PvE without a Tank System/Mechanics is simply a Zerg Fest! Prove me wrong otherwise

Palebane

Originally posted by Antipathy

 

Originally posted by Rydeson

It would look like the cave troll fight in Lord of the Rings..  Trust me when I say that Frodo wasn't tanking.  The whole fight looked like a FFA ..

 

 

So you support the idea that the fight would be a zergfest?

And from what I remember of the LoTR films, the only reason Frodo survived was because he was wearing tank gear (a mithril shirt). If the same blow had hit Samwise, Merry or Pippin, then they would have instantly died.

I all also seem to remember some of the tougher members of the group moving to protect the weaker (i.e. tanking).

And if a monster can one-shot half the party, and strikes people at random, then the fight is either going to be quite short lasting, or most of the party are going to be auto-dead, since a random targetting system will get round to selecting them sooner or later (and an intelligent bad guy would likely not target as randomly as a cave troll).

Is a fight much fun if half the party know they're going to spend half of it lying on the floor dead, no matter what they do?

Cave trolls are big, slow, and stupid. You shouldn't have to have a class that can stand toe to toe with one. Players can dodge, run, and work together to bring him down with intelligence. Your aggro-managing random target multipliers, with tanks,  healers, and dps actually makes very little sense in such an encounter, in my opinion.

 

It would not be a zergfest, which would imply every single person in the party rushing up to him and stabbing him until he dies. No, players would be running around pillars, slicing his knees as they duck in-between his legs, shooting him with arrows and fireballs from far away. It would be anything but a zergfest if you wanted to survive.

vi2023ly

Originally posted by arenasb

Originally posted by Evile

Just because the fact someone even thinks such a thing as you can't stray from the same tired tank/bla bla format you can't have interesting combat is a pretty bad display of the common mentality of the MMO consumer.

We all wonder why devs just rehash wow.

 I find the typical tank and spank fight absolutely horrible. I don't understand how people can continue to like that sort of thing time after time.

Almost everyone seems to have played WoW. I'll give an example of my probably my favorite "boss" battle there. There is an instance there called Magisters Terrace. The third boss encounter there was Priestess Delrissa. Now what made this fight interesting was that she had 4 random mini bosses with her that different abilities. The other aspect of the fight was that there was no threat table. So in essence it resembled more like a pvp fight than a pve one. For appropriate geared players you had to us abilities that most don't ever use in pve. I loved the fight but it seemed most people absolutely hated it. I assume because it was out of the norm of the tank and spank scripted fight that almost everything else in the game was. So it was out of their comfort zone. Interestingly enough (although not surprising), the folks that liked the battle the most were pvpers.

This is how encounters should be, unpredictable. Give the npcs you fight some intelligent AI. You don't need to buff up the enemy with huge amounts of health and that can strike for a billion damage. Make them smarter and then you don't have to have tanks.

The reason people hated that fight and fights like it (like heroic faction champs in ToC) isn't because they're different or challenging, it's because it breaks the model that's previously been established and enforced, in the same instance no less.

I hated that fight as a healer because I could literally do nothing other than run around and try not to die, and pop off instants once in a while.  Now, if the entire instance was like that I could spec and gear for more survivability and be mostly OK and still able to do my job, but I couldn't because it was before dual specs and every single other encounter in the instance required a traditional setup.  The tanks I knew had similar feelings - they couldn't hold threat and couldn't do any decent damage, even if they switched to a 2-hander.

I did like the fight in ToC much better though (horrible instance it was overall).  There was enough people that when I took aggro I could just run around in a big circle kiting all the baddies with earthbind & grounding while there were still people who could heal to keep us all alive, and I could spam instants when they came up.

The major difference between these fights is that people in support roles could still participate meaningfully in ToC (by kiting, because there were enough other people to fill their shoes while they were occupied) while they couldn't in H. MgT (because the area to fight in was too small, there weren't enough people, and there were no on-the-spot free respecs).

All of the upcoming MMOs are doing interesting, but different, things with class roles.  I think what people want, really, is to just not get stuck looking for one or two people with specific classes that can fill specific roles.  In GW2 the responsibilities of controlling and healing the fight are split among everyone, in FF14 every character can learn every class, while in SWTOR every class can fill a critical group role and there's companion characters ot fill any gaps.  I think all three are great ideas, and at least one of them will see some widespread success and adoption.

