Skip to main content

MMOs - time to retire your healers and tanks

I learned something about mmo endgame last night from a single player flash rpg called Sonny.

At the beginning of Sonny (review here) you choose one of four available classes. As you progress through the game you level your character up with choice of gear and abilities according to your preferred playstyle. Then you hit the end game where the bosses have powerful skills and combos which must be countered in order to survive. Just as in an mmo the choice of tactics becomes much more limited at end game. You must figure out the trick to beating each boss and you have to employ it. Respeccing your character is essential (the game allows 5 respecs per calendar day). The character you have lovingly built up becomes unrecognisable as your favoured skills get thrown out to be replaced with whatever is required to solve the next puzzle. In truth you no longer play your character instead you play whatever role is needed to overcome the encounter. Sound familiar?

Character stats vary widely depending on chosen class so in order to ensure that every class can complete the game the critical end game skills are made independent of class. In fact every character has access to every skill but early in the game your choice of skills is determined by your character stats - strength based characters choose strength skills and so on. Endgame skills on the other hand are designed to be independent of stats and equally accessible to all characters.

I wonder if there is a lesson here for MMORPG designers. An often heard complaint about mmo endgames is that certain needed classes (typically tanks and healers) are in short supply while other classes are oversubscribed and unwanted in endgame groups. What if the really critical roles (perhaps tanking, healing and crowd control) were made equally accessible to all character classes. Got too many hunters and no tank - not a problem one of the hunters will enter tanking mode. I don't mean that a hunter will be able to perform a watered down half assed job of off tanking I meant that all of the tanking skills and abilities are independent of character class and the hunter will be just as good a tank as any one else.

It probably makes sense that a character who chooses to act in one of these roles loses their normal abilities for the duration to dissuade folk from soloing everything as uber tanked, self healing AOEing juggernauts. I can think of several ways to incorporate stuff like this into game lore e.g. a character who equips medical equipment must put down their weapons.

Another advantage of this approach is that there would be no need to have dedicated tanking, healing or crowd control classes which would allow for more creativity in character types. People who really like playing those defunct classes need not get upset. Even though any character type could play one of those roles not everybody will be equally good at it. I am sure there will be plenty of demand for specialists who concentrate on playing one of those roles to the utmost of their abilities especially for harder endgame instances.

Comments

Melf_Himself said…
But, you have to ask yourself, if every class can perform all these roles, what does each class have that actually makes it unique?
mbp said…
Well its only the core roles of healing, tanking and crowd control that I am suggesting making available to everyone. That still leaves room for customisation among the DPS classes (ranged versus melee, magic versus physical, DOT versus direct damage etc.) Also remember that you have to temporarily abandon you own class when you choose to take on on of these these roles. I am guessing that many people won't choose to do this while others may actually specialise in one of these areas. Guild wars comes close to what I am suggesting with the secondary class concept but you don't have to temporarily abandon your primary when you take on a secondary class.
Melf_Himself said…
Ok you've convinced me, I like the idea. In fact I like it so much, I decided to steal it for my blog:

http://word-of-shadow.blogspot.com/2008/09/when-one-becomes-two.html

:p

Basically, it turns out they've implemented this with the Rune-Keeper in LotRO. Very cool idea, and I hope we see it a lot in the genre in the future.

Popular posts from this blog

My First Gaming Mouse: Logitech G300

I bought a gaming mouse yesterday a Logitech G300, here my initial thoughts. What is a gaming mouse?  There are a wide variety of devices available classified as gaming mice but a few features  seem common: 1. Wired rather than wireless: Although some high end models are wireless wired connections are just better and faster than wireless so most gaming mice stick with wired. As a bonus wired mice don't need batteries so the mouse is lighter.  2. High response rate: 1 to 2ms response rate so the mouse immediately responds to input.  2. High DPI. Gaming mice invariable boast high DPI numbers from 2,000 DPI upwards. This makes the device very responsive to the smallest movements.   3. Adjustable DPI . High DPI improves responsiveness but reduces precision so gaming mice generally allow you to adjust the DPI down for precise work such as pulling off headshots in sniper mode. Generally the mouse allows dpi to be changed on the fly by pressing a button.  4. Extr

Android Tip 3: Sharing a Folder between multiple users of an Android device

Android has allowed multiple user logins for quite a while now. This is can be very useful for tablets which are shared by family members. Normally Android erects strict Chinese walls between users preventing them from using each others apps and viewing each others files. This is a useful security feature and ensures your kids don't mess up your work spreadsheets when screwing around on the tablet and should also prevent them from buying €1,000 worth of Clash of Candy coins on your account. Sometimes however you really do want to share stuff with other users and this can prove surprisingly difficult. For example on a recent holiday I realised that I wanted to share a folder full of travel documents with my wife. Here are some ways to achieve this. 1. If you have guaranteed internet access  then you can create a shared folder on either Dropbox or Google drive. Either of these has the great advantage of being able to access the files on any device and the great disadvantage of bein

Portal 2 two screen coop on one PC.

I mentioned before that I intended to try Portal 2 in "unofficial split screen co-op mode. Well split screen on a small computer monitor is a recipe for a headache especially when the game defies gravity as much as portal. However a minor bit of extra fiddling allowed us to drive two seperate screens from one PC. The Steam forums describes a complicated method of doing this that I couldn't get working so this simpler method which worked for me might be of use to someone. 1. First I followed the instructions in this post to get split screen multi-player working: http://forums.steampowered.com/forums/showthread.php?t=1847904 A minor issue not mentioned is that you need to enable the console from the keyboard/mouse options menu I am using keyboard and one wired Xbox360 controller as suggested. Getting the controller to switch to channel 2 was tricky at first but as Chameleon8 mentions plugging it out and in again during loading works. The trick for me was to do the plug / p