I need to hustle this morning so the post may or may not be disjuncted. I had a generally lousy time sleeping last night as all sorts of odd noises kept waking me up. The end result is that I gave myself 15 more minutes to sleep at one point… and now I am probably more than 15 minutes behind schedule.
Out to Pasture
Yesterday my post about EQ next, its removal of role based combat, and my subsequent despair caused a pretty large comment storm divided up between my blog, Google+ and twitter. I have to say I had a vastly different gameplay experience than a large number of the posters. But that said it does seem like there are a massive amount of people disgruntled about tanking in general or even the concept of needing one. Rowan wrote a pretty great rebuttal with his post “Thanks, But no Tanks”.
I feel in many ways like I am being put out to pasture, like I am some relic of a bygone era. It reminds me of the same kind of feeling I had when Warriors in World of Warcraft went from the only viable tank, to by far the worst one. It’s like being told, “Thanks for tanking all of those years, but we really have no need for you any more”. I am sure that a lot of my healer friends will be feeling the same way. I remember going into GW2 with some of those folks, and ultimately they were extremely disenfranchised when they couldn’t find a healer to play.
Divide and Conquer
All of this is to say that I am not open to new ideas, but more that I am extremely disillusioned with the alternatives that we have seen before. Brian “Psychochild” Green who happens to be part of the Storybricks team, made a quick comment in my Google+ thread.
The holy trinity came about because of primitive MMO AI. Vastly improved AI means a new dynamic is needed. Wait before you despair.
And honestly I am completely fine with a new dynamic… but I want there to be a “Tanky” role in whatever it is. This can mean a lot of things but so long as there is room for strong defensive and protective gameplay, I will probably be okay. Taunt has always been a crutch, and a tool that the good tanks used only in situations where things were already out of control. I can live without the artificial construct of instant threat generation. Additionally I can live without the concept of the tank being the one person who gathers up all the mobs… in fact the “AOE it down” mentality while effective is extremely boring.
I want a role so that I focus on the biggest and hardest hitting mob, while the rest of my party burns down everything else. I want to engage and keep busy the big guys while my team either through the use of crowd control, or simply dps juggling takes out the rest of the group . I am completely fine with that kind of a paradigm. I just want a beneficial role to play, and this really has not been the case in any other game that tried to blur the lines of the trinity. A guardian in Neverwinter is about the most useless thing ever when it comes to grouping… I don’t want to be the sword and board guy that is dragging the entire team down.
Physical Mass
They could go down a completely different avenue and pattern the constructs off of pvp based tanking like Warhammer Online. I am again completely fine with this paradigm as well, as I really enjoyed tanking on my Ironbreaker. The different there and the construct that allowed this to function was that players had physical mass. You could not idly clip through other players or npcs… and as a result “Tanks” could create physical barriers to keep players from attacking the squishier targets.
This was an enjoyable mechanic and there was quite a bit of synergy between the support functionality I was supplying and the damage dealing my friends were doing. With the destructible and constructible world concept… I could definitely see a tank being an obstacle maker that slows down or impedes the enemy from getting to the party. So long as I play an important role in the party, and the addition of my abilities improves gameplay rather than drags them down… I will find a way to be happy with whatever defensive gameplay it provides.
DPS is Boring
Ultimately I play a tank most of the time because I like being able to take tons of abuse. I habitually level in every game as either a full tank or a custom tank hybrid build. It is the style of gameplay I always gravitate towards. The avatar I have in my head, always has a sword and shield and lots and lots of armor. My time constraints often times push me into a mode where I simply cannot be the lynchpin of the group, and cannot tank… so I fall back on dual wield dps generally. The problem is I find that style of gameplay boring.
DPS to me is avoiding stuff on the ground while trying to execute a “Simon Says” like pattern as quickly as possible to do the maximum amount of damage. Obviously from the comments in all the threads yesterday, this is a gameplay style that a lot of players enjoy. For me if I am not having to juggle targets, manage aggro, and protect other players I quickly get bored and zone out. My biggest hope is that whatever the new scheme ends up being with EQ Next that it gives me more to do than just run around idly and mash a few buttons blindly.
I realize that I am probably in the large minority of players that enjoy tanking, and do so even when NOT in a group situation. I know we are out there however, and that tanking to me is just something we do instinctually. I just hope was we move forward there is still a place for us to have a valuable team contribution without having to fall back on a gameplay style that just isn’t natural for us. I like grouping with my friends, and in many ways I took up tanking because I wanted to protect my friends… it ties into my deep protective instinct.