Emergence

In essence, I can't think of that many types of abilities in combat.

Damage of... Hit Points, Stamina, Mana, Ammo

Healing of...

Damage Reduction, Damage Blocking, Damage Absorbtion

Crowd Control, Movement Effect (Snare, Root, Mez)

Buffing, Debuffing, Statistics or Skills

Stealth, Teleporting, Speed Movement

Range of Abilities

 

Roles can be fulfilled via...

Movement, Defense, Offense, Range, Support. That's 5 roles.

Tank, Healer, DPS, followed by Movement and Ranged versions of these three things.

 

In FPS games, there are Damage and sometimes HP.

In RTS games, there's Tank, Healer, DPS. With occassional special effects.

In some RTS games there's rock, paper, scissors (as well as volcano, typhoon, and middle finger)

 

The only types of gameplay I can think of right now are Tank/Healer/DPS types and Rock/Paper/Scissors types. In essence, these are the same thing. DPS kills Healer, Tank kills DPS, Healer kills tank? Yea whatever.

 

I am thinking of Company of Heroes.

Anti-Tank > Tank > Sniper > Machine Gun > Infantry > Sniper > Anti-Tank > Machine Gun  > Infantry

Spam Tanks > Spam Pioneers > All

Azrile

The funny thing here is the people are talking like every boss in WOW is a tank/spank fight where the tank gets all aggro and nobody else takes damage.

Almost every raid (even most instances) have boss fights where there is no aggro table (like the mage in UK) or they have insanity type bosses, or something else.   A lot of encounters have bosses where a melee character IS NOT supposed to take the damage from the boss and a warlock or moonkin is the tank.

The only problem with this in WOW (which is being fixed) is the one-hit deaths for any non-tank.  I don't think if the tank dies at 8%, it should be a wipe.  I think some classes should be able to step up a little easier and semi-tank for longer than they currently can.  That is being fixed in Cata where more classes are getting survivor/healing abilities and health pools will be bigger

but if anyone thinks wow is all about the tank taking all the damage from the boss, .. they haven't played anything past vanilla wow 5 years ago.

But yeah, the only other option then a trinity system is a zerg system..  my 5 vs your 5... one on one  haha

aesperus

Originally posted by Azrile

But yeah, the only other option then a trinity system is a zerg system..  my 5 vs your 5... one on one  haha

I don't think that's necessarily true. I think the problem is most people are looking at the conventional games to prove something out of the norm. Basically you have the trinity system for more structured combat, you also have the zerg system, but then you have some games that basically run on counters.

Two examples of this would be Guild Wars and Eve. While you can create 'tanks' in each, you don't necessarily need one in either. Also, when tanks are not present it doesn't default to a zerg fest all the time either. Basically, in this system you have people playing to their strengths, and finding ways to exploit those weaker than them based on skills / equipment rather than numbers. In Eve you have hit and runs, scouting attacks. In Guild Wars you have any number of skills that you can use to counter other playing styles. Since the bosses and players work on the same system w/ the same types of skills, the strategies work fairly similar for both bosses and pvp.

Not sure what system you could label this as, but given the trend I guess it would be 'pvp based'. By diluting the emphasis on the tank, and giving people the option to mix & match roles to their choosing, you have essentially removed the need for the trinity from the game. By Limiting the effectiveness of numbers (putting more an emphasis on choosing the right skills / equipment) you limit the effectiveness of the zerg, and are left with a 3rd option.

Angier2758

Originally posted by arcdevil

Originally posted by mCalvert

Overwhelming force is a succesful combat tactic as old as war. 

truth be told, history taugh us plenty of times that overwhelming forces are far from successful against brilliant tacticians

 You do realise that by far most of the time superior numbers usually lead to victory right?  There are plenty of exceptions, but more often than not 2 on 1 (or greater) = win.

 

History has shown when in doubt you should bring the bigger army.  Sun Tzu who was one of those exceptions even understood that numbers meant a lot.. how does his quote go:

"If you have the stronger army attack... if you have weaker army retreat... if you have an equal army ambush."  verbatim 

astoria

Lots of games do fine with out tanks on teams. GW - traps, wards, dmg reflection, etc.; CoX doms/trollers; CO active blocking even alternating aggro; FE and EVE everyone can be some hybrid.

