Please Remove Tank, DPS and Heal

BioWare I don't want to have to think while raiding please fix this.

If this game needs a change it's to composition of groups rather than the trinity. Bioware by now probably have decent metrics on how many of each role are queued for group finder at any given time. So why not alter the ops and flashpoints accordingly. Say something like 6man FP, 12 & 24 man ops. Still need the same amount of tanks and healers but you can then take more dps per tank than you could before.

No we all don't agree.

Having read the 9 pages, as I write this, of the thread, I did not see the necessary touch of reality.

Leaving aside the cliché that as a role playing game you need roles, consider the evolution of war since the American revolution. Tactical combat has gone from armies to squads/teams. Squad members may have two 'specialties', but will only use one in a given fight. The trinity is now a set of rules/roles in the real world and so should be in an role playing game.

I actually think two more roles may be needed in the swtor Republic, at least. An old style Ranger--low DPS, relative to the warrior class but who doesn't get that close to the scrum. (Possible new tactic, ranger runs drawing the opposition away long enough to allow a healer time to work on the rest of the team without resetting the scenario.)

I also somewhat favor a crowd control role that stuns/debuffs/debilitates the opposition--real world is the one with the tear gas guns or flashbang grenades.

Bioware did this kind of setup, I feel, in DAO so it is doable. But I have not heard of it in MMO. (The comments I saw in this thread were more no specialties oriented.)

I am just not interested in being a psychopathic killer, whether as a solo or in a group.

Well after reading almost every post i can see not 1 single replyer has agreed to your suggestion so your on your own there OP.

People like to have roles in these kinda games, hence the name "Roleplaying game" and those roles are tanking/healing/dpsing.
This isnt a mmozeg (massive multiplayer online zerg everything game), its a mmorpg.

Actually, for almost the entire PvE levelling path, it is a zerg-fest. Follow the quest path and you are always over-levelled for the content. I've done much of it with dps, tank, and healer and it is a danger-free zergathon for 95% of it. Tank with healer companion is as simple as any game you are ever likely to find.

The only real difference I have seen with any difficulty is that DPS classes sometimes need to use medkits. Tank and healer classes are pretty much indestructible as long as you aren't asleep at the keyboard.

@op

nice hyperbole

over the heads of many but still...

Op over my dead corpse. They tried this stunt with wow and it turned every class into a generic boring stupid class. I watched as my plate wearing dps warrior turned into a squashy healing piece of crap. Sorry I do not want that to happen to my troopers. You got a problem with the old system then leave, but don't screw it up for the rest of us.

I have often said that this game is too simplistic in terms of its roles.

I didn't realise it in the past, but I am a massive fan of support classes! I came from LOTRO where I played a Captain. The captain class may be described as the buffer class, but it was a jack-of-all-master-of-none type class. Our uniqueness came from our group buffs but the play style involved off-healing, off-tanking and dpsing on top of the buffing.

LOTRO actually had two other support classes too, the Loremaster (debuffs + pet class) and the Burglar (debuffs + dps). In the end, the classes in LOTRO looked like so:

Guardian (TANK - heavy armour style)
Warden (TANK - medium armour focused on avoidance)

Hunter (Ranged DPS)
Champion (Melee DPS)

Minstrel (Healer - direct + AoE)
Runekeeper (Healer - DoTs or DPS - Ranged DoTs)

Captain (BUFFS)
Loremaster (DEBUFFS + CC + Pet)
Burglar (DEBUFFS + DPS)

What this meant was that 1/3 of the classes were support classes. Both debuffer classes were also good with CC (if specced) so what this meant is that the devs could implement much more complex mechanics in to the game. You ended up with some interesting group setups, from the straight forward tank, dps and heals to the more unusual groups which would have 5 support classes and a healer. Turbine (developers of lotro) never once added an enrage timer to the game (in my experience) because they just weren't needed, the mechanics were often complex enough to weed out the poor players and you just had to be good with tactics.

Additionally, their resource mechanic (power) meant you had to be a lot more tactical with your skill usage. For example, my captain had something like 12k hp and 3k power when I quit. It would take me maybe 90seconds of my standard rotation before I ran out of power, and power regened soooo slowly that you couldn't afford to do that, so a large part of combat / mechanics was finding interesting ways to manage your power, either through fellowship manuvers (combos that the entire team entered), power pots (potions) or class skills (loremasters could drain enemies of power and hand it to allies).


I seriously think that I, personally, would have enjoyed TOR tons more had the combat been more complex and involved support classes. However, I do feel it is too late to add support classes in to the game. Every single boss in game is built around enrage timers and bringing a support class would make it too hard to reach those timers. On the other hand, removing enrage timers entirely would kill the game because the boss mechanics here, combined with simplistic resource mechanics, would trivialise everything.

They had alot of these niche roles in EQ2 and those brought in their own issues. I actually played the debuffing class in EQ2, the Brigand, and while it made me desirable for raiding there were alot of drawbacks as well. Give a class a bunch of debuff utility that means you have to take something from them, usually that's going to be their DPS. Early on in EQ2 I actually got kicked from raids quite a bit because my DPS "wasn't enough" because people didn't understand that while my DPS was mediocre at best, I made everyone else 10% better, which more than made up for me putting up only 75% of the DPS compared to the pure DPS classes. However those were usually 24 person raids. So adding 10% to 20 people was a substantive bonus. Do that here and it's much less effective. Like a 4 person FP group, if 1 person is making the tank and healer 10% better, but they are 25% less than the other DPS then you lose performance. Spin that into raids, it's more of a bonus in 16 than 8 person ops. but you'd still see the benefit there. But that leads to the second issue...pigeonholing.

Right now as things stand you can clear all content generally speaking without being speciific outside of their trinity roles of Tank, DPS and heals. If you start adding niche roles like debuffer, etc, suddenly you start seeing those roles become "mandatory" in some people's eyes for certain content. Just for arguement's sake lets say they make Tactic's VGs a debuffing class. Do you really want to see people standing around on fleet spamming this "LF 2 DPS, 1 Heal, 1 Tcts VG for HM TFB"? Because that is what will happen inevitably. Niche roles become mandatory in some players eyes, and slowly the developers start to feel the same, so content gets balanced with the expectation that the niche will be filled and it becomes a self-fullfilling prophecy of niche roles that are supposed to be optional are now mandatory due to the content being designed/balanced around their presence. And it gets worse and worse until you have only a handful of configurations that will work for given content and while that works for most HC ops guilds, it cripples casual raiding who are the majority of your raiding player base. And alienating large chunks of your player base is never a good idea...