The problem is this same instinct just doesn’t really apply in the same way to strangers. The evidence of the lack of people who want to tank or heal that keeps being brought up are the long lines in the dungeon queues. I present an alternate explanation… those of us who tank or heal because of this protective instinct… simply do not want to tank for strangers. I love tanking for friends and guildies… but I have zero interest in ever queuing into a random because every experience I have ever had as a PUG tank was relatively bad. The tank in these groups is the focus of everyone’s ire, and until that changes you will always have able bodied tanks like myself unwilling to subject themselves to the crap storm… especially when we can form groups
relatively easily within our own guild.
Wrapping Up
I have rattled on enough for the day, and I probably will have opened up a few more cans of worms that will work themselves out during the day. I am open to new ideas, but every break from the trinity thus far has failed miserably in my eyes. Here is hoping that Storybricks will be the magic sauce that makes non-role-based gameplay enjoyable. I have a lot of hope about what Storybricks will do at least from a single player experience… but I just have yet to see any alternate scenario actually work as far as a grouping one. If they can deliver fun and non-chaotic group play I will be more than happy to hitch my banner to their wagon. I hope you all have a great day, and I hope nothing I have said offended anyone.
Solid blog – you might have to expand upon it given all the response you’ve gotten. I think “DPS” means a lot of things to a lot of different people. Ok, maybe it just means something a little different to me, but I’ve rarely been typical. 😉
I agree that simple min/maxing dps is quite boring, and if my playstyle ever reverts to only being about macros to maximize damage and not “standing in the fire”, I think will be time for me to hang up my DPS mantle.
Rather, I tend to think about DPS as a utility role (who can also bring the pain), which is quite likely a rarity in this gaming age. Whether it’s CC, specialized interrupts, providing extra protection for the healer from adds by pulling them on to you until the tank and grab them, or bringing some other group/raid benefit (think WoW shadow priest in burning crusade), these are all critical elements to what I consider being a real “DPS”. In essence, providing a valuable skill set that isn’t just about pew pew or stabbity stabbity.
I believe a bit part of the decline in good players specializing in this role is the advent of damage meters. They have created a (detrimental) culture whereby the only thing by which a “dps” is measured by is the damage they can put out. It’s a shame because the decline in group/raid synergy and situational awareness declines dramatically when focused on the all important topping of the damage meters. It’s a good tool that was created to help people better understand how to play better and smarter, that has resulted in the dumbing down of the role and an pervasive increase in asshattery.
Maybe I’m just a traditionalist, but I like the trinity (using the definition of “dps” above, of course). I’ve played, grouped, and raided as all roels through the years, but I still find myself trying to maximize the VALUE (not just the damage) in a DPS slot in any group. I’ll follow a good tank (such as a Beltank) to hell and back, killing everything on the way, and would personally feel like I’m missing something if I didn’t get the chance to do so.
I’d personally really love to see a post where you really go into depth about what it means to be “a tank” to you. I think this would be really interesting and might help frame the discussion.
To my mind, a tank as part of the holy trinity is someone who takes the focus of enemies and can tolerate their blows. This is done so that the healer can focus on healing a single target rather than spreading healing across multiple targets, and so that the more fragile classes who can’t tolerate the damage don’t get destroyed. This is the entire reason for the holy trinity.
Now, you might associate some other things, or might feel that some elements are more important. You say right in the post that you like being able to take “tons of abuse”. From reading your other posts, you like protecting others and directing the flow of combat. Go into more depth about your feelings, as I would love to read more.
Also, I encourage people to go visit the main site for EQ Next: https://www.everquestnext.com/round-table The questions up right now are not all that deep, but SOE is serious about getting player feedback as they develop the game. The class issues sound like something that would be great to give feedback on when the time is right.
That may in fact be what I ramble on about for tomorrow mornings post 🙂
Awesome stuff. As others have pointed out, the mechanics are changing. How the care bears define our roles may need to change, as well.
I have been amazed at just how much discussion this has caused… and more or less all discussion so long as you enter into it with a willingness to listen to other points of view is awesome a good thing. As I talked about in the post today, I am willing for a redefinition of what a tank means. I feel that aggro is just as artificial a mechanic as the next person does, but it has worked to this point. I am willing to shift my ideas and my favorite era of games has been when divide and conquer was absolutely necessary. I like having to set a priority of targets, cc things, dps others down… and be the guy that tackles the big hard hitting mob. So long as whatever this new scheme looks like supports that kind of mechanic I am game. In League of Legends, tanking is not about aggro, but more about being the player that disrupts the enemy and the normal flow of attacks. I can be happy being that guy.
