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Reinventing grouping mechanics
Lord.Bachus
Member RarePosts: 9,686
Since GW2 announced that they will leave the traditionall holy trinnity behind... and replace it with somethign different... Whatever methode will be the best needs to be seen, we can't know untill we extensively playtested GW2.
But what will happen is that players need to find out and discover the new roles and tactices for grouping (in the instanced dungeonareas) succesfully... this will make sure that the grouping gameplay will atleast feel very fresh when first experienced compared to all other MMO's....
But will all characters just fit in a group regardless of how they are specced, or does the new grouping system require another kind of ballance.... Maybe we will find out that every group requires equall ammounts of offensive/defensive/support specced characters..... (every class tough can to some degree fullfill all these roles depending on their specs)
Will succesfull grouping expect people to fullfill a certain role in a group even if noboddy likes to play it? Or can those odds be overcome by a full group of DPS specced people... by simply switching the tanking(the one person getting hit) role around... and then healing up in the background while switching to range damage...
I am very thrilled to figure out how the new grouping system works out ......
Best MMO experiences : EQ(PvE), DAoC(PvP), WoW(total package) LOTRO (worldfeel) GW2 (Artstyle and animations and worlddesign) SWTOR (Story immersion) TSW (story) ESO (character advancement)
Comments
My guess is that for most casual groups, people will be able to mostly run with what ever build they prefer, rather than group build being that important for success. However, we know that the Explorable Dungeon Content, which is unlocked by doing a Dungeon first in Story Mode (which is supposed to be doable with a Pick Up Group), are designed to be very challenging, so players may need to carefully formulate a group build for that content.
CPVP is somewhat similar. People should be able to enjoy casual games with what ever builds people bring in, with the stress being more on good play than character professions/builds. However, when it get's into structured, highly competitive tournaments, I'm sure team builds will develop in a similar manner to the way they do in GW1. Hopefully it will be easier to balance, though, and we will have fewer Flavor of the Month Profession and Group builds in Competitive PVP than we've seen in GW1.
Bringing it back around to casual groups, being able to change builds easily when out of combat should encourage good players to tweak and adjust to circumstances as part of being a good player. Although someone who really wants to stick to a certain build should be able to do so with out issue, other players will likely be more proactive, even in casual groups, with adjustments meant to amplify strengths or address weaknesses of the group.
Want to know more about GW2 and why there is so much buzz? Start here: Guild Wars 2 Mass Info for the Uninitiated
as said, there will be no so called holy trinity, so by that no special tank/healer/dps classes.. So as i understand everyone will have to heal them self, everyone will be hitted (there wouldnt be like that specific guy is tanking atm (i guess no agro thing)) - so no one will actually tank, and there will be no specific dps classes, so everyone will just spawn their skills and move away from been hitted. So if the skills will be like really balanced, then every class will benefit +-~ the same, so you can group with who ever you like to - no need to wait for specific class...
The point you're making about switching the tanking in a party, the constant in and out of battle, healing up and taking back aggro
is exactly the thing i can't wrap my head around. I'll probably have to see it, experience it, before understanding it.
I really wanna know aswell how this grouping system works out.
Same here. Looking forward to how it plays out and how it is received.
There isn't a "right" or "wrong" way to play, if you want to use a screwdriver to put nails into wood, have at it, simply don't complain when the guy next to you with the hammer is doing it much better and easier. - Allein
"Graphics are often supplied by Engines that (some) MMORPG's are built in" - Spuffyre
It's all about playstyle and adapting. I'd rather have a group full of people that can adapt well to situations than people geared towards one specific thing. There's more room of success that way.
You can do it in every game that has a class like the Paladin and Druid.
This is not a game.
This would imply that there where no grouptactics but only single player actions when playing in a team. Thats not how i expect it to be there will be more to grouping then just crossclass skills.
A water specced healing elementalist, combined with a protecting healin guardian could keep a necromcer in the thick of battle against a single strong mob close to full health
Tough multiple mob fights would have a totally different strategy
Best MMO experiences : EQ(PvE), DAoC(PvP), WoW(total package) LOTRO (worldfeel) GW2 (Artstyle and animations and worlddesign) SWTOR (Story immersion) TSW (story) ESO (character advancement)
This type of thing has already been done successfully in CIty of Heroes (CoH). Althought, a small number of fights in CoH did still require the holy trinity. For most dungeons, any combination of classes and any size group (solo to full group) could do the dungeon. The encounter changed according to the number of players and levels of the players. Some of the fights were really fun to watch, particularly those with a full group of the same class using a unique class ability on a full room of mobs.
