Should SW:TOR start de-emphasizing the trinity?

No. And you will understand why when Guild Wars 2 comes out.

I once dreamt about playing a mmo without waiting 39 minutes for a tank to join my raid..... Then gw2 shows up.....


On the serious note, most pre wow mmos doesnt use the trinity system. Games like ragnarok online, lineage, uo, legend of mir, lineage 2, etcetc never force players to find a healer or tank until they can start playing the endgame....

Helluva thread OP, hope it doesn't get craphammered by moles & trolls. Oops ... too late.

I'm not sure combat, exploration and progression can be avoided in an MMO. Remove combat and encounters become docile. (Think Second Life.) Remove exploration and the game evolves one dimensionally. (Think Guild Wars.) Remove progression and there's nothing but status quo to lean on. (Can't think of one.) Anything outside that triangle would require too much storage, too much back-end bandwidth and WAY too much fuzzy logic to pull off.

And I think fuzzy logic is where the next generation MMO would have to come from. A ubiquitous world builder engine that plays creator in a purely pervasive environment where every character's actions and choices affect every other character's actions and choices throughout the entire game. End game starts the moment a player first logs in. Plots would build themselves, stories and lore would write themselves, and player characters would in essence be a part of every other player character's questlines - all on the fly. Won't ever happen.

However I could see a limited variation of that someday in an instanced multiplayer environment with maybe 4 players where decision and reaction skills alone - and not character level or equipment - would be the balance. But not on an MMO scale with millions of players residing in a one room galaxy.

Until that or some haptic-based alpha wave triggered virtual brain world that paints from and directly reacts to a player's thoughts comes along, the trinity (either in part or in whole) is probably it for MMOs.

I don't think SWTOR should (or even can) de-emphasize the Trinity. Just continue improving what they have until it can expand beyond instanced spacedocks into the Star Wars universe we saw in the movies.

The trinity paradigm will fade away, but not in this game (or in wow, for that matter). I would think Titan will probably be the game to finally kill the precedent set by DikuMUD way back in the day.

I could see this playing out in SWTOR, but as another poster said it's already too late in the game for that to happen. Having different "modes" available to each character to deal with having threat vs. supporting the group vs. dealing damage that could be easily switched based on that moment in the fight does sound like fun, but I don't think Mythic has the IQ to pull it off in a way that's fun & rewarding to the player.

The trinity paradigm will fade away into what? What replaces it?

Concept? never gonna happen? easy peezy, people do that in their sleep.

Skill loadouts.
I wouldnt replace the trinity, id just open all the skills up within the classes, let people pick and choose, then put the roles into switchable loadouts.

So you have tank abilities in loadout slot 1
Healing abilities in loadout slot 2
DPS in loadout slot 3
Debuff, buff ect on loadout slot 4.

Everyone has 4 loadouts that they can swap on click before a battle and a 5th set which is basically your sandbox loadout. That pretty much serves a multipurpose sort of play . It opens up a wide range of skills and still allows players to gather for groups, choose their roles, get after it and go back to their solo play and chosen skillset after no?

So imagine playing a sandbox sort of skill set solo, thats your primary skill loadout of chosen abilities, then for groups you switch up do the deed, switch back, go about your business. assume your role on a click.
Healer dies? np click, im healer now, tank dies i got it. throw af ew symbols above heads to show role for less confusion and so on. Bamm, you please everyone.

Zerg Wars where everyone can do everything. Where you don't need any strats just zerg em down.

Guild Wars did that already, it didn't go over very well. They're trying again with a new system, but honestly, it's not going to go over so well either. Once people start playing their PC game with XBoX Live console players, there goes any chance of even trying to get a trinity worked out anyways.

Vindicuts doesn't have a trinity, Tera doesn't look to have one either, but both of those are action based MMOs, which doesn't really need a trinity. What I could see games evolving (at least a niche of them) to would be either your traditional style that uses a trinity, or an action based style that forgoes the trinity in favor of being responsible for your own mitigation and dodging of boss attacks. Put simply, one system would use a dice/roll system to depend on, the other would be more about learning patterns and finding/exploiting openings in a boss' attacks. Having a mix of the two, while it could be possible, probably wouldn't be favorable to a player's eyes and senses.

Nothing.

These are the people who believe that "change" should happen for its own sake. Then when the "new" stuff comes, from automatic raids (which cost WoW 2m subscribers, hooray?) to easy-mode leveling, they complain that there's nothing to do.

Prior to the "oh yeah, we're going console" GW2 announcement, they were all touting the "death of the holy trinity". Why? Because the people who couldn't figure out how to balance healing in PVP (hi monks...) in GW1 and ran it into the ground said so?

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The trinity isn't going anywhere because it effectively captures the different "player personalities" that enjoy MMOs - the leader (Tank), the min-maxers (DPS), the support players (Healers). It works, it's crude, but it's effective. There has always been an "issue" of more players wanting to play DPS roles than Healer / Tank, but that's not something you want to try and fix necessarily, because whenever you do, you create a hack-n-slash game that falls apart in a week.

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It's okay for DPS to sit and wait for a bit. The fact that they want to play the game so badly that they're waiting in line for it is a sign that things are *going well*, not a sign that we need to panic. Look, Disney has lines that are hours long that people *pay to stand in* because they enjoy the rides.

Bioware needs to continue to focus on making the rides enjoyable, not the crap decision that GW2 made of trying to take away the line... because often times we find that the ride itself is garbage.

I hope they stick with the trinity and if change anything let it be strengthening of the role differences. No trinity no mmorpg for me. I want to fill a role.