I think games try to eliminate the “Trinity” not because they want to get rid of pure roles, but they want people to be able to play without the need for a specific type of player. I quit the original EQ because at the point I left, you HAD to have a tank, a healer, a debuffer (shaman or enchanter) and dps in a group or you could do NOTHING.
I’ve played healers for 14 years, I enjoy it, but only in groups of friends where a blown cooldown causing a wipe just causes laughter and starting again instead of torment and /ragequitting.
I’m very interested in EQ Next and I hope there is the possibility to do a lot of healing for a group, but self-sufficiency isn’t always a bad thing in the grand scope of it all. We’ll always need “tanks”, the players that want to run face-first into the mobs. If they can keep themselves alive to some extent, I don’t see that as a bad thing.
I was finally able to sit down & watch the EQN Class Panels last night, and… to be honest, I don’t think it’ll be as bad as what you’re thinking. Their big thing is being able to play the way you want, and not having to wait on a specific role in order to kill something. I believe I remember them saying that there are indeed defensive roles, so if you want to play that way, awesome. You just don’t HAVE to – a mob could go down by using other strategies than just tank and spank.
The other part of that is this new “advanced AI” – if the mob is going to be smarter than what we’ve seen in the past, traditional “tanking” just won’t cut it. I think we’ll definitely see defensive & support playstyles (I love barding and playing buffers/CCers myself), but there’s going to be a lot more strategy involved than what GW2 had – and for the record, I didn’t care for the zerg-it-down mentality of GW2 either. I’m hoping it’s very different than that.
Don’t get me wrong… as negative as I come off… I am still really looking forward to the game. I have so much love for the Norrath setting that I will play the game even if it is simply a single player experience for me. I just wanted to get the discussion going now to make sure the designers that apparently think NO ONE loves tanks… that no really there are people who love tanks more than anything else.
You make a really good point near the end of this post that I failed to consider, and I don’t believe was brought up in the comment storm you previously mentioned: maybe tanks and healers don’t like to queue for public groups. This is a huge thing to consider. Not only would I consider these jobs more difficult, but more reliant upon previous knowledge of an instance: if you don’t know the boss mechanics and whether the instance is better suited for ST heals or AoE heals, or if you don’t know that spikes come out of the ground and you better GTFO or even the tank gets one hit by the boss… Then you’re not going to have a good time. Wiping doesn’t necessarily have to be a horrible experience, and it should happen when you’re learning a dungeon, but in a PUG you’re called out for it.
I would agree that our guild is actually pretty heavily weighted on the tank/healer side, and I’d probably have a more difficult time trying to find DPS than a tank or healer.
I’m rather confused that I haven’t considered the “tanks don’t like to queue” aspect before, since I recently tried to queue for a dungeon or two in Rift, myself… As DPS, so I could ignore the hatred that comes from being a tank in an instance I’ve never ran. That said, I’ve also never queued in a dungeon in TSW, because my current selection of weapons/skills (I even picked up some 300% threat skill, I believe) make what I consider a decent tank build, but I have little to offer in the way of DPS, and I don’t want to put up with the abuse of not knowing what I’m doing.
I hate to point a finger at the community itself, but there is a mentality there that I try to stay away from.
I haven’t looked at any of the EQN news yet, so I don’t know anything about that side of this conversation other than what you told us. As for the rest of the article though, I pretty much agree with almost every word.
I like leveling in general, regardless of which spec I am using to do so, but one of my most enjoyable ways to level is as a tank. I don’t have your aversion to grouping with strangers as my LFG experiences are usually very positive and I enjoy putting myself in situations where I have to use taunts and get creative with threat because people aren’t doing exactly what they’re supposed to. If I have a jerk in my group then sure I’ll stop taunting off of him and he can tank his own mobs, but if there’s not interesting things like that going on then even tanking is boring to me.
Leveling as a solo tank like I did with my Justicar/Cabalist was incredibly fun because even though I didn’t have people pulling threat off of my and such it gave me a chance to really focus on the survival aspect because I didn’t have anyone else there to help me DPS the mobs and nobody was there to heal me, so it was all on me.
Back to the not having roles thing though, so far every game that I’ve played that didn’t have some form of trinity in it did fail in the long run. Some of the people I enjoy playing with the most don’t do very will things like using cooldowns or kiting mobs, which means if they don’t have someone tanking for them or they aren’t able to heal themselves effectively, then they tend to die a lot and not enjoy the game as much. Then they stop playing, so I stop playing, and we find ourselves back in a trinity MMO.
For all the things we loved about GW2, that is one of the biggest detractors that keeps us from going back to it for anything more than an occasional exploration trip.