GW2 may take some of the best features from earlier games or come up with something entirely different that works well.
They won't be necessarily removing the trinity. They are reinventing it. Instead of Tank, DPS, and Healer it is now Damage, Support, and Control.
Boy, it is going to be hard for those who have known only the rigid holy trinity and not much else. I feel sorry for them already...
No doubt players will try to enforce some roles, but I don't see any strict roles built in to the game. I expect the most efficient players will do everything as needed - No strict roles. If the team looks bad, people change weapon sets for more defensive/harrasment playstyle etc. There's no trinity when the s*** goes down. People just do what seems right for the situation. It is not rocket science.
"Herp, derp - I am support. I support."
"Erp, I am DPS. I don't do support."
I can imagine such players wont be very popular in groups.
However, I think we will see "initiator", "roamer" and other roles similar to those found in MOBAs in PvP, but nothing resembling any trinity.
I skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been -Wayne Gretzky
Considering the fact that there is only one skill bar and that specilizations were made to make things easier for each player, I am willing to bet that most players will do more support, or more damage, or more control instead of everyone being a hybrid. Think about it. If you had to do damage, control, and support all at once, not only would it be harder because you would need to manage a series of different things, it would most likely be less effective than say if you had one person dedicated to supporting the group, one person dedicated to dealing most of the damage, and one person dedicated to controlling.
It's like a company. You don't have the secretary doing the work of an accountant and vice versa.
Sounds great on paper and if they truly will be able to pull a "no specific class/role needed to be wanted in groups" out of their hats, i'll be amazed. My biggest fear is that players will try to "force" the trinity into groups. I dont want to see "lf Warrior to tank and Elementalist to heal for instance X", because people will feel that warrior seems to hold aggro best and the elementalist has the best heal/support skills (just an example). If that will happen, i'd rather have the trinity. Guess we'll wait and see.
I approve of the idea of not needing to have a traditonal tank, dps, CC, healer group rotation anymore.. However, just because It sounds good doesn't mean it will work good.. If everyone can tank, heal, cc, and dps, it means that each person will have to do everything themselves.. If there's no set role for your character, I think It will lead to more disorganized fail groups...
I'm not trying to hate on this system,, just giving my opinion... It's like the Yankees and RedSox.. They build championship teams full of superstar "I WIN" players on paper.. But when it comes to playing as a team, both haven't done what was predicted of them...
Hopefully the system will work because I've hated having to create tank and healer classes for my guilds the past 10 years simply because not many people ever really gets excited to play those classes..
Rallithon Oakthornn
(Retired Heirophant of the 60th season)
Just because they have no trinity doesnt mean you wont have a role in your group. If your trying to do everything it wont work out. what they mean by each class can heal dps or control is that you have the option to do so but you dont have the skill bar length to equip all those skills at once.
They didn't remove the trinity:
"You could say instead of DPS/heal/tank, we have our own trinity of damage, support, and control..."
... dot dot dot ellipsisssssssssss ...
I'm sure certain class ability combininations will prove more optimal than others for certain parts of certain dungeons over time, but from what we've heard, virtually every group comp should theoretically be viable. That said, even in many current holy trinity MMOs, you can run dungeons without a tank or without a healer and succeed as long as the group is coordinated and controls each enemy properly. So this *type* of gameplay is possible and even viable in games today, it's just that adding a tank and healer into the mix makes the run infinitely easier, reducing this potentially compelling, challenging, and fun combat to a mere unnecessary struggle. Still, some of my most fond dungeon crawling memories are of running almost every WoW BC heroic with just a mage, a druid and a hunter. No real tank, no real healer, only fun
... dot dot dot ellipsisssssssssss ...
Tactics will not change in any game,players look for the fastest way to kill then it becomes a generic setup.The problem i have is that i DO love the typical ROLE playing in a game,so i want the healer ROLE the tank ROLE,i want it to be a role playing game,not a jack of all trades morphling game.
