked.
>>727797656Thanks for putting it so bluntly, we need to get away from these psychopaths DPSbros.
>>727786406Tank Healer DPS is the best designed.It's not evolved past them because there's nothing better, companies haven't spent millions on making their games and decided to stick with these 3 just because, it's because if you expand on it you kill what makes them fun, you end up creating something that nobody is going to play. If there was a better system we'd know about it, because it'd have been tried and even if the game flopped, everybody would be hailing their system as better and wanting existing games to adopt it.Anytime somebody talks about changing it, you can tell they've not thought about it past the surface level because of how basic their understanding of why it exists is.
>>727786406What game? I like summoning things to play the game for me while I hide
>>727786406Because it's safe and easy to balance. The moment you step out of it's hard to figure out how to make all the DPS do the same damage.WoW still can't figure out how to make all the DPS do the same damage because Blizzard are retarded.
>>727786836the problem is that a lot of gamers are dorks who always boil everything down to mathematics and optimizationwhat we need is a game that reward creativity and innovations
>>727798980>Another single player game people praise as the best MMORPG.Yawn
>>727786756Debuffs should be a part of everyone's kit, as should cc, with AOE focused DPS being the best at it.
>>727799815I have thought about it for many years and I have realized that offense/defense/support is an intrinsic fact of life and the optimal solution to almost any battle. However, this is not the same as the trinity systems present in MMOs like WoW. The trinity is an abstraction of this strategy which makes up a lot of rules about how it functions for the sole reason of making encounters easier to design. The fact that the defensive role exists doesn't mean that there has to be a tank and an aggro mechanic, it might as well refer to a line of men at the front of an army carrying heavy armor and shields to pierce the enemy ranks, or even the defensive players at a soccer game. To bring it back to the games, a tank could be a player that stands in front of the caster group actively protecting them from enemy projectiles using their shields, sort of like the tanks in overwatch.My point is that MMO players and devs alike are too hung up on the way WoW does things when there's a world of possibilities out there for how you could design a group-focused game.
>>727786406WoW was the main impact and then the great shilling of wow14 gave the genre the rest. It will never recover and the players are so dumb they can not read a single word.
>>727786406What would the alternative be?>Make all attacks avoidableThen DPS is all that matters>Make buff classesThey do, all it does is act as an indirect DPS class>Make everyone able to tank/healThen everyone has the same job to maximize DPS and minimize tankiness/healing to beat the encounter>Make a summoner class!They do, the summons either tank heal or dps woooow
>>727786406MMO players don't want anything else.
>>727800935>a tank could be a player that stands in front of the caster group actively protecting them from enemy projectiles using their shields, sort of like the tanks in overwatch.>MMOs would be so much better if there was a class that literally it did was a fairly common mechanic that already exists in a ton of bosses where you body block a projectile!
>>727801567Among other things of course, playing defensively refers to anything that is defensive in nature. Only your imagination for what that may be is the limit.Baking such a mechanic into the role itself instead of being a one-off mechanic doesn't sound like a bad idea, all you need is an AoE block skill with a cooldown which tanks can rotate depending on what is happening in the encounter. RL could go like: "DEFEND THE HEALERS" and the tanks would rush over and do their thing, if you don't think that sounds interesting then you probably don't play MMOs.
