What irritates me is that in almost every MMO 90%+ of playing a support character is still nothing but healing. Hate hate hate games where the vast majority of support is some version of health bar whack-a-mole. (Did i mention that i'm not especially fond of healing being the only viable method of team support in most MMOs?) One of the reasons i still miss CoH.
Long post, bear with me. If you want, skip to my second section under bold.
"Trinity gameplay problems in a nutshell, and mmorpgs in a nutshell. Why they are 'grinds'."One of the main reasons I say MMORPGs suck
. If I compared an MMORPG to other RPGs, even combat heavy ones, I notice a sharp difference in the importance of healing vs mitigating damage. Lets look at say, Fallout 4 for example.
Stimpacks in ALL difficulties heal over time. Survival mode as currently stands the healing rate is slowed drastically. This means anytime you face high damage, you need to do something about it;
You can hide behind corners(in fact, there is a hidden 'cover' mechanic, in which if your facing a wall with a corner next to it, aiming at it will lean you around the corner as you aim, exposing only part of your character).
You can use chems to buff your defenses(like MedX/Psycho).
You can use chems to boost your damage and ability to react to incoming fire(like Jet/Ultra Jet).
You have VATS(VATS in F4 works more as it did in Fallout 3, but it's more slow-mo, just make sure you make a decision quickly).
Stealth, nuff said.
Good use of all five make a gigantic difference in how much damage you take from enemies. It's critical to mix them up whenever you have the difficulty up.
But mmorpgs make it so healing is a be-all-end-all instead.
They tend to be to scared of anything with significant impact on a fight as to render anything else useless. Because they want healing to be useful, they tone it back on everything else. Which is in reality a deadly mistake. Real RPGs focus on reducing damage. MMORPG's focus instead on healing. But it's also due to another problem, a mindset that in order to encourage teamplay, you have to make people entirely dependant on others.
Which isn't really a good way to encourage team play. It isn't like say, a first person shooter coopertive where one guy could distract a more tankier enemy so the other guy can shoot the tank in the more fragile back side(like halo), or pile on more shots on a spider masterminds softer brain pan like brutal doom(spider masterminds only take 7/8ths damage from leg shots). Or the timed switch in which someone has to hit a button, maybe it just makes sense for a few people to be in place to hit the buttons correctly? But you don't need to have such a narrow strategy of the trinity to pull those off.
In fact it could just be simple positioning that is all thats needed to maximize team effectiveness. In FPS coops thats done in a sense one player covers the other players back. Thats all it takes. But mmorpgs never really get that. They try to be over elaborate, but in reality end up over simplified and end up discouraging any variety of strategy.
There is a good reason I always draw the analogy with roman legionaries vs greek phalanxes.
Those who want to skip this should go down to 'history analogy finished'Greek Phalanxes couldn't move any other direction but one direction with any amount of speed. They had to slow themselves severely to make slight turns, but to really turn they had to lift the spears up, re-position, then lay them back down. This severe lack of speed made it incredibly easy for cavalry and even infantry to out-flank them in open ground, so they depended on archers and cavalry, entirely, to cover those flanks. This proved the be the downfall of the greek phalanxes when the romans tried to use it against the gauls. The gauls simply chose to surround the romans, and since they very likely had cavalry and it was likely better, the romans got crushed. The other issue was the phalanx required flat terrain to work. It required plans to go perfectly.
A greek phalanx that was hit in the sides would break and crumble within record time. Especially because men in the formation were ill equiped to fight flankers, had no room to maneuver to defend themselves, and were often "free kills" for more experienced swordsmen and cavalry.
The greek phalanx also took up to 3-4 HOURS to assemble fully due to how perfectly everyone needed to be positioned for it to work.
The inflexibilities should sound familiar, because holy trinity teams suffer very similar inflexibility. They need the tanks to take all of the punishment, or they all die. If one thing goes wrong, every one dies. This lack of flexibility and dependency on a plan that cannot change is a cornerstone weakness and it's also bad for game play for multiple reasons. And the holy trinity team has to have every person perfectly spec'd for the team. AND they often wait for in game times, 30 minutes or even up to an hour. Which kills gameplay for anyone who would also like to do other things with their time.
