How do you fix the MMO trinity?
You don't. Many MMOs have tried to do it in different ways, and it never fucking works.
implement per-character permadeath, remove permanent progression.
ESO sucks so much ass.
Why? It's simplistic but adds a lot of depth and variety to gameplay.
you don't? it's literally offense, defense; a line, not a triangle. healing is just an abstraction of defense, the same way debuffing is just an abstraction of offense. the proper line of thought is, how do you better abstract offense and defense so as to give superior gameplay variety? let's say you have a necromancer, he can summon skeletons, those skeletons can be both offensive or defensive depending on how they are designed and skilled. 2-3 powerful warrior skeles that quickly clear mobs? 10-20 weak skeles that rise quickly after death, forming an effective meatwall? maybe a martyr style hero that can absorb damage and debuffs away from allies and into himself? gets damage and speed boosts, or defense and magic absorbtion, when taking damage or based on number of debuffs applied?
Various encounters that demand the player play the same role but differently maybe.
Shouldn't it be tanking - crowd control - healing - buffing - DPS - debuffing
Like basically warrior can do some crowd control (taunt) and debuffs (war cry), mage can get some crowd control (hypnosis) and buffs (enchant weapons) and rogue can have some buffs (evasion) and debuffs (poison).
Everyone does DPS on top of base role, DPS base role does CC and buffing on top of DPS.
That was easy.
It's fine. Just make players interact. Make the tank and DPS deal with threat. Make the DPS and healers coordinate to overcome AoE. Make the tank and healers sync up to deal with bursts.
The problem isn't having roles, it's the modern single-player design where they have fuckall to do with each other, and everyone's just route spamming their rotations, playing guitar hero on easy, while not standing in the fire.
You can't improve upon perfection.
It's simple: we kill the trinity.
Make every player a self-sufficient unit with basic self-healing capability like a semi-renewable consumable. Also give every player a simple dodge.
Then introduce build diversity to allow people to spec into different roles themselves.
Also actual combat. Dragons Dogma Online did it so you got no excuses.
Also see:
>Monster Hunter
>Nioh 2
>Souls
With this setup you dont need tanks or healers per se, but having a player specced into a tank or support role would make for a fun and interesting experience different from the usual, while potentially also making it slightly easier.
Also fuck mass raiding, low player count parties is where it at.
I have always wanted tanks to also be summoners where you take 0 damage and get to watch your minions beat the shit out of everything
It's pretty much an inherent consequence of min/maxing. If you have any specialization options at all (which the game probably should have, since everyone being the same is fucking dull) and a limited pool of "points" (whether it's through stats, perks, items, skills, or whatever), deeper specialization in one aspect of specialization tends to increase the value of points in the same aspect. For example, if you have 50% damage reduction, every point of health offers double value in terms of survivability, compared to no mitigation.
Even if you don't have a threat system or abilities that heal other players, you can at least min/max damage: if you have a group of 5 each with 40 specialization points and 40 points are needed for crowd control or debuffing or other tank/healing-alternatives, it makes sense to have one player dump all their points to CC while the other four are pure damage-dealers, because value of each damage specialization point is higher when you have 39 points than if you have 29. So you get something akin to trinity anyway just with different names, and players tend to enjoy the thematic and mechanical aspects of "healers" and "tanks" better than "debuffers".
I think the problem in a lot of contemporary games is rather the opposite: less strict adherence to holy trinity has lead to things like everyone having the sort of defenses, sustain and control that allow them to function well enough solo, disincentivizing group play and actually diminishing the room there's for roles that aren't strictly in the trinity: for example, if all tanks can do respectable damage, tank-DPS hybrid is no longer a distinct role.
start by saying what's wrong with it
I too am currently playing PSO2
PSO2 is basically this whole post
Isn't debuffing and crowd control the same thing?
>PSO2
Is the combat system good?
People seem to fail to realize MMO's need to be 'simple' in terms of combat. Else you greatly limit party and raid sizes. This is due to 1.latency and 2.complexity
And that adding pure 'buffing/debuffing' and 'crowd control' specs simply dilutes other of the Trinity's kits.
Being just a healer gets boring. Being just a DPS gets boring. Being just a tank gets boring. Thus having those tools in the trinities kit makes them more 'deep' while keeping them distinct.
When everyone is everything classes lose depth and identity. It also makes it easier to ignore or dump certain classes.
The whole 'everyone is dps' arguments garbage too. GW2 was first to really push it, and it was garbage. PSO2 does something similar, but that's not a traditional MMO(like GW1 etc).
>crowd control manages aggro and movement of mobs
>debuffs include DOTs, stat debuffs, damage multiplers, etc which often have 0 to do with crowd control and more about damage
>both which are better included in Trinity kit, instead of making entire classes revolving around them
When you have the 3 distinct roles, it makes easier to make content and classes.
If you have a majority 'debuff' character, and a new instance has 0 use for debuffs then that class is now useless. Now if that character was a DPS with some Debuffing in their kit, you still have a DPS that can contribute.
