SWTOR

[Typhon]

Either that or make everyone a dps/support hybrid that provides the 'support' part as a side-effect of the 'dps' part. 

Rift's bard is fun to play, I get to damage the bad guys while providing some healing in the background.  Same for WAR's Disciple of Khaine.  Not every dps / 'support' would/should be a healing role, some could apply debufs, shields, etc.  I think every class should have a taunt - save your friends by taunting the enemy.  Makes for a more fluid / hectic combat experience

[Lucas]

Unfortunately I cannot recall where I read it, but it seemed to me that, yes, every class will have the capability of healing itself (beside bandages/medikits or whatever, of course). Now, for some classes that will probably mean a insta or HoT just to support yourself while soloing, or throw a heal at another character from time to time (i.e. the smuggler as seen in the Taral V flashpoint); other classes, instead, may have a full range of heals, in order to act as your usual "healer" class.

[Sky]

What time is your normal playtime, Sky?

Usually 11pm-midnight EST. Sometimes a little earlier and later. Usually get in a couple hours during the day on weekends, too; and there's a night or two the fiancee will work late, but that's variable every week.

Yeah removing the companions takes this from fun story driven game where companions fill in the hard to find specializations and turns it into every other MMOG in history.

Or start giving everyone self healing abilities and cut out the stupidity for once.

Trion's backing away from a formula that would have reduced the exclusive nature of mmo (in their case by allowing Role changing on the fly and each calling to fill several roles). It's still there in a limited fashion, but if they had explored it, they would have had a revolutionary product (like their ads and interviews claimed) rather than a stock mmo with a cool class system. I think risk-averse management will strike Bioware Austin in a similar fashion. Cannot upset the wowtards, despite the fact you won't win them over in any great numbers.

Really, really wish Trion had pushed for a proper implementation and given every calling the ability to fill at least three roles as well as any other calling, just differentiate the methods. I still don't understand chasing exclusionary design principles when they (all mmo devs) have such a huge boner for 'if you play mmo, you must want to group!' At least let folks group with the people that are present without worrying about missing a piece of the formula and sitting around with their thumb inserted rectally until said missing piece shows up or gets filled in with some random jacktard. People will initially cry and whine about a 'warrior' being able to heal as good as their 'cleric' (or gods forbid they get out-healed by a warrior with better gear and specializations), but people are generally stupid, selfish creatures of habit.

Hell, just being able to play a cleric and take a night off healing to do dps or tank is a refreshing change (that Trion fell far short on, as well). Trion really came so close to making the kind of mmo I want to play, and then did absolutely everything to make it exactly the kind of mmo I dislike. Bioware Austin is making a lot of similar moves.

Unfortunately I cannot recall where I read it, but it seemed to me that, yes, every class will have the capability of healing itself (beside bandages/medikits or whatever, of course). Now, for some classes that will probably mean a insta or HoT just to support yourself while soloing, or throw a heal at another character from time to time (i.e. the smuggler as seen in the Taral V flashpoint); other classes, instead, may have a full range of heals, in order to act as your usual "healer" class.

Then functionally, there are only those with the full range of heals. Because that's what the content will get balanced to. That's exactly why a 'paladin' needs to be able to spec into a role as effective as a 'cleric' or it's not really worth bothering.

[Lucas]

Oh wait, here is a very recent post by Georg Zoeller (Principal Lead Combat Designer):

http://www.swtor.com/community/showthread.php?p=5738193#edit5738193

We cannot tell you definitively that a group without a healer will do just fine in 'most all' encounters.

However, groups without healers will be able to play the majority of the game's content and not feel like they are at a significant disadvantage, especially if they are careful in how they play.

Remember every class has access to an out of combat self-heal ability, as well as a revive ability (for use on fallen comrades). Be careful, and you'll stay alive.

---

Oh, and here is Stephen Reid (Community Manager) on the different types of "tasks" you'll undertake in TOR:

http://www.swtor.com/community/showthread.php?p=5728802#edit5728802

In a subsequent message, Georg Zoeller specifies that 'Heroic Quests' are "quests of higher difficulty that provide a challenge to groups."

[SnakeCharmer]

What time is your normal playtime, Sky?

Usually 11pm-midnight EST. Sometimes a little earlier and later. Usually get in a couple hours during the day on weekends, too; and there's a night or two the fiancee will work late, but that's variable every week.

Sounds exactly like me.  I've mostly lost touch with my old gaming buddies so looking to establish some new ones that have about the same schedule.  So, if you want to hook up when the time comes, I'm game.  It's early, sure, but I'm Mr. Preparedness and I don't think we too much longer to wait.