Joarnaj

I've played games with no need for tanks and so far I've never seen a game mechanic work as well as the trinity. The really nice thing about the trinity is that it does require some strategy and skill from at least some of the team - it makes it into at least a little bit of a thinking man's game. I'm not saying this is impossible with other styles, I just have preferred games that contain the trinity over games that do not. But that's me.

 

CoX is moderately successful at a no-tank model. Mostly, though, it was because they never solved the problem of tanks being overpowered so their hot-fix was basically, "gimp them until they are useless," and the community learned that the missions were easy enough to not need great tanking. I have to admit that this was a lot of fun for a while - I remember one team where we had a healer and 7 blasters and we had an absolute blast (pun intended.) But in CoX the op tank has basically been replaced by the op controller and now no matter what your class you are completely expendable and can easily be replaced by any old controller. Not fun.

djazzy

What makes the trinity system work is the artificial threat mechanics. That really dumbs down the games for players. Encounters needs to be based on more natural situations, just as Nefarian said "kill the one in the dress".

Joarnaj

Originally posted by arenasb

What makes the trinity system work is the artificial threat mechanics. That really dumbs down the games for players. Encounters needs to be based on more natural situations, just as Nefarian said "kill the one in the dress".

That seems a little harsh since it basically calls those of us who prefer a game with this mechanic "dumb." I think just the opposite. I think a game with the trinity provides a solid strategy for instances and provides players with more options for how to play. It also allows us to play to our strengths. For instance, I am a great healer. When I start a new game I look first at the healing classes since I know I'm well suited for them. I am an ok tank. I am great at dps, but only in games where powers can be queued. I don't know that I agree that games without the trinity become a Zerg fest, but I do think they lend themselves to players just figuring out how they can do the absolute most damage in any situation which, to me, is not as strategic.

 

I'd love to see a game designed where instances are unique and require different strategies for each instance or boss. This would potentially kill the trinity in that game. It would also likely mean the game would have much less content since the designers would have to spend a lot more time designing each instance.

nariusseldon

It is just different styles of gameplay & mechanics.

Tank & spank is not just tank & spank. Look at ICC raids. However many fights are simple tank & spank? Very few. Each role have their own jobs, and often it can be quite interesting (like stopping valks in the LK fight .. coordinating snare, stun & dps). There are also lots of extra mechanics (like the ice tombs in sindragosa fight, or the healing fight in dreamweaver).

So Tank & spank is not necessarily a bad boring thing. Within that confine, there are lots and lots of interesting encounters.

Having said that, i don't think tank & spank is the only fun way of constructing encounters. TOR is developing cover mechanics (for the smugglers) and there may be other ways of making combat fun while requiring team work.

cosy

Originally posted by MMOExposed

I say PvE without a tanking system is nothing more than a Zerg Fest.

nope in EvE only u can PVF whit no dedicated tank and there is no zerg because u can pve alone

terrant

OK, lemme preface all of this by saying I play WoW. And my main is a tank.

 

So that out of the way...I both agree and disagree with the OP and his idea.

 

MMOs like EQ started, and WoW polished off, teh concept of the "holy trinity/tank n spank" fight. But relally, is there a need for the trinity? I think not. I DO think there should be defensives/support roles of various kinds in a pve environ, but that doesn't mean we have to be stagnant.

 

Who said a tank has to be a big fat guy in heavy plate with stupidly high health pools, little to no damage capacity, and a taunt button? Who says tanking is about focuses the boss to hit you? Oh that's right, Blizzard. And we all listen because they make more money than God, so they must know something.

 

I'd love to see an effective "Tactician" class. Many games have tried this (AO's Bureaucrat class comes to mind, among others) but few have really caputred it well. Make a class whose armor and health might not be that high, but provides tactical buffs that increase survival, damage, etc for the group. Make tanking less about "taunt the boss, then hold him" and more about making split-second decisions that turn the tide of a fight. That's the sort of thing most of us tanks love about our chosen role, and I'd like to see more of it in gaming. Boss is charging that mage? Trip him before he gets to her, then crack his armor while he's down. Adds threatening a healer? Jump in front of him with a shield and buy him time to get to safety.  Group in chaos? Issue commands that provide powerful buffs if the group follows instructions. Give him the ability to use terrain...to move ranged players to a cliff above the boss to rain fire on his head, or cut down a tree to create a barrier between enemies and a wounded player. Don't be a meat shield- be a saviour.

