Really, the trinity didn’t disappear – it was simply replaced. It’s not “stacking” it’s… crowdtanking.
The issue is that so many people were b—hurt by WoW, that they are frantic to bash anything that is even remotely similar. That leaves MMO designers replacing “WoW Mechanics” with anything different even if not better.
Trinity existed long before WoW. In fact, it existed long before first MMORPG, back when all we had were pen & paper MMO. It was intentionally removed in GW2 not because of WoW, but as a consequence of devs aiming for more action-oriented combat and soloability.
It didn’t work as well as intended, of course (it achieved the main goals, but only at a price of introducing many other, unwanted problems), but that is another story.
You see, this is an example of people being overly b—hurt by WoW. I say nothing about when Trinity came into existance, but this guy feels the need to argue about it because I mentioned WoW. No, WoW didn’t invent trinity, but it is the most well known and successful MMO that uses Trinity.
If anyone seems to be kittenhurt by WoW here, it’s not me – i don’t have any strong feelings attached to that game at all.
You may have said nothing about where Trinity originated, but you claimed that the devs decided to abandon it in GW2 because of WoW specifically. Which is not very likely.
If you ever played GW1, you’d have noticed that the “tanking” part of trinity was already relatively close to what we have now. While it was easier to manipulate aggro than in GW2 (as mob behaviour was more consistent), it could be done only through pre-instance build preparations, and positioning. There were no skills or abilities for that at all. And while the “heal” component did exist, it was already moving into more proactive behaviour (protection line), and the existence of the “healer problem” has been acknowledged.
GW1 never did manage to solve that last problem, but it tried to circumvent it (and any other similar “we need class x” cases) with the Heroes.
As it clearly can be seen, GW2 approach to trinity – abandoning specific class roles, disappearance of aggro management (that was to promote active positioning tactics) and moving the basis of survivability from healing to avoidance, pevention and mitigation of damage is just an evolution of ideas that originated in GW1.
Granted, the implementation of that vision is really, really bad, but it does exist, and is not just a “different than WoW” approach.
This mentality is why devs are replacing traditional systems with systems that aren’t necessarily better. The goal is to avoid the hordes of people that are b—hurt about WoW, not come up with better ways of doing things.
I’m pretty sure that the goal was to come up with better ways of doing things. That the lot of things they wanted to improve on ended up not so good is true – remember though, that it doesn’t mean that the “traditional” approaches they were trying to avoid were worth retaining.
The overflow world boss method is a poor replacement for raid content.
Agreed (for those new raid-like bosses). It needs improvements. Lot of improvements. But not in the direction of making it more like raid content, but exactly opposite – to make it more open and accessible.
Stacking is a poor replacement for tanking.
It is not – because it is not a replacement. It’s an unintended consequence of bad implementation of a good idea.
Ask yourself this question; Is the problem stacking or Anet’s inability to implement the support/dmg/control mechanic?
Basically, this.
Actions, not words.
Remember, remember, 15th of November