But the offer to hook up on regular flashpoint runs and whatnot extends to anyone here.  Just let me know 

[Paelos]

We cannot tell you definitively that a group without a healer will do just fine in 'most all' encounters.

However, groups without healers will be able to play the majority of the game's content and not feel like they are at a significant disadvantage, especially if they are careful in how they play.

Remember every class has access to an out of combat self-heal ability, as well as a revive ability (for use on fallen comrades). Be careful, and you'll stay alive.

How many fucking times can you hedge in one statement? I bolded them. Turns out seven.

[Sky]

Sounds exactly like me.  I've mostly lost touch with my old gaming buddies so looking to establish some new ones that have about the same schedule.  So, if you want to hook up when the time comes, I'm game.  It's early, sure, but I'm Mr. Preparedness and I don't think we too much longer to wait.

Right on. Rift was ~this close~ to pulling me into grouping. If we can get a somewhat regular group in the evenings to do a few things, as we've been saying, it's really almost more casual than soloing as far as getting stuff done. As far as the release, the guy at PAX said it will be releasing in 2011. Also, go to http://www.swtor.com/guilds/7040/bat-country and sign up. PM me here if you use an unrecognizable/non-f13 name (Still need confirmation if binfuser is fuser?)

Finally, what Paelos said.

[SnakeCharmer]

I dunno.  I get what he's saying (if you're really good, you'll do fine without a healer).  I think he's trying not to piss off the dedicated healers out there who would instantly cry "NOBODY WANTS ME BECAUSE THEY DON'T NEED ME", and you know they would freak the fuck out and post incessently about it.  Just trying to be diplomatic about it.

[Tarami]

To me, it sounds like LotRO. Given you have a captain, a lore-master and maybe a burglar, you can in theory do a lot of the content if all available heals and tricks are employed.

But naturally, that's not how the game is played in practice, in part because it relies on the whole group not being morons rather than just one person.

[Lakov_Sanite]

Your hope will taste all the sweeter once it is crushed.

[Sky]

Having trouble making a new thread on the private board. Again.

At least they tested the guild pre-release stuff thoroughly. Oh, wait...

 

[Lucas]

Yep, just tried to create one myself and it gave me a: "Fatal error: Allowed memory size of 234881024 bytes exhausted (tried to allocate 64 bytes) in /opt/vhost/swtor.com/includes/database.mysqli.inc on line 157" :P

See? We're having GREAT FUN in there, join us!!! 

[Sheepherder]

It's too bad you can't use companions to help fill out the healing/tanking/damage quota in instances and raids.  That would have been something worth the price of admission.

[Paelos]

I dunno.  I get what he's saying (if you're really good, you'll do fine without a healer).  I think he's trying not to piss off the dedicated healers out there who would instantly cry "NOBODY WANTS ME BECAUSE THEY DON'T NEED ME", and you know they would freak the fuck out and post incessently about it.  Just trying to be diplomatic about it.

I don't think catering to dedicated healers is something you need to worry about as a designer.

[Nonentity]

I'm still trying to wrap my head around how, thematically, a healing-specced Trooper will work.

They've already done the 'send out the healing droids' thing for Smugglers. Do you use a Team Fortress-esque healing beam?

[Venkman]

We cannot tell you definitively that a group without a healer will do just fine in 'most all' encounters.

However, groups without healers will be able to play the majority of the game's content and not feel like they are at a significant disadvantage, especially if they are careful in how they play.

Remember every class has access to an out of combat self-heal ability, as well as a revive ability (for use on fallen comrades). Be careful, and you'll stay alive.

How many fucking times can you hedge in one statement? I bolded them. Turns out seven.

But even if they weren't hedging, by this definition the majority of actual content in WoW doesn't require a healer either. It's easy to define "content" as "the amount of land area where a person could solo". The reality though is over the life of an account, a dedicate fan of a game is spending most of their time in the "small amount of the game" that does require healing.

Unfortunately, there isn't a wildly successful game that doesn't have dedicated specialist roles in the endgame. Some of it is probably risk aversion, or maybe the recognition that requiring specialist tanks and healers is just another way to gate content.

[Fordel]

Battle Field defibrillator!

[UnSub]

I'm still trying to wrap my head around how, thematically, a healing-specced Trooper will work.

Healing bullets. 2x healing bonus for headshots.

[Malakili]

I'm still trying to wrap my head around how, thematically, a healing-specced Trooper will work.

Healing bullets. 2x healing bonus for headshots.

It worked in Borderlands!

[Paelos]

If I was looking for something effective, it would be to give everyone a chance to convert their damage into healing themselves. Make it a tradeoff.

