Guild Wars 2

[Sheepherder]

WoW Paladin Judgment system, 'done right' as they say.

Which incarnation?  I've seen like four now.

[Fordel]

One of the earlier ones, which they wouldn't let go of for what seemed like years.


Where you had Seals lasting like 10-20 seconds, dropping on judge and determining the judge effect.



Same basic idea and theme as what the Dervish in GW does, but the execution was terrible.

[Modern Angel]

Dervish was a very well done class. The elite skills which turned you into avatars of the four(?) gods were especially awesome.

[Lantyssa]

Five.

Dervish is one of my favorites, but I tended to go with longer lasting enchants so I didn't have to juggle so many at once.

[Fordel]

One of the best things about the Dervish was also one of it's most basic.


All attacks being AE/Cleave, even the Auto was a cleave that hit 3 adjacent targets.

[Lantyssa]

Death to the Holy Trinity!

The article gives a summary of the GW2 combat system with a few new tidbits.  Highlights:
 - Everyone has a slot devoted to a healing skill
 - Everyone can revive a fallen player, from level 1
 - Seven types of boons: Regeneration, Might, Fury, Swiftness, Protection, Vigor, and Aegis.  Aegis is Guardian-specific.  Others are shared.
 - Boon system; Similar buffs stack in duration, not effectiveness
 - No allied targeting.  Targeting is based on position and ground effects!
 - Adaptability and Mobility are major design points of the system.  Positioning and awareness matter.

This makes me so very happy.

[kildorn]

Death to the Holy Trinity!

The article gives a summary of the GW2 combat system with a few new tidbits.  Highlights:
 - Everyone has a slot devoted to a healing skill
 - Everyone can revive a fallen player, from level 1
 - Seven types of boons: Regeneration, Might, Fury, Swiftness, Protection, Vigor, and Aegis.  Aegis is Guardian-specific.  Others are shared.
 - Boon system; Similar buffs stack in duration, not effectiveness
 - No allied targeting.  Targeting is based on position and ground effects!
 - Adaptability and Mobility are major design points of the system.  Positioning and awareness matter.

This makes me so very happy.

The bolded makes me rage at people running out of healing fires in my mind <3

[Morfiend]

So far they are saying everything right, everything. I know there is another shoe somewhere.

[Typhon]

The other shoe is that it's a computer game, it's not the robot-jesus-unobtainable game that is playing right now in all our heads.  At the end of the day it's still a bunch of procedures that will need to run on your home machine and on servers.

I'm just happy that they are philosophically committed to not doing the trinity again.  I'm delighted that "mobility" is something they are stressing as an important part of combat.  More and more psyched about this release.

[Murgos]

I have far more hope for this game then I do for SWTOR.  Well, except lasers.  I like lasers.  And spaceships.

[Sky]

Other people are that shoe.

[Rasix]

I have far more hope for this game then I do for SWTOR.  Well, except lasers.  I like lasers.  And spaceships.

Yah, I'd like to say I'm more psyched for this kind of approach but... I have the Imperial March as my ringtone. 

[Lantyssa]

If GW2 does turn out to be better than sliced bread, maybe ArenaNet can make the next Star Wars MMO.

[DLRiley]

The major tenants of GW2 "anti-holy trinity" combat is very present in GW1. In GW1 to adopt a playstyle without a trinity you needed to actually understand the game, they were teams of all mesmers doing the hardest dungeons since prophecies, the problem was two fold
- you actually had to understand the game at a level beyond equating w/mo to a wow paladin.
- the game is filled with options, too many for the average player who instinctively looked for "how do I nuke? how do I tank? do we have a main healer?"

Because you can have the trinity most players relied on it and went with it despite the designers numerous attempts to allow players to play without it. Most of these attempts are present in the very first installment of the game. GW2 takes the same player who didn't know what a water ele was and gives him no choice but to play within the confines of the more advance system. However I suspect that the GW2 will take the "advanced" out of system, because the more people are forced to actually learn the system to actually play the more tears you will get in the first month of the games release. I'm more interested in seeming how much of this game runs on auto pilot and how much I have to actually do to master the system.

[Sky]

Rift is dealing with a bit of that, though their anti-trinity ideas look stillborn. I'm tempted to log into this weekend's Rift event, but I think I'll just put an ear to the ground to see if the situation has improved at all.

That is why we want to eliminate things that we felt were burdens on the game such as:
Group LF Healer/Tank…
Party wipes when you lose the wrong person.
Watching the interface instead of the world.
Playing with people because you have to, not because you want to.
Being stuck in the same combat patterns over and over again.

