Tobold has an interesting post today where he talks about the holy trinity of MMO’s – tank, healer and dps, and the problems associated with these. There are three basic issues:
1. It’s kind of unrealistic that a smart monster would just stand there and hit the taunting tank while everyone else takes him down.
2. It’s difficult for tanks and healers to level as their damage dealing abilities are weaker than that of dps.
3. You get skewed numbers – too many dps available and not enough tanks or healers.
He has some ideas on how to address these issues, but at the end of the day this is still just window dressing. You’re always dealing with the ‘holy trinity’, so what you’re doing is just changing around abilities a bit to make those three different roles work, which is a bandaid solution at best.
I have another idea entirely – get rid of tanks and healers and make everyone dps. Change the way the encounters work. The one way to differentiate between all the dps classes in this situation would be buffs, mitigation and crowd control. The last aspect is key. Attacking a boss becomes no longer an issue of having one player stand at the front and get hit a lot. It switches to different classes taking it in turn to lock down an enemy while the other party members deal dps. With no healing available, a characters damage mitigation and their skill in using it becomes key to surviving. There are still all three roles present:
Tanking becomes crowd control.
Healing become damage mitigation.
DPS is still DPS.
It would mean that players would have to become responsible for all 3 roles, constantly switching back and forth in harmony with the rest of the group. Every group make-up would be different, requiring you to come up with new ways and tactics to defeat a boss. There would be no tankspot style videos online as the random possibilities based on the classes present in each group would be so different. You could still research a boss online but what you would be researching is their abilities and ways to counter them. This would require that crowd control abilities would work on bosses. It could encourage more realistic fights. I’ve never been a fan of the big room fight situation where the players carefully pull each section of the room while the other mobs stand there with their fingers up their butt seemingly unconcerned that their buddies standing 20 feet away are getting their faces ripped off. With all classes being DPS you could realistically take on a room full of opponents. Remember the Zul Farrak fight on the high steps where waves of mobs came swarming up at you? I think that is one of the best ever fights in WoW. The first time I did it I was enraptured and pumped full of energy. It’s a full-on battle fest, yet at its core it is simple.
This system would solve the three problems listed above and would also lead to better PvP situations. It won’t happen of course in WoW as Blizzard has already invested too much time and effort in the present system. But if I was a new game looking to be the next big MMO, this is the direction I would take.
The Noisy Rogue 
June 14, 2010 at 10:53 am
This idea brings PvE closer to PvP and bears the same burden. Tomorrow I’ll post a pretty sad post (you can already read it on the guild forum) that addresses this very problem.
In short: to have fun, people must have direct roles and obvious feedback to their success or failure. In the current case tanks and healers see if they are doing their job right, while DPS can compete on recount. With your suggestion it’s unclear who’s job it was to interrupt the “death ball” cast that caused the wipe. If 10 people failed to interrupt, who failed? On the other hand if 1 interrupted and 9 failed to, did anyone failed? (the interrupt happened, so no one died)
June 14, 2010 at 11:02 am
Amen to that!
I’ve recently started doing 5-mans without a tank because it’s just so much fun when the boss can target anyone, which is how any intelligent boss would be (like the faction champions). It really makes you think about how you can pull individual mobs out of a group, how you can CC groups and how you can avoid damage when you are targetted. All in all, much more fun than typing 1112111211121112.
Getting rid of healers might be a step too far with the current set-up for dungeons – bosses just do a ton of damage, and it isn’t usually possible to kite them so that they can’t hit anybody. That would have to wait until all dungeons could be rebalanced, or until all classes are rebalanced to provide better mitigation. However right today, you can have a ton of fun by not taking a tank with you.
June 14, 2010 at 1:16 pm
I’ve been toying with this idea for quite a while. Mine is a little different since I want to get rid of the DPS and go with a tanks and healers. The idea of only DPS classes leave almost no margin of error.
25 man raid: 20 tanks and 5 healers. I keep thinking of the first boss in BWL. Adds flying out of everywhere needing constant attention. Being DPS only would make this retardedly hard.
Another problem would be that most tactics would have to be removed from a fight. take dragons for example. Do not stand in front of or behind them. But with bosses turning back and fourth sporadically like somebody summoned Army of The Dead you just can’t have features like this. DPS only would make all the boss fights almost identical.
June 14, 2010 at 1:22 pm
Oh, and one more idea. They could easily make parties of 6-7 instead of 5 mans. Add two more DPS to increase the chance of one of them getting a tank and healer.
OR make all DPS like the feral rotation. That would convince quite a few people to play a tank or a healer just for the ease of it.
June 14, 2010 at 4:32 pm
I don’t know. When I think of “MMORPG” I think of the “Role Playing Game” part, where you find a role and you play it, and this implies that there is more than one role (rather – why call something DPS+mitigation when someone is perfectly happy simply being “healer”?). Having everyone be one role and just different variations of that feels less like an RPG and more like a console/platformer game. Of course I love console games, but I love RPGs also because of their trinity-like aspects. They’re just quite simply different things and both good in their own ways. People actually do sometimes enjoy having a specific role. Some people really do like tanking or healing, it’s just happens that those personality types and preferences are not as common as the DPS kinds. I think the problem people REALLY have is that the requirements to do almost anything in WoW outside of soloing force you to use this trinity-type system.
Then of course there’s the argument someone above made: this sounds eerily like PvP. I like PvP. A lot of people like PvP. A lot of people also despise PvP with every fiber of their being, so I cannot see this playstyle being fun for them.
I think this is the real issue: it’s okay to have a trinity-like system. The problem arises when people are forced to use that system for like 90% of the content. That I can see being an issue.
June 14, 2010 at 4:36 pm
I have to second the ZF fight, one of the best ever. Sadly, these days with heirlooms and buffed leveling gear, it’s rather trivial.
@Gevlon: Raids can assign interrupt rotations and assignments. Player 1 gets the first interrupt on mob 1, player 2 gets the second, player three gets the first on mob 2, player X is backup in case of a resist, etc.
June 14, 2010 at 7:00 pm
Exactly. I think it would be easier to have direct roles with this system. Everyone has to do DPS but each class would have their specific roles to do during an encounter based on the CC options and special abilities they bring to the table.
June 14, 2010 at 8:04 pm
Sadly, nowadays a game cannot be both popular and skill-demanding. Your idea is great from a game design point of view, but terrible for business, as it is much too skill-demanding for the average MMO player.
June 15, 2010 at 3:22 am
I think this is a myth. Few players are permanently bad. Instead most are poorly trained by the trivial content they are spoon-fed, up until they step into their first raid that they don’t overgear and suddenly it’s a disaster.
June 15, 2010 at 12:06 am
Have you tried Star Trek Online?
It’s pretty much just like your suggestion.
I found that game became boring very fast.
It wasn’t just the lack of content – it was the mechanics of play.
The ‘holy trinity’ is actually interesting from a social dynamic standpoint. And it allows free expression of different personal affinities – not everyone wants to just sit there and nuke the eDragon you know.
June 16, 2010 at 9:14 am
Aion pretty much does this and I’m going to be brutally honest here, I’ve played Aion, Aion SUCKS BALLS. 😛
My suggestion is simply make it a 6 man party affair. That means one extra DPS is needed per group, this would help significnatly imo to balance the numbers out again.
June 23, 2010 at 1:43 am
Replying to the running without a tank comment above:
I do almost the same thing; I queue as a healer and then let Vampiric Embrace heal for me while I top the damage meters in Shadowform. One quote from a tank really stuck with me: “Really guys? You’re below the tank, AND the healer?”