[Sheepherder]

The best mechanic for that would probably have been companions that operate without player input.  Because people regenerating health by blasting things would seem a little off, even in DIKU laser PPC combat.

[Lucas]

I'm still trying to wrap my head around how, thematically, a healing-specced Trooper will work.

They've already done the 'send out the healing droids' thing for Smugglers. Do you use a Team Fortress-esque healing beam?

IMO, it will be some sort of advanced "healing tool" that doesn't exist in the inventory (like a normal "healing potion") but only as an ability, that the trooper draws out when needed, interrupting his damage output in the process. Maybe you can imrprove its efficiency during the first 10 levels of the game (before you pick an advanced class), decreasing the "casting time" and/or improving the amount healed, but that's it.

[Sky]

I think having the ability to have a healing-spec Trooper is more important than the delivery mechanism.

That said, I think Lucas is on it. Have some kind of military med-kit, wouldn't need to be a tool. Just an animation that fires off when he uses his healing abilities.

[kaid]

I think having the ability to have a healing-spec Trooper is more important than the delivery mechanism.

That said, I think Lucas is on it. Have some kind of military med-kit, wouldn't need to be a tool. Just an animation that fires off when he uses his healing abilities.

Most of the smuggler heals from the video appeared to be deploying droids that went out and healed people. It is not much of a stretch to see medic troopers having military grade varients of those healing drones.

[sam, an eggplant]

It's too bad you can't use companions to help fill out the healing/tanking/damage quota in instances and raids.  That would have been something worth the price of admission.

That was the original plan, but I guess they backed away from it because they couldn't make the companion AI work. Actually, there was never any way the AI could work for tanking anything more complicated than a tank/spank, but healing could definitely happen.

Anyway, healing isn't inherently un-fun. What sucks is the diku whack-a-mole healing paradigm. Healing through dealing damage like the Rift bard and chloromancer is a perfectly fine compromise. The trick is that it has to be the only way to heal, not the alternative method that's less effective, or the "support" healing. It has to just simply be the way all healing is done. Otherwise you're unfair to the classes/specs watching healthbars who rightfully feel that since 100% of their attention is dedicated to healing, they should be better at it.

[Koyasha]

That was the original plan, but I guess they backed away from it because they couldn't make the companion AI work. Actually, there was never any way the AI could work for tanking anything more complicated than a tank/spank, but healing could definitely happen.

You realize that a raid composed entirely of NPC's/AI would be vastly superior to humans if they were programmed properly, right?  There's no reason the AI couldn't handle tanking, if they consider that as part of the encounter design (if tank is an NPC companion, tank runs this script that's programmed as part of the encounter).

Downside is that this requires the designers to figure out how to defeat the boss they've created and hand the players 'the strategy' - I strongly prefer the EQ style of making a boss, giving it cool abilities, and letting the players figure out how to beat it.  At least, that's what it felt like a lot of the time.  I don't know if they came up with specific ways the bosses were 'intended' to be defeated or not, but it didn't seem like it, and strategies varied widely between guilds.

Beyond that, the actual difficulty would be that the NPC's would be too perfect at the role, so who would ever want to have a human player that can make mistakes do an important job?  You'd have to program in an intentional error rate.  Make it too low and people will still always want the NPC, make it too high and the NPC becomes useless.  It would have to average at the error rate of a 'decent' human player, which would be very difficult to figure out.

[Venkman]

But that was my earlier point. These linear progressions are always about making the next thing to get slightly harder than the current thing you just got. Projecting that forward you eventually get to players who've reached the power cap and mobs that are nearly undefeatable. So instead, you balance the mobs against groups.

That's complicated though because you still need to treat the mob as a puzzle. These mobs could actually be smart, adaptive, could win more often than not. But that's not their purpose. Their purpose is to get whacked as part of the progression of getting something with slightly more time/energy invested than the previous time. So the mobs only get more powerful in certain ways, and are generally quite static in their performance. Players are supposed to decode how the mobs work, typical of a pure content gate. They're not supposed to worry whether they'll never get "smarter" than the mob. Maybe there were technical reasons for mob dumbness... back in the 80s :)

So mobs get crazy amounts of hit points, mana, maybe a unique ability or three, all to counter the pinnacle of power each archetype can achieve.

On the flip side, you have the archetypes. Everyone approaches an archetype with dreams/assumptions about what that archetype is about. This is borne of collective conditioning (because others said so) at this point, which itself is based on common knowledge.

So players eventually grow until they reach the pinnacle of that dream/assumption, which necessarily means they're a specialist in that role.

These games are not about players figuring out who they are in these worlds. Rather they're about players unlocking the full potential of whatever archetype they think they want to be, and doing so through the same sort of progression/reward compulsion cycle that's long since been proven effective.

