Should SW:TOR start de-emphasizing the trinity?

When a game is centered around combat, it's hard to implement a good alternative to the classic trinity. When you and the mobs both have HP that needs to be either preserved or depleted, you'll naturally see roles develop that resemble the trinity. To get much beyond that, you'd have to move away from being combat-centric and make the quests more like puzzles or diplomatic encounters.

You can design a boss enounter without needing a tank. This is not complicated. You can desgin NPC damage to be avoidable thus removing the need for a healer. This is not complicated. You can retool the class tool box with different skills and reblanace them.

So, change all npc mechanics, change all pc class skills, change all companion skills...

how is that not a "massive overhaul" ?

Is there any non-trinity MMO's that are out now? I have no idea whether I would like or hate it, because I have never played a mainstream MMO without it.

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.

Encounters can be made where the trinity is not required without changing a single class ability.