 

Find me the game with THAT tanking class, and you just earned 15/month.

blbeta

I personally like it with characters of varying degrees of survival.  That is one thing I liked about Asheron's Call or the general idea.  You could train or specialize in 3 defensive skills:  Melee Defense, Missle Defense & Magic Defense.  You had a pool of total points for skills, so if you spec in any or all three you were most likely going to lack on offense.  Now their system wasn't perfect I did I like the feel of thier combat.

Another great example is WoW without tanks and endless mana for healers.  Three of us use to take on regular dungeons in WoW, most of the time hunters.  Point is it was never a tank/healer and DPS.  It was a challenge and fun, but at the same time as we went on became no fun at all.  Dungeons we would do eventually became useless as the gear was no longer an upgrade or useful.  By this I mean at endgame.

This is another thing that I liked about Asheron's Call is the loot vs WoW.  Let's just say it was similar to Diablo and then some, but that is for another thread.

Personally I miss the days of needing crowd control.  Sure tanks are fine but when they can tank everything in the room with little to no worry it takes the fun out of other classes with CC.  This also brings me to healing.  Healing in WoW currently is not much fun.  Spam heals all day long and that for the most part is it, you don't worry about mana much and there are way too many heals with no cooldown.  I imagine some find that fun, but I do not.

Combat that is fun to me goes more along the lines of using CC, positioning, smidge of healing and different people perhaps being more adept at tanking different kinds of damage.  I am not a fan of one character in the group being the best a damage soaking of all kinds and horrible DPS.  It's not much fun if one guy dies, healer or tank, and for the most part you are screwed.

WoW PvP style combat is where my prefered MMO combat would head.  All enemies, including bosses, are not immune to CC but rather there are diminishing returns.  Sure some can be immune to certain CC or hell even some immune to all CC.  I believe CC/tactics playing a much larger roll than they do in WoW PvE dungeons.  Also being 1 shot by bosses almost 100% of the time and not to mention just regular mobs if you are not a tank is not much fun, again in dungeons.

Rockgod99

The mods spotlighted a "prove me wrong" thread???

Man this site is going downhill...

dlunas

Originally posted by Palebane

Originally posted by Antipathy

 

Originally posted by Rydeson

It would look like the cave troll fight in Lord of the Rings..  Trust me when I say that Frodo wasn't tanking.  The whole fight looked like a FFA ..

 

 

So you support the idea that the fight would be a zergfest?

And from what I remember of the LoTR films, the only reason Frodo survived was because he was wearing tank gear (a mithril shirt). If the same blow had hit Samwise, Merry or Pippin, then they would have instantly died.

I all also seem to remember some of the tougher members of the group moving to protect the weaker (i.e. tanking).

And if a monster can one-shot half the party, and strikes people at random, then the fight is either going to be quite short lasting, or most of the party are going to be auto-dead, since a random targetting system will get round to selecting them sooner or later (and an intelligent bad guy would likely not target as randomly as a cave troll).

Is a fight much fun if half the party know they're going to spend half of it lying on the floor dead, no matter what they do?

Cave trolls are big, slow, and stupid. You shouldn't have to have a class that can stand toe to toe with one. Players can dodge, run, and work together to bring him down with intelligence. Your aggro-managing random target multipliers, with tanks,  healers, and dps actually makes very little sense in such an encounter, in my opinion.

 

It would not be a zergfest, which would imply every single person in the party rushing up to him and stabbing him until he dies. No, players would be running around pillars, slicing his knees as they duck in-between his legs, shooting him with arrows and fireballs from far away. It would be anything but a zergfest if you wanted to survive.

Now that sounds like my kind of boss fight.  Don't forget, the hobbits tended to be ignored in Middle Earth, because of their size and unassuming nature.  A big dumb cave troll might not even notice them at first, or even after they ran and hid, unless they had pinpricked him really hard.

dlunas

Originally posted by Comnitus

Seriously, I can't see why we can't have both in one encounter.