Yes it is hard to predict a combat scenario and we do need to test it first.We need to see how hate is controlled/lost/gained in this game to know how each player will play.
Perhaps the most important factor will be the speed of combat.if it is too fast,then strategy is thrown out the window,nothing really matters then.if combat is slower and thinking is involved then yes how you play can be an important factor the way it should be in a MMO.This again needs to be tested,however i think there is yet another factor to look at.I beleive there is a system where you don't really die,you sort of hang on the fringe of death.They said this was to allow players to feel more heroic,sounds good on paper and imo is ok soloing but not grouping.This is because in a group i would assume while your player is on the brink another player would proably steal hate rather easily making your heroism mute.This again falls into the actual testing and hate control,everything i already mentioned.
One other important factor is how it will all play out in the boss/event battles where you are basically scaling players.In those battles there is no real grouping because it is unorganized,players just show up and join,so their system will not work all the time.Then again how will hate work in those scenarios?Wil lthe highest level player basically be tanking the whole fight?idk all needs to be thoroughly tested.
Never forget 3 mile Island and never trust a government official or company spokesman.
yes, but remember that you can switch in between these roles on the fly, just by swapping weapon sets. This means that, while you can fosuc on one role at a time, good players will switch roles as needed for the situation. Somebody earlier said that you would only be relying on yourself in combat, and I have to point out that the level of skill interactions between players and the difficulty of dungeon mobs is going to be geared towards requiring teamwork to some extent (story mode dungeons will be puggable, I doubt explorable mode dungeons will be.)
remember, this isn't a game where they are just saying there isn't going to be the [healer tank DPS] trinity and nothing about difficulty or mobs will change, everything is going to be different to make the super soft [support control damage] trinity actually work in the game.
edit: adding colors is fun.
I used to TL;DR, but then I took a bullet point to the footnote.
Best MMO experiences : EQ(PvE), DAoC(PvP), WoW(total package) LOTRO (worldfeel) GW2 (Artstyle and animations and worlddesign) SWTOR (Story immersion) TSW (story) ESO (character advancement)
This is something I agree with. I have wondered how much strategy the combat will have in grouping, and how much of a zergfest it might become. While I love the idea of removing necessary roles to run through group content, I do not have a problem with the roles themselves, only the sit and wait game that happens when a holy trinity is evident. By removing them, or changing them, I do have a few concerns regarding group contnent and large scale DE's and they probably won't be alleviated until I see a video of group play being shown with the difficulty at the level it should be. We have seen snippets of dungeon play, but the mobs were tuned down and we didn't really get to see how important people playing a role is as apposed to zerg, zerg, zerg.
I am such a fan of the concept and ideas that the team is working to bring something different into the genre, but it is hard to get a good idea of the mechanics without seeing more vidoes on the grouping itself, or better yet getting to try it out for ourselves and see if it really works the way Anet says it will. Since they have been developing this game for some time now and are convinced it will work, I'll stay optimistic.
RIP Jimmy "The Rev" Sullivan and Paul Gray.
I too am really curious to see how the system will work out.
If any group of any character type with any specs can defeat any dungeon then it sounds like they will have an auto scale / dumbing down system to make things painfully easy to support the weakest , poorest played characters.
Sounds great
I prefer my Dungeons Heroic not Moronic.
Adding colors IS fun.
Aggro in GW2 is at least primarily, if not completely, based on proximity to the mob. It attacks the closest person to them. It sounds asinine on paper, but the more I think about it, the more I think it is a cool system where people can duck in and out of being in front of a mob as needed, people switch roles and take up the slack.
What makes GW2 different from a holy trinity game is that it's not fixed roles. In WoW, you've got tank, healer, and 3 dps in a group. Every decision each one of those people makes, all their gear, gems, enchants, glyphs, talents, and rotation is designed to maximize that one aspect.
In GW2, there's no "tank", there's only the person the mob is fixated on at this moment. A mob can be attacking player A, and player B could be the one dropping blinds and cripples on the mob to try and mitigate that.