It would be "experimental" (read: risky/scary) to mess with this proven formula. So instead of being hamstrung by some silly storyline and decades of assumed IP knowledge, it's easier to tweak the IP (or make sweaping changes) to fit the proven formula.

[Lantyssa]

Beyond that, the actual difficulty would be that the NPC's would be too perfect at the role, so who would ever want to have a human player that can make mistakes do an important job?  You'd have to program in an intentional error rate.  Make it too low and people will still always want the NPC, make it too high and the NPC becomes useless.  It would have to average at the error rate of a 'decent' human player, which would be very difficult to figure out.

I hear Guild Wars has AI henchmen.

[Ingmar]

Beyond that, the actual difficulty would be that the NPC's would be too perfect at the role, so who would ever want to have a human player that can make mistakes do an important job?  You'd have to program in an intentional error rate.  Make it too low and people will still always want the NPC, make it too high and the NPC becomes useless.  It would have to average at the error rate of a 'decent' human player, which would be very difficult to figure out.

I hear Guild Wars has AI henchmen.

But not tanking. They haven't solved the issue of an AI tank that's any good any more than anyone else has.

[Fordel]

GuildWars tanking is all weird to begin with.

[Lucas]

..."Tanking" which is a concept I still have to wrap my mind around: not that it should mirror that principle/experience, but in D&D I remember that so called *warriors* were fighters in shining armor (yeah along with paladins) that had no fear in facing their foes while bashing skulls with their hammer along with mages and rangers from distance, while clerics threw cure wounds from time to time (as well as crowd control and attack spells)...No talk of "keeping the aggro off" and stupid stuff like that.

[Ingmar]

..."Tanking" which is a concept I still have to wrap my mind around: not that it should mirror that principle/experience, but in D&D I remember that so called *warriors* were fighters in shining armor (yeah along with paladins) that had no fear in facing their foes while bashing skulls with their hammer along with mages and rangers from distance, while clerics threw cure wounds from time to time (as well as crowd control and attack spells)...No talk of "keeping the aggro off" and stupid stuff like that.

Not explicitly called out, but it certainly existed. Nearly all versions of D&D have some variant on the 'you get to hit someone that moves away from you'. Combine that with the fact that it has what in a video game would be called collision detection, and you have a lot of factors that contribute to de facto 'tanking' by the fighters.

[pxib]

Combat in tabletop roleplaying games is an abstract, human mediated thing. The folks with the armor stand in front while the squishies stand in the back, and when monsters try to get at the squishes the armored folks get in the way. This works because you don't have real 3D characters and real 3D monsters interacting in what's supposed to be realistic ways in some approximation of real time.

How many different monsters can one armored person block? How much space is there for the enemy to flank? Where, exactly, is everybody standing now? These questions can be discussed for minutes until the players and the gamemaster find some agreement that seems "realistic" and, more importantly, "fair".

MMOs have to actually render this shit on the fly. Even if it wasn't buggy as hell, collision detection wouldn't work because it would be twiddly and arbitrary rather than cinematic and fun. Aggro management is the established way to make armor/squishie work without prohibative latency, rendering, and gameplay problems. I'm not sure there's a better alternative on the horizon at the moment.

[Malakili]

Combat in tabletop roleplaying games is an abstract, human mediated thing. The folks with the armor stand in front while the squishies stand in the back, and when monsters try to get at the squishes the armored folks get in the way. This works because you don't have real 3D characters and real 3D monsters interacting in what's supposed to be realistic ways in some approximation of real time.

How many different monsters can one armored person block? How much space is there for the enemy to flank? Where, exactly, is everybody standing now? These questions can be discussed for minutes until the players and the gamemaster find some agreement that seems "realistic" and, more importantly, "fair".

MMOs have to actually render this shit on the fly. Even if it wasn't buggy as hell, collision detection wouldn't work because it would be twiddly and arbitrary rather than cinematic and fun. Aggro management is the established way to make armor/squishie work without prohibative latency, rendering, and gameplay problems. I'm not sure there's a better alternative on the horizon at the moment.

Yup.  I know there are plenty of people who dislike the concept of threat and aggro, but when you come down to it, its really not a terrible way to deal with problems when you go from table top turn based to computer real time. 

[Lantyssa]

It still boils down to easy rules even an AI could follow:

1) Geek the mage.

2) Try not to let their guys geek your mage.

We're getting into the Holy Trinity argument again.  D&D might have had some basis in it, but it wasn't as rigid as MMOs have made it.  Fighters were allowed to do impressive damage and mages could give themselves unbeatable protection.  There's no reason it has to follow the Holy Trinity other than lazy designers.