Which role do you prefer in your MMORPG of choice?
uninstall wizard.
I quit playing MMOs before they settled on those three roles.
>>4039746Seriously tanks are a mistake, try playing FF14 without a tank and it becomes much more fun and tactical.
I'd say healer. DPS tends to be more than half the classes and they're all competing with each other for party slots. Tanks always seemed lame to me since I always found aggro management kind of anti-immersion. If some DPS class has a concept I really like I'll do that instead though
I would usually go for a healer/utility role but the whole trinity system fucking sucks since you usually can only choose between dps melee ("Tank"), three differently colored fireballs that do damage on impact and the guy who cant do shit and just presses 1 to make bar go full.The whole incentive of an mmo is to have a giant pool of players capable of complicated actions with dozens of tools to approach a problem and all thats done since wow is five people playing number go up.
>>4039736Can't we have completely new classes or rather archetypes?
>>4039946Yes, but also no.As long as there are battles that require groups of players, efficiency will be a driving goal. To that end, the most important factor is raw damage output, or how fast a battle may be won. Damage mitigation becomes necessary by virtue of preserving this output, but here, we can only either remove the roles (by placing an overwhelming emphasis on positioning to avoid attacks, for example), or renaming an existing role to something that performs the same or similar function.A "support" role, one that supplies friendly resources so DPS may continue to use their most damaging abilities, or maintains short-duration/high-effectiveness buffs, may be argued to be adjacent to a healer. The specifics are different, but both perform maintenance on players, active and passive, in order to maintain damage output.
>>4039736I don't have a huge frame of reference, mostly dps anyway >wowdistinction between tank and dps is fairly small, tank is just a less complex dps with 1-3 extra oh shit buttons>guild wars 2 (early)you have 1-2 extra block skill as a "tank", whoopeethat being said more games need healers bitch slapping enemies and healing allies with traditional healing spells
>>4040016Instead of tanks I'd rather have a dedicated stun specialist, focused on driving enemies off, interrupting their attacks, and so on instead of just running around with a "kick me" sign. Some tanks in FF14 are so OP there's a handful of bosses they can straight-up solo, while even the best healer classes end up stalemating at best.
i always play a mage in singleplayer games but in mmos i exclusively play tank. i hate not being the person who leads the group, sets the pace, and makes the decisions
>>4040042I main healer, I set the pace because I am the one who decides if you live or die.
>>4040049In terms of pick up parties, it pretty much always just comes down to only the tank and healer having any grasp on how the game works, at least in my experience. Sometimes only one of them.
I'm the guy who freezes up when he has to keep track of more than a couple actions and allies
>>4040288Healers have to know how the game works. I've never seen a healer who didn't, in more than twenty five years of playing MMOs. Tanks.... have better chances than DPS to understand the game, but only about half of them actually do. The other half just zerg around and rush to add as many mobs as they can regardless of whether the group can actually handle it. In particular, most tanks think their job is to do damage, so they just switch to some berserker stance or whatever while wearing medium armor and trying to out-dps everyone else. It's fucking insanely excruciating, and I just don't even bother trying to heal for groups like that. I just block them all and port out when I see it. Zero tolerance anymore. I have nothing to prove to anyone, I've suffered through groups like that before, I have absolutely no incentive to continue doing it. Prove you deserve my time. And suffer through your half hour queues.If you are not SUCKING my dick and begging for my grace, you don't get to play. I am the healer. I make the rules. I run this shit. You only get to play for as long as I fucking feel like it.So make fucking sure I feel like it.
>>4040996>vote kick whiny healer>4/5>vote passed
>>4041010You can't kick people who aren't in the party, anon. There's no whining, there's no warning. Please me or you don't get to run the dungeon. So take a bath, put on clean clothes, stand up straight, pay attention and do the correct thing and you'll be allowed to play. Or you can just do whatever and not get to play. It's entirely your choice.
>>4039736The original MMORPG holy trinity came from Everquest and was Tank, Healer, Crowd Control(+Haste/Mana). Warrior, Cleric and Enchanter/Bard. Everyone else outside the trinity had to fight over the remaining offense/marginal utility slots. Or be the barely functional replacement in the role.WoW changed this by splitting up overpowered crowd control and buffing abilities between multiple classes. So "crowd control" no longer occupied an obvious role, it was something everyone had to do. WoW also lowered the difficulty floor significantly, so you could make more crowd management mistakes and still win (vs everquest where the slightest coordination mistakes would lead to full-party wipes).