Right off the bat, the roman legions mobility becomes apparent: every man not only had room to move that a greek soldier could only dream of, but the entire formation could move and pivot itself. The legion could adopt multiple formations and thus a far wider variety of tactics. It did not depend on hammer and anvil strikes. It did not depend on archers or cavalry to protect it's flanks. It could do it all, in a way. While you could argue it's frontal hitting power was "less" than the phalanxe, thats wrong to, it had a lot of hitting power. It mixed in the pila as a means to severely damage frontal attackers, a legion would throw a storm of the heavy javalins and cripple shield using foes and cut up the ranks severely. The fact that the formation could pivot also meant it could flank and wrap around an opposing phalanx the same way the gauls could. Combined with the fact that they could help chase of cavalry by pivoting.
They also had another advantage, men in reserve, for fighting. Men could be kept behind lines that a phalanx, due to it's lack of mobility, couldn't. A phalanx behind another could only reinforce a phalanx in front. A cohort could run in any direction it needed to, and thus could march up to attack a flank, or chase off flankers ect. This proved to be a key advantage.
Last and not least, a roman legion could have itself ready to fight in thirty minutes or less. One sixth the time it took for a greek phalanx.
Which, brings me back to mmorpgs, and why CoH and many non mmorpgs handle team play better. A well buffed team in city of heroes was defended all around, and wasn't vulnerable from "adds"(such a stupid term) or more properly, reinforcements. If enemy reinforcements arrive and hit a trinity team, it tends to break very fast from attackers hitting people who are completely unprotected on the sides/back, just like a greek phalanx. Because they were dependent on an "additive" force, healing, any increase of enemy numbers were a severe concern for the team plan. I exclude the terms "tactics" and "strategy" with the trinity because, it cannot really benefit from either. It's all about the plan going perfectly, and it can never change.
Of course, that tendency for one plan only tends to increase repetitiveness combined with all the other problems.
Trinity gameplay problems in a nutshell, and mmorpgs in a nutshell. Why they are "grinds".So with my analogy mostly out of the way, I'll just summarize the issues trinity gameplay has:
1: Inflexibility. Every further problem stems from this.
2: Set up time: It takes 30 minutes or even an hour at times to fully set up.
3: Inability to follow a variety of strategies. It has to follow a set plan, as often games make it so only one plan works. If anything goes wrong such as unexpected reinforcements or "adds"(hate that term!) happens. This leads to....
4: Repetitiveness. It's the same thing over, and over, and over, and over again. The trinity also due to this and inflexibility also leads to....
5: Cog based team play. People do not invite people because they are friends, but because of their rolls. This combined with repetitiveness leads to...
6: Bad team environments. Everything I hated about Guild wars 1 boiled down to this. Leads to the next big problems....
7: Something going wrong? Find someone to blame. The plan had been made perfect, after all, or the attempt wouldn't have even been made. Since it isn't working, someone is failing. Maybe the healers disconnected, maybe the tanks disconnected, maybe the damage dealers aren't using the right skill/power/spell chains.
8: Players wanting to join their friends but cannot join because their rolls are redundant and the "slot is already filled".
9: Players who are hostile towards others but you invite them anyways because they are your only option for that roll(a big one).
10: Coming late, but #2 also greatly increases iteration times for attempts at team content. This creates an unfun situation...
11: If it's hard, it's hard for punishing reasons. Punishing gameplay generally means time is completely wasted and the player cannot try again until they succeed, but instead is blocked by numerous factors keeping them from further attempts. Combined with the dependency on other players to the degree it does, this further also removes....
12: Skill as a factor in difficulty. This makes the game feel like it's presenting a big barrier in between you and fun. It creates a sense of 'this games hard for the sake of it and it sucks for it'. It creates a sense of unfairness and that 'luck' is the be all end all.
13: This combination of potential for very negative experiences, sheer amounts of time with little gain creates the dreaded "Grind" term.
When you combine everything together, you realize it's not a fun game genre. It's difficult in ways that are not fun, but just frustrating such that it does not feel like a game, but just another bad job.
The above are why I didn't like playing DCUO, or CO, or guild wars 1 in teams. And it all boils down to the levels of inflexibility the what should be called "Unholy" trinity. The only people who benefit from it are those who just wish to sit back, click health bars and heal all day. Everyone who wants a real game thats fun and entertaining are left out of the genre, or trapped in a "Skinner box". The only thing MMORPGs survive on, is addiction-based psychological tactics.