Wow, this is pretty much my beta 1 Rift feedback. The Rift soul system can /easily/ be tweaked to incorporate this, but it seems by beta 3 they were pulling away from that goal.

[Merusk]

Rift is dealing with a bit of that, though their anti-trinity ideas look stillborn. I'm tempted to log into this weekend's Rift event, but I think I'll just put an ear to the ground to see if the situation has improved at all.

There's an event this weekend? I hunted down a key last week only to find by the time I'd downloaded that the beta went down on Saturday so I got about 4 hours of game time total.  I've gotten no notice about anything since then.

[Ashamanchill]

I know it sounds funny to you all, but I think if you take the trinity out of DIKUs you will lose a lot of players. Many people are set in having roles. Some people LIKE healing. Others, (myself included) like tanking. I find it fun.

This is definately a personal opinion, but saying shit like "The Holy trinity is bad mechanics! Let's free players from it and they will love us!' Kind of has a whiff of the ivory tower. It may not be a 'good' game mechanic, but I suspect it's something many DIKU players secretly enjoy.

Don't get me wrong, I will definately play GW2, I am looking forward to it (I like the 6 skill action bar), but I don't think you are going to vacuum off a horde of players by having 'a better design'.

[pxib]

Many people are set in having roles. Some people LIKE healing. Others, (myself included) like tanking. I find it fun.

There will always be games available for them. I promise.

[Arrrgh]

I know it sounds funny to you all, but I think if you take the trinity out of DIKUs you will lose a lot of players. Many people are set in having roles. Some people LIKE healing. Others, (myself included) like tanking. I find it fun.

There are two people in my guild who only play healers. Over years and several MMOs I've never seen them play anything other than a healing class. 

What does GW2 offer them?

[Typhon]

Something new and different. Queue times not based upon waiting for role X.  A reason to watch what is actually happening versus watching people's health bars.

[Modern Angel]

Have they ever played anything besides MMO? I wouldn't compare this thing to WoW (at least on paper; we'll see at release) or EQ beyond the number of people playing at once. It's the wrong comparison.

[Merusk]

I totally wouldn't play Mass Effect if it didn't have the cleric job.  Ditto for Diablo.

[Lantyssa]

What does GW2 offer them?

The option to play RIFT, SWTOR, or any of the other fifty games using the Holy Trinity.

[Sky]

I think if this game doesn't have stunt driving, it will lose a lot of players. I love stunt driving.

[Rasix]

I totally wouldn't play Mass Effect if it didn't have the cleric job. 

Fine, dismiss the importance of medi-gel. 

[Fordel]

People may in fact enjoy tanking, in the sense that they enjoy having 50 mobs beat on them with total futility like they are superman or the hulk.


Almost no one actually enjoys HEALING. They might enjoy the the guaranteed group spots, or how needed they are across the game, but the actual healing mechanics... the number of people that would enjoy just healing and would heal their quest mobs to death are very very small.

[Modern Angel]

I've been playing MMOs a long, long time and I've run across way more people who enjoy exclusively healing than being even part-time tanks. I admit that the appeal is lost on me; healing is the one part of the trinity that I absolutely detest. But whatever floats your boat.

[Nebu]

I've been playing MMOs a long, long time and I've run across way more people who enjoy exclusively healing than being even part-time tanks. I admit that the appeal is lost on me; healing is the one part of the trinity that I absolutely detest. But whatever floats your boat.

I absolutely love playing the healer in a group.  It allows me to control a portion of the game flow without having to be the leader (I get enough leadership crap at work).  I just wish that a game would allow healers to watch more than the UI during the gameplay experience. 

[Stormwaltz]

I enjoy healing; it's grouping that I hate. 

I stand in the back and watch how the battle plays out. When appropriate, I step in. My job is to keep everyone else running, so they can focus on what they're doing without worrying that they're going to die. It's like what God told Bender in Futurama - when you do things right, people won't be sure you've done anything at all.

Now tanks, geez, those guys have a boring and unfulfilling job! Standing around and getting punched, but unable to really kill anything themselves? Ugh, count me out.

