Guild Wars 2

Preface: this is not argument FOR revisiting the holy trinity.

I totally understand the move away from the holy trinity of MMO play (tank, healer, dps), and personally I think it’s a wonderful breath of fresh air; I just think that certain aspects of the old school trinity should still be maintained – especially in the case of dealing with mobs’ attention.

The real challenge is that in order for there to be no “trinity” of sorts, then every player in every group would have to effectively be able to hot-swap into any of those roles, and right now that just isn’t possible. There is no way currently that an elementalist would outlive a guardian when it comes to taking and mitigating damage.

I also recall reading on a few threads now that the name of the game isn’t to outheal incoming damage, rather to block / reflect the damage. Again, this is a philosophy I totally jive with, but it’s also dependent on the ability for a player to be able to deal with that damage reliably.

Right now we can’t even tell who has any given mob’s attention (which in every dungeon I’ve ran seems to change very often and very sudden), so even if every player had a reliable and relatively consistent way of managing damage, it doesn’t help if there isn’t enough reaction time.

So if we can’t predict where the damage will go, can’t control where the damage will go and can’t all mitigate damage equally well across any build a profession chooses, how can these PVE scenarios be anything but a chaotic dps race / graveyard zerg?

I strongly feel we need Targets’ Target UI elements and abilities that allow us to control aggro regardless of which trinity of gameplay is chosen – Tank, Healer, DPS or Control, Support, DPS.

TL;DR: Kiting is fun sometimes, but not when it becomes the entire premise for managing every mob in the game.

And let me also note, I’m not advocating giving certain professions aggro retaining abilities and certain other professions aggro reducing abilities, but to spread them across every profession’s weapon sets / utilities.

As a use case, I like to play staff ele (mostly for the range I get out of the abilities), but in a case where we’re combating mobs in a long corridor (where it’s incredibly difficult to see whom the mob is focused on due to partical effects and random environmental conditions), I’d like to be able reliably pull a mob’s attention, pop a slow or stun affect (for melee mobs) or my earth spell reflect (for caster mobs) and soak up damage. I can then pop a utility skill (thinking mist form) to effectively lose a mob’s attention and let him move off toward another player whom has a mitigating ability ready. This just “feels” more like team play and opens the doors for a different level of player coordination.

Right now it just feels the game’s UI and environment conflicts with our ability to react effectively.

Ironically, one of the forum Game Designers poster on here not long ago about how the method of kiting was considered “doing it wrong”.

Whether or not you agree with him isn’t for me to judge, but there you have it.