>>4040288In everquest, healers didn't know jack. It was a very reactive class. Essential, but rote. The "game knowledge" roles were:1. Puller2. Crowd Controller3. Tank
>>4039946>>4040010Not with tab-target, hatelist-oriented, "wow style" gameplay. The game would need to become more fundamentally tactical. Exploiting terrain, positioning, more varied AI. Some of this exists with scripted raid/boss encounters but those are bolted on to a system always converging on the DPS race, aggro-management game.
>>4041136None of that inherently adds anything. Even with scripts, it's still just juggling the 3 basic roles, wearing a mask of some shape and name or another. It combines them, perhaps, if the game is clever.
>>4041088Your guild members laugh behind your back.Touch grass.
>>4041136One of the best things I did for FF14 was to map all my skills to a macro that targeted based on mouseover.
>>4041410>None of that inherently adds anything.There are many things that can break it up.For a design exercise, the easiest thing to do is just eliminate combat healing entirely and then try to re-balance the game.
>>4039946Why don't you come up with some?
The biggest problem is “how to give dps players any sort of fail state or responsibility (they hate this)”. The easiest way is to make an enrage, but this ends up dominating tank and healer design, because dps players will always do the bare minimum, and a dps check lets them pawn responsibility off on other roles. I prefer classic-BC wow design of combing dps and crowd control, so they can have tasks they have to do themselves, rather than shirk onto sober / smart players.I play healer btw.
>>4039946Most MMO players are not interested complicated classes, strategies or boss fights. They just want to turn their brains off and play on autopilot.
The cooler looking classes are usually DPS, but everyone plays them. Tanks look the dumbest and I don't care for their boring playstyle. I guess Healer for me.But also I can't play MMOs because I just don't understand how to set up my keybinds to play easily. Like the only MMO I've been able to do anything in is FF14 because I can use a controller with that cross-bar.
>>4039736where would a bard with no heals fit here
>>4055270Buffing being it's own thing (to at least some extent) isn't unheard of. I played a little FFXI where bards were basically pure buffbots that weren't there for healing (and were very useful). I don't think that sort of class has a lot of people lining up to play it though. I don't think shoving a lot of those minor roles on to DPS classes is so bad.
>>4055270Any "buffing" role is just a secondary enhancing to one of the primary essential roles.
>>4056385I think you could then say that DPS is the only role that really exists, because the only truly essential thing you have to do to win is to inflict damage. Everything else is just there to enhance the DPS' ability to inflict damage.
>>4056385Things like crowd control, pulling, buffing, debuffing, etc can just be a minor part of a some class that's known more for something else, but if some game actually goes out of its way to make that the main feature of a class I think it's fair to say it's a role to identify them by.
Actual MMO Combat Roles, which may or may not be aligned with a specific class category.The "Tactical" label is somewhat inaccurate, technically tactics is about the actual decisions not specific abilities. But movement and detection/recon/knowledge abilities are the closely associated with tactical operations, so I think roles that emphasize movement and observation make sense to group together.
>>4056405>Things like crowd control, pulling, buffing, debuffingBuffing and debuffing are not the same thing, it is wrong to lump them together. Crowd Control is usually a form of debuffing, although it can also be done with tanking+healing. Pulling is a tactical role. Buffing is not a primary role because it always requires being secondary to someone else. Haste doesn't increase DPS if there are not DPS classes already. Mana regen doesn't increase healing endurance unless there are already healers. HP or evasion buffs require a tank role already existing.Now, a given game can turn buffing into some kind of arbitrary minigame that is engaging, buffing can be absurdly overpowered and a game can be contrived so that buffs are required to win. But as far as a specific combat role, it is isn't distinctly essential like the other ones.
By the way, "debuff" subdivides into multiple categories like>movement reduction or immobilization>damage reduction or neutralization>defense/resistance reduction
>>4056410>Buffing is not a primary role because it always requires being secondary to someone else.btw, you can also consider just the single-player perspective.If you can buff yourself to become a tank, then you are filling a tank role not a buffing role. If you buff your DPS, you're filling a DPS role not a buffing role. And so on. Buffing is just the mechanism by which you accomplish the real role.
>>4039736Fixed number of abilities with a mix-and-match class system. Sort of like Guild Wars 1. Actually, exactly like Guild Wars 1.
>>4039946>dps>tank>healer>lurer>buffer>debufferCan there be more?
