… not habit of “Mob is targeting me, so push 4”… Or it’s time to do a combo, the same combo for the 30,000,000 time since I started playing the game, OMG SKILL!!!!!!!11
And trinity roles are different from this how?
That while trinity roles have a set role that you follow most of the time, it focuses on a skill set specific to that role…. Tanks will have to worry about mob positioning and placement, healers (when designed right) have to make those quick decisions on who to heal and when, Damage dealers need to learn the fights inside and out and learn to avoid as much damage as possible. Meanwhile in most games, each role has the utility of other roles… A healer will be called on to control a mob, a tank might have to help prevent damage on other players, a damage dealer might be throwing heals out. Combat roles themselves have no effect on the complexity of combat in the game, I don’t know where you guys keep getting this from, I"m willing to bet GW2 might be your first MMORPG, or you never actually tanked or healed in an older one.
By getting rid of the trinity, they could have gone a step above that, where you can organize actual roles to your group, where every player can have a job, something he’s responsible for, not necessarily tanking and healing, but one guy has to put on a shield to protect the group from occasional insane damage, one person is responsible for kiting a boss during certain phases, one person should be focusing on as much damage reduction for the group as possible…. But instead, they went the opposite way, we’re all damage dealers that can dodge. ArenaNet didn’t get rid of the trinity, they just didn’t add a tank and healer, there’s a HUGE difference. A game designed on no trinity should actually have a more in depth ability set, a higher requirement of situational awareness and placement, other players should be more than just adding more damage (the fact that people have solo’d some “endgame” content should shine some light on the terrible design). Basically, avoiding damage and staying alive should be a group effort, not push V at the right time, and keep a snare on the mob. The combat system, the way they did it, is just too simplistic. A trinity is actually a step up from what it is now.
It’s not set combat roles that make combat in games boring, it’s bad game design. Just like where some games made tanking as mundane as spamming your taunt ability and that’s pretty much it (FFXI, looking at you), GW2 made a very repetitive combat system that lacks any real complexity. I wouldn’t recommend looking at WoW now, because the game really took some huge steps backwards, but if you can find some WoW videos of top guilds during TBC, or they’re RARE to find, but top guilds in EQ2 during its prime, look at how much off-role utility those tanks and healers use, then imagine that with no set tanks or healers…. That’s more of what ANet marketed this game as, not the dodge-fest it is now. And people have a right to complain, it’s not like they were given an option to try it before buying it. The game was marketed as not needing the trinity and taking a step above that, when really all they did was dumb combat down to actually less than you do in most single player combat games, and let you throw more people at the mob to help you kill it.