[DLRiley]

I think GW2 main goal here isn't to remove the trinity for the sake of removing the trinity, though it looks like it at a glance. Arenanet figures that they are catering to a crowd more used to single player games than WoW. GW2 doesn't assume your in a group, in fact they assume your playing solo, not an innovation since most modern mmo's assume this is true as well. But I think Arenanet wants to take it even further, GW2 isn't trying to differentiate between solo play from group play, the class structure allows any combination or no combination of classes to stand together as a "group", the only thing required is x number of warm bodies. GW1 was the same except it gave the choice of falling back to the trinity.

The key to GW2 will be how will this translate to the player who runs flare on a warrior/elementist (google it). They already dumb down the deck building, till there is basically no way for the average player to ever mess up their build. The implications on pvp is enormous but to that later. The next step is how close to the trinity will the players get before frothing in the mouth, my guess will be warrior, necromancer, guardian or warrior, elementalist, guardian. The fact is even if you remove the dilku from the game, the players attracted to the big -mmo- sign will still be diku in mindset and playstyle.

[Ingmar]

I've been playing MMOs a long, long time and I've run across way more people who enjoy exclusively healing than being even part-time tanks. I admit that the appeal is lost on me; healing is the one part of the trinity that I absolutely detest. But whatever floats your boat.

Not to go pop psychology here but I think most of those people enjoy the feeling of being needed more than the actual mechanics of healing.

[DLRiley]

I've been playing MMOs a long, long time and I've run across way more people who enjoy exclusively healing than being even part-time tanks. I admit that the appeal is lost on me; healing is the one part of the trinity that I absolutely detest. But whatever floats your boat.

Not to go pop psychology here but I think most of those people enjoy the feeling of being needed more than the actual mechanics of healing.

I played a healer once, in GW1, and it was akin to playing wack-a-mole, while running for your life. At a scale of 1-10 from a pvp'ers perspective, i was a 2 at the job. If you want to see a stressful job type in "GW infuser" in google.

[Malakili]

I've been playing MMOs a long, long time and I've run across way more people who enjoy exclusively healing than being even part-time tanks. I admit that the appeal is lost on me; healing is the one part of the trinity that I absolutely detest. But whatever floats your boat.

Not to go pop psychology here but I think most of those people enjoy the feeling of being needed more than the actual mechanics of healing.

I look at it as reactive v. proactive gameplay.  With DPS its about optimizing your rotation or whatever, you can plan that, and you can perfect that.  Healing is much more reactive (with a dash of prediction thrown in for classes that can prevent damage).  I like constantly reassessing the situation, having to choose who to cast spells on and so forth.

[SnakeCharmer]

I've been playing MMOs a long, long time and I've run across way more people who enjoy exclusively healing than being even part-time tanks. I admit that the appeal is lost on me; healing is the one part of the trinity that I absolutely detest. But whatever floats your boat.

Not to go pop psychology here but I think most of those people enjoy the feeling of being needed more than the actual mechanics of healing.

Which is kinda weird in itself when you think about it.  When you do your job well, nobody really says anything because they expect you to keep them alive.  Drop the ball and the raid wipes, all eyes are you for the blame.

[birdsguts]

I thought about it and realized I've actually played almost exclusively healers in any game that worked on a variation of "the trinity" for quite some time now. This extends even into games like Bad Company or TF2.
The reason though, has nothing to do with enjoying healing as a mechanic. Most of the time I'm just the most wiling to do that job in the group I'm playing with. No one else picked the healer so "what the hell?". After a while I actually became interested in what it allowed you to see and learn while playing. With healing you have to have much "softer eyes", you have to watch the whole battlefield and be willing to "peel off" of a target quickly and sometimes try and predict what is about to happen. Some games made this very fun... the Monk in GW1 was actually my favorite in a "fantasy rpg" style game. The older Shaman design from WAR was pretty fun too because you could throw out attacks after every 5 heals and they would be pumped up enough to really mess with whoever your DPS was focusing down or harassing.

What I'm trying to say is that at some point I realized the position allowed you to get a feel for a game's general battle flow... it helped me develop battle sense. In alot of the games I've done that role in you even got to control the "pushes" in some fashion. Usually via some kind of timer-ed ability. So the role itself became fun despite the fact that most implementations fail to impress or even entertain. That's almost a good thing (in certain games(but not really)) because it allows you to spend more time watching the actual battlefield.... but I'm glad to see a game trying to do away with the actual mechanical part of the "mechanic" in favor of making every class require that kind of awareness. That's the only thing I ever got out of playing healers in dikus. That broad awareness. They are retaining that part.

Maybe I'm an odd duck and not all healy types feel that way, but they are still using the part of that "role" that I like, they are just expanding it to cover the whole cast/game.