The trinity has been a truism of MMO design now for about as long as it wasn’t. I came up during the small times when if you mentioned an MMO trinity, people would probably assume you were talking about some proper Christian raiding, not anything related to tanks, healers, and DPS (or crowd control, depending on how long ago you started MMOs). Oh, the terminology has changed, but those roles have existed in broad strokes for a long time; what hasn’t always been the case was having a core three roles be the only ones out there. Heck, back in my early days we called DPS “DDs” for damage dealers. You know, when we took a break from hunting the mammoth.
The thing about habits of design is that they tend to get that way for a reason – not necessarily because they are the best or only solution but because they are a reliable and effective solution that requires a bit less time to figure out. But while I want to talk a bit about alternatives to the existing trinity of roles, I want to first highlight some of the older and often beloved roles and why they aren’t in the trinity and/or aren’t as easy to just add in.
Offensive Support/Debuffer
Red Mages in Final Fantasy XI, Controllers and Dominators in City of Heroes, you know the sort. These are the support options that work primarily by making the enemy weaker, either preventing your targets from acting at all or significantly reducing their ability to deal damage, resist damage, whatever. And when you think about it for a moment, you might see why this is a complicated role as a result.
Put simply, however, this role has to justify having it in a group instead of another person dealing damage. The ultimate way of shutting down an enemy is killing it; just as a dead player deals 0 DPS, there is no danger from a dead enemy. So if your average enemy dies in a minute or two, it’s a lot harder to justify having your focus be about making it die slightly faster when another damage dealer could make it die a lot faster.
The corresponding side angle is that if this role is too effective, it basically renders most enemies and perhaps even bosses basically ineffective. If you can just shut down boss mechanics, well, the role goes from being nice to being basically what the whole game is balanced around. That makes the balance a constant struggle to deal with, and it’s way too easy to err on the side of just letting it be optional. CoH balance on Homecoming these days, for example, pretty heavily biases toward just having more damage dealers, but it most definitely wasn’t always that way.
Defensive Support/Buffer
So I mentioned CoH’s balance in the prior entry, and this is another place where it’s instructive because it turns out that the defensive buffer has more or less done what it can do when it’s too dominant by making “healing” functionally irrelevant. The game’s pure healing powersets are usually considered sub-par at best and actively detrimental at worst; why would you ever pick Empathy when you could instead have Kinetics?
Sufficiently powerful buffs can make your party strong enough that you don’t actually need a healer or maybe even a pure tank. On the flip side, when your buffs aren’t powerful enough to justify having you around all by your lonesome, you kind of need to be doing something else, right? This is why a lot of games that do have some more buff/support options roll them in either with healers or damage dealers; it’s a lot easier to swing a damage dealer who mostly enhances others or a healer that also buffs the party’s damage. You get most of the flavor without having to justify the space being its own thing.
That’s not to say that there isn’t something fun to be done with just juggling buffs or even juggling buffs on your allies and debuffs on the enemy! This is a legitimate playstyle. But it can be way harder to balance around, and the returns tend to be lower, and you still run into the same core problem of needing to justify it from a gameplay side.
Puller
So back in the day, this tended to be a real role. Heck, Hunters in World of Warcraft were kind of tailor-made for it – you had ranged attacks and traps you could lay down, then you could use Feign Death to let the tank take over once you had pulled what you wanted. Your job was to pull something, then let the tank take control of it, and then…
Well, therein lies the problem, Timmy. Or one of two problems, to be clearer. The first problem is that once something has been pulled, your puller needs to still be providing something of merit to the party, and that usually means dealing damage. Designers kind of realized that while the role definitely had its own skill and gameplay (being able to effectively navigate spawn rooms in FFXI and not pick up links was a skill, really), it kind of made more sense if the people dealing damage were just dealing damage instead of having one sort of “special” damage dealer.
The other problem is just that this encourages a much slower and more incremental style of play that is… well, kinda boring. I do not miss sitting at camp spots and waiting to pound on one enemy for a couple minutes before waiting for the puller to fetch the next enemy. Designing for a more energetic style of pushing forward and clearing as you go sort of obsoleted the concept.
“Gimmick” Damage
So FFXI has a mechanic called Skillchains, where weaponskills used in sequence can deal more damage to a target. There’s also another mechanic, Magic Bursts, that happen when a caster matches an elemental damage spell to the result of a skillchain. The idea was that you ideally wanted to use both in a party because that improved your overall damage. Thus, you didn’t just want three physical damage dealers in your party, you wanted a mix of physical damage dealers and magical damage dealers.
Having a specific grouping of damage dealers whose primary aspect is dealing more damage in X circumstance, of course, falls back on the same problem as pullers. If you’re going to be dealing damage, why not just make that your primary metric? Making it into a whole gimmick-laden exercise is mostly just so much posturing and irritation, nobody really wants that. Just let people deal damage.
Am I saying that any of these roles are bad, historically? Not at all, and you’re not wrong if they were your favorite roles back in the day or even still things you want to play. As I said up front, my point here is to illustrate why these roles can be challenging to implement and why, as a rule, the tank-DPS-healer paradigm has edged them out over the years. Next week, I want to dig into the idea of potential designs that don’t rely upon that trinity and propose alternative role balance.
Designing an MMO is hard. But writing about some top level ideas for designing one? That’s… also remarkably hard. But sometimes it’s fun to do just the same. Join Eliot Lefebvre in Design Mockumentas he brainstorms elevator pitches for MMO sequels, spinoffs, and the like for games that haven’t yet happened and most likely never will!
