Definition: The part played by a person in a particular situation.
In the majority of MMO’s, roles are predefined, known as the Holy Trinity. You have the Tank, who keeps the bosses attention, DPS who deal as much damage as possible and Healers who keep everyone alive through replenishing HP.
In a game that is based around the multiplayer aspect, roles are used to create the sense of teamwork. A common complain with GW2 is that roles aren’t needed, and that everyone is damage, thus the game lacks depth. From a perspective, I can understand why people think that.
However, despite being tried and tested, the Trinity (and set roles in general) has its issues:
1) Lack of Depth: If content requires roles x, y and z, then it lacks depth (the amount of choices that can be made from a toolset) in terms of how the players decides to tackle the content. PvE inherently has this problem anyway, since the mechanics of a fight tend to have a single way of tackling them (thus the depth needs to be found elsewhere).
2) Limitation in Mechanics requiring the roles: For example, the mechanics if there is a Tank tends to be limited to “Face away”, “Kite” and, if there are two Tanks, “Swap at X stacks of debuff” and “Tank A tanks boss, Tank B tanks Adds”. If you look closely at a lot of encounter mechanics in other games, they either a) don’t actually require set roles and b) could easily be adapted to not require set roles.
3) Psuedo-Teamwork: A complaint by someone in another thread was he often forgot he was fighting with other players. At the same time, this could be applied to set roles; everyone is expected to know their role, so you worry more about what you’re doing. If you’re a Tank, more often than not, you’re more concerned about how much threat you’re generating, since DPS and Healer is keeping their own in check. DPS is focused on their rotation and staying out of the fire (most of the time), leaving the Tank and Healer to do their job. Healers are better when there are mechanics where the Healer needs to be aware what other team members are doing, but aside from that, the healer is focused more on keeping the bars filled.
4) It’s all based around _x_PS: Tank needs to generate Threat Per Second, DPS is self explanatory, Healers need to do more HPS than the mobs DPS. While this is somewhat simplified, this also sums up the majority of my experience as a Tank, Healer and DPS in games that I have raided in.
What GW2 wanted to achieve
GW2 wanted to achieve that:
- Roles can be swapped while in combat, with people choosing to specialise if they so wish.
- Any class can fulfill any role.
- Control didn’t rely on one person keeping aggro.
- Support didn’t rely on out-healing damage, but mitigating damage.
With the actual core system in an ideal encounter (since the majority of encounters don’t require these roles), points 1, 3 and 4 have been achieved, with 2 needing work.
What GW2 can do to improve the ‘role’ side of things
1. Don’t have roles pre-determined, but build roles into encounter mechanics. Doing this can add more depth, since the player looks at what tools they have to accomplish this role.
2. View Control, Support and Damage not as roles, but as aspects of combat. By doing this, you break away from the whole pre-determined roles way of thinking, which gives much more freedom when it comes to designing roles within the encounters.
3. Rework Defiant:
- A: Have Defiant as a timer, not stacks
- B: Have Defiant not trigger if you interrupt
I’d personally opt for A or, more ideally, a combination of the two, since this would allow Control builds to more readily interrupt if they need to help their team-mates.
For example;
- The crystal mustn’t fully regenerate its health, otherwise the boss heals. Each hit on the crystal gives you a stacking debuff that causes a % DoT, meaning you need to swap with other players.
- The boss spawns lots of adds that need to be taken down before they explode
- then there’s damaging the boss.
Even though the fight is only focusing on the aspect of damage, there’s 3 roles (for all purposes of what the definition of ‘role’ is) in this fight; keeping the crystal from recharging, destroying the adds that spawn and damaging the boss. In this fight, team-members need to be aware of when they need to swap with team-mates when stacks get too high, and the person in charge of the adds needs to be aware of their team-mates position in the event the add did explode, as to not wipe them all out while grouped up.
Obviously you can fit other aspects in too:
- Boss will occasionally try to go and knock the player off of the crystal, in which case, CC can be used to prevent it
- Boss is condition heavy, thus requiring condition removal
Apologies if it isn’t a coherent read. I’m writing this at 3:40am with no caffeine.
Time is a river.
The door is ajar.