The holy trinity and MMORPG combat

Recently I was discussing the Cataclysm changes in WoW with a friend over lunch, he was complaining about the changes in healing and tanking in the new heroics. That coupled with the lack of tanks and healers available for random groups having drained the fun out of the game for him. In particular he was complaining that the new difficulty had created an environment where Tanks would quit any random group they considered even marginal, because they could instantly join another group.

One of the things he suggested was removing the Holy Trinity from MMORPG games. For those who don't know the Holy Trinity is the combination of DPS, Tank and Healer that's become the de-facto design for group based combat in MMORPG's. The first game I can remember using role based groups like this was Everquest (although it wasn't really a trinity at that point). Almost every game since has copied the basic mechanic. WoW did simplify it somewhat reducing it to 3 clear roles, and Blizzard has probably spent more time tailoring content to the pattern than anyone else. Asheron’s Call did eschew the class system all together, but it lead to cookie cutter builds, sure everyone could heal, DPS and take damage, but because there were a certain set of skills that had to be taken in any viable build everyone ended up with the same skills with only minor differences.

Getting back to my friends point which was that 2 of the 3 roles (Tanking and Healing) were more difficult to play or at least had dramatically more impact when performed poorly and almost everyone preferred to play the 3rd role anyway. Looking at WOW for a minute, even with 3 DPS to 1 Tank/Heal ratios, there still aren't enough Tanks or Healers to meet the demand in random dungeon queues, which tends to support his point.

It started me thinking, what would group combat without the Trinity look like? I’m fairly certain there are a number of different viable mechanics, but it’s an interesting exercise to try and devise one, at least at a very high level.

The requirements are relatively straight forwards.

• We want to reward coordinated group play.
• We don’t want it to become everyman for himself.
• We don't want to excessively reward particular class combinations.
• The classes still have to feel unique.

After a some though the basic idea I came up with is that combat becomes about handing off threat between the participants in a battle. In long battles multiple party members get to be "it" (the primary target of the mob). While you're “it”, you have several penalties that prevent you from retaining "it" status.

Let’s start with a simple system with one class.
Characters have two resources HP’s and Energy. In practice you could just have one, but it’s harder to sell through game “Lore”.
In addition they have 3 dynamic attributes
Threat Generation
DPS
Damage Mitigation
Imagine these attributes as spring systems with dampers.
These 3 attributes are effectively signed values starting in some neutral state (0) trying to return with some force to that state.

Character skills either directly or indirectly inject impulses or forces (positive or negative) to each of these 3 attributes and there is momentum associated with changes of the values.
The closer the attributes are to the neutral state the faster health and energy regenerate.

Depending on the skills a player uses, they can choose to generate extreme DPS or go with extreme damage mitigation, but will run out of energy and in the worst case gain or lose aggro with no energy to change there current focus.

That’s basically it, players have to coordinate their role changes with others in the party, changes aren’t instantaneous, so it requires a level of skill.

How do you differentiate classes in such a system? well you’ve got the obvious visual differences, Dodge vs Shield vs Magic etc. You can still use mechanics like the WoW rogue action points or the slight variation that Rift uses for Warriors. In addition if you look at what we are trying to do here it’s have the group manage a shared pool of energy/health throughout an encounter, so there is no reason that you can’t have skills that trade them between players. The 0 point of the attributes and the strength of forces could also be changed per class. I think that gives enough leeway for class uniqueness.

What about solo PVE? that pretty much amounts to DPS vs Damage Mitigation and the use of counters none of which are precluded by a change in core group mechanics.

And PVP? This is much harder because there is to way to manage threat with players, but it’s true of pretty much every other MMORPG game anyway, you kill the healers first, then it becomes a game of numbers. At least here the roles aren’t predefined and can change in battle. As to 1 on 1 PVP I think it’s close to impossible to balance a game for it with any substantial class variation.

There are almost certainly a lot of other core mechanics that could achieve compelling group play without the split by role mechanic. It requires designers to not start with the premise that MMORPG == Holy Trinity. Unfortunately I suspect that’s easier said than done.

One last thought, possibly the hardest part of all of this would be selling new mechanics to existing MMORPG players, there is a reason most new MMORPG’s follow in the WoW mold, and it’s because wondering too far from it alienates your player base.