>Monster Hunter
>Nioh 2
>Souls
>none of which are MMO's
>Dragons Dogma Online did it so you got no excuses
>which is now shut down
There is nothing to "fix". The trinity is fine as it is. If anything that needs to be fixed it's the brains of dps retards who think tank and healers must be removed so they don't have to wait decades for their mindless braindead action.
Those 3 extra classes you mentioned just end up being either glorified dps or new "tanks and healers" thus ensuring dpstads have to wait even longer.
This shit has been tried multiple times already and every time it's shit and people make improvised tanks and healers anyway.
>crowd control
This either is tanking, or belongs to everybody
>buffing
is a DPS
>debuffing
is a DPS
>which is now shut down
Wouldn't have if they weren't retarded and localized it to the west.
>be capcom
>have immense success with MHW in the west
>have a title which is literally MH with a medieval skin and pawn bot slaves
>let it die
Outright stop playing MMOs because grindan games are garbage
But if you must: stop making healer and tank classes mandatory. Make them equally balanced alongside DPS classes, and provide more DPS class options. If the majority of people like playing DPS, why force them to take a role they don't like? Make the game match what the players find fun.
Making three more specialist classes isn't the answer if you still have 4/6 people wanting to play the DPS and only 1 DPS role.
I am too new to the game to answer that, but it feels like it has everything you asked for. You can mix your main class and sub class to do some really specialized cool builds along with your 'talent tree', and the combat is non GCD based with bonuses to properly chaining attacks. The bosses are fairly engaging but the regular mobs are mainly for aoe'ing down. I'd say its worth a shot, just know that the NA launch is a bit of a shitshow in that it can be very hard to get to work if it doesn't install right on the first go. So I would wait until that gets resolved. Also its pretty brutal about telling you info, it just kinda throws you into the game past the tutorial and you gotta figure it out or look up how to progress.
You have three people. The trinity demands that you have a tank, dps and healer to win. Problem is, two people want to be the DPS and nobody wants to be the boring healbot.
Go back to the classics. Everyone is a DPS.
The Barbarian is the tankiest DPS.
The Mage is the DPS who can also heal.
The Rogue is the DPS who can do extra burst when someone is distracting for them.
Contrarian opinion, grind is fun but not the MMO grind.
Grinding currency is not fun and is just soul crushing.
Grinding low chance drops from a particular enemy is good mindless fun if it's optional and just a small boost or vanity or utility stuff to make your individualized build perfect. Also the runs themselves should be quick and no longer than 10 minutes.
The real problem is that tank/healer classes suck outside a group. Good luck soloing if you can't hurt mobs by yourself. Maybe tanks can suck in enough mobs to aoe them down or something but healers are just fucked.
Locking someone into a single role forever and ever was a fail idea from the start. This isn't D&D and if you try to be grouped 100% of the time you're going to go insane from dealing with retards.
>I think the problem in a lot of contemporary games is rather the opposite: less strict adherence to holy trinity has lead to things like everyone having the sort of defenses, sustain and control that allow them to function well enough solo, disincentivizing group play
You can still foster group play, but you have to turn the direction to tighter, smaller group play rather than 60+ gank-fests. Large-scale raiding is what conditions the idea of the trinity in the first place, because you can't give that many people specific enough roles. The flow of combat devolves into threat, damage and healing, because the other aspects (buffs, debuffs, control, utility) can typically be handled by one representative of each role. Basically, you can have 30-40 DPS/healers stack their performance additively, but only one person needs to inflict status effects or charm a group of enemies. It's just a numbers game with that many people, and there's virtually no room for utility without overshadowing the roles entirely.
In smaller group play, having that horizontal leverage becomes more important because you only have so many bodies, and their unique traits overlap less. That's actually the crux of having multiple roles in a RPG: classes need to be unique in some function, and directly offer something another class doesn't. The primary reason this never works is simply because players don't have a tolerance for individuality. If a class is better in one situation, but less favorable in another, people cry "balance!", axing any further experimentation in encounter and content design. In an environment that glorifies min/max methods, there is simply no way to add variety without agitating players or encouraging compromise. The trinity itself is only a necessity because it streamlines the players experience and doesn't force them to step outside a comfort zone; hence, it's easier to foster large-scale group play.
The trinity isn't the problem, it's the implementation. There is no situation aside from PvP in which the trinity won't just vastly outperform whatever muddled mess you could make with non trinity builds.
The real trick is making tanking and healing as much fun as DPS.
>nobody wants to be the boring healbot.
Tanks and healers haven't been threatbots and healbots in ages in online games. And there absolutely ARE people who like to healbot.
This man speaks the truth: sprinkle in different buff, with not so much overlapping, debuff and CC to the already trinity and it becomes good.
If you kill the trinity you basically make all classes similar and streamlined, everyone need to be able to sustain damage and/or heal it back and if some classes can heal other they become the de facto healer of the game.
I'm not saying it can't work, as you said MH works really well, but it works when the 'matches' are insulated in their own enviroment and less seamless like in usually is in most mmos, or if you only care about PVP content since the trinity is basically forfeit there.