Zerg wave --> zerg wave --> zerg wave --> Mini-boss who hates X class in your party above all others and gives him priority, hopefully a heavily armored class for the sake of your party --> zerg wave --> zerg wave --> zerg wave --> Mini-boss who is vulnerable to some kind of taunting or magical insult, but no guarantees of only attacking one class; will periodically go for the weaker ones, so they'd better know how to run --> zerg wave --> zerg wave --> zerg wave --> Final boss, kind of like the 2nd mini-boss but throw in some fancy mechanics or puzzle or w/e to make the encounter interesting --> EPIX LEWTZ!

I'm dreaming, I suppose. People look at "zerg" like its something they stepped in. I say there's nothing wrong with the undirected chaos of mass battle (and it doesn't have to be chaotic on your part, if your team is organized and disciplined enough. An efficient team will cut through enemies faster, even in a "zerg," than a bunch of solo heroes swinging at anything they see).

And arcdevil, since brilliant tacticians are few and far between, I'd rather have overwhelming force.

This one sounds fun.  Variety WITHIN a dungeon?  Also, the priestess of something something fight sounded pretty cool.  Obviously not if you're playing a squishy healer that can't really do anything else, though.  While it sounds great to me, I do acknowledge that it would've been a pain to any priest that was geared towards just mana and healing.  I personally like a little surprise and randomness in my dungeons.

dlunas

Originally posted by terrant

OK, lemme preface all of this by saying I play WoW. And my main is a tank.

 

So that out of the way...I both agree and disagree with the OP and his idea.

 

MMOs like EQ started, and WoW polished off, teh concept of the "holy trinity/tank n spank" fight. But relally, is there a need for the trinity? I think not. I DO think there should be defensives/support roles of various kinds in a pve environ, but that doesn't mean we have to be stagnant.

 

Who said a tank has to be a big fat guy in heavy plate with stupidly high health pools, little to no damage capacity, and a taunt button? Who says tanking is about focuses the boss to hit you? Oh that's right, Blizzard. And we all listen because they make more money than God, so they must know something.

 

I'd love to see an effective "Tactician" class. Many games have tried this (AO's Bureaucrat class comes to mind, among others) but few have really caputred it well. Make a class whose armor and health might not be that high, but provides tactical buffs that increase survival, damage, etc for the group. Make tanking less about "taunt the boss, then hold him" and more about making split-second decisions that turn the tide of a fight. That's the sort of thing most of us tanks love about our chosen role, and I'd like to see more of it in gaming. Boss is charging that mage? Trip him before he gets to her, then crack his armor while he's down. Adds threatening a healer? Jump in front of him with a shield and buy him time to get to safety.  Group in chaos? Issue commands that provide powerful buffs if the group follows instructions. Give him the ability to use terrain...to move ranged players to a cliff above the boss to rain fire on his head, or cut down a tree to create a barrier between enemies and a wounded player. Don't be a meat shield- be a saviour.

 

Find me the game with THAT tanking class, and you just earned 15/month.

THAT is a tank class I'd love.

dlunas

Originally posted by Rockgod99

The mods spotlighted a "prove me wrong" thread???

Man this site is going downhill...

I think the spotlight was more for the following conversation.

z80paranoia

you all are missing the key of the subject
he said it would be a zerg..FEST
i dont know about you but i dont object to zergs and a zerg festival sounds like fun to me
besides must all mmorpgs have all identical mechanics?
cant we peacefully have one mmo that does something slightly superficially different?

kvfnaTTD

i hate zerg fest or something like that.But i don't think there is nothing but a tanking system.

Ozmodan

Just making that statement shows complete lack of understanding of game mechanics.  There has been a ton of examples, AC1 being a excellent one of developers not locked into such feeble thinking.

You and Smedley should get together, you think alike.

Skichalet

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dlunas

Originally posted by Skichalet

[B][URL=http://www.chilliandice.com/]Ski chalet [/URL][/B]

*squints*   Chili and Dice?

dlunas

Originally posted by Skichalet

[B][URL=http://www.chilliandice.com/]Ski chalet [/URL][/B]

*squints*  ...Chili and Dice?