I post these two links a lot because I think they give us the best view of the dungeon experience. In the first, the easier story mode of the dungeon is handled just by people wordlessly modifying their tactics. Warrior and thief are aggressive, elementalist stops being aggressive and starts healing, engineer starts doing the AOE the elementalist stopped doing. They "gelled" in his words, and they did the story mode no problem.
But for the harder explorable mode, they couldn't do it. You need to have your tactics and skills completely planned out in order to even have a chance. In the second link, the guy did do the explorable mode with 3 developers, and it was a 3 hour wipefest. And this is the level 35 dungeon. As the guy says in the second link, you probably won't be disappointed with the difficulty.
http://www.killtenrats.com/2011/06/29/gwfanday-the-dungeon-gel/
http://www.guildwars2guru.com/forum/showpost.php?p=774927&postcount=45
"Gamers will no longer buy the argument that every MMO requires a subscription fee to offset server and bandwidth costs. It's not true you know it, and they know it." -Jeff Strain, co-founder of ArenaNet, 2007
It really depend on how their system is made. Uo had a non trinity combat system, but it rely mostly on heal for your defense. Contrary to trinity system were the counter of healing is due to the weakness of the healer on crowd control, in Uo the counter was done with poisons (that would forbid heal and stop its effect). So the responsiveness was a lot greater in Uo, because cross healing was very efficient in pve and pvp, crowd control had less impact on battle. And generally the pivot of combat wasn't in the hand of one player, but on everyone hand, because of the power of healing or cross healing in groups.
But i'm not sure GW2 use the same kind of pivot in combat. It seam to rely mostly on self heal, but i'm maybe wrong. I never really saw how cross healing work in GW2, you would need good groups to show that i guess if it even exist as a component. I know they are those aoe heals and items on the floor, but never saw them in use much.
In any case self heal reliant combat system are a bit boring imo. Darkfall use such system (its non trinity as well) and it's just not responsive at all, heals work like extended mana pools rather than defensive position like in UO. Imo it miss the really interesting pivot combat have between defensive and attacking positions, when combat rely on healing. It's more of a "go through or die" kind of combat, and it miss something imo, the self just make this feeling last longer that's all. Its slower and less responsive, combat never really revert or change. Imo it just miss a huge strategic layer here, and its a pity. Crowd control can be used as pivot too, but imo cc are just frustrating from a player point of view, and without trinity i'm not sure cc can be use to revert a situation.
Honestly i don't know the position of Anet concerning this healing aspect and how they handle all this. I hope they will put some pivots in there combat system, and have it as responsive and changing as Uo was. If they do, healing is still The pivot imo, used in trinity as well as non trinity imo, they are no better pivot. They are also other factor in GW2 like the dodging, so we will see how they are doing all this.
THere will still be classes that you can build and play around "keeping your buddies alive" If you like that playstyle it might be very much possible... Guardian and Elementalist come to mind.... Certain builds and playstyles might actually give you almost the same feeling as a healer... except that you arent healing someones full healthbar every 3 secconds but more like preventing 50% of damage and healing 50% of it every 15 secconds or so... While still doing some damage too...
the focus in keeping people and yourself alive has changed a bit from active healing to pro-active damage preventing.
Keep in mind that they are still working on thAI.. (most of the AI still needs to be done) and they also said somewhere else that they where testing out ,mobs that attacked people that did huge DPS... Crowdcontrolled them.... healed someone.. Or just plain old run away when they get hurt... Or even run off to find their friends...
So there might be some mobs that react differently to agro and hose would require a different tactic...
All depends on the Agro system they are implementing right now.... but attacking the closest person will certainly be the most seen reaction of mobs...
Best MMO experiences : EQ(PvE), DAoC(PvP), WoW(total package) LOTRO (worldfeel) GW2 (Artstyle and animations and worlddesign) SWTOR (Story immersion) TSW (story) ESO (character advancement)
From what I understand, there are still those roles - melee/tank with additional damage resistance, dps/control/aoe, healing.
It's just that any profession can fill any of that role, all you need is gear. Engineer, for example, can tank with shield/stuff, put out any combination of dps/control/aoe with his other weapons and be a healer with healing turrets/etc. So, in group, instead of "where can we find a tank and a healer", it would be "okay, who wants to be a tank, who wants to be a healer?"