How do you make damage dealers more engaging to play?

[Val the Moofia Boss]

There're tanks in EVE.

Pretty sure this cannot be true, at least in PvP, simply because it's impossible to effectively compel a player to attack a specific target to the exclusion of better targets.

EVE Online is very reliant on positioning. Ships have different mass (which can be increased by certain fittings) and have different accelerations and top speeds. Weapons and equipment also have different effective and falloff ranges. The way PvP in EVE works is that your group sends a scout ship ahead to scout for targets (or formidable enemies to avoid). If they find a target then your group warps in, with the "tackle" ships going in first at max acceleration and speed to CC the enemy before they can escape. Then comes in your tank ships which are your bread and butter. Warping in further behind them are your healers (called "logistics" ships in EVE). Your group needs to make sure that the enemy does not reach within range of your healers and kill them, so you need to use equipment that slows down or drains the capacitor of their ships while your healers remain conscious to keep putting distance between them and any chasers. If the enemy can't reach your healers, then that means they will target your other ships fighting them closeby.

[Norfleet]

That's not really "tanking", though, that's really more into the territory of "controlling". It doesn't physically force the enemy to attack the tank the way an "aggro" system does.

[Val the Moofia Boss]

That's not really "tanking", though, that's really more into the territory of "controlling". It doesn't physically force the enemy to attack the tank the way an "aggro" system does.

The end result is the same, no? Your group's incoming damage is being directed towards a few predictable targets, therefore you can specialize those roles into being more survivable and have your healers focus on keeping them alive.

[Norfleet]

The end result is the same, no? Your group's incoming damage is being directed towards a few predictable targets, therefore you can specialize those roles into being more survivable and have your healers focus on keeping them alive.

Not quite. In this case, you're mostly relying on positioning and blocking to protect your backline. You aren't actually forcing the enemy to attack your "tanks" over, say, your "DPS", since if the enemy is in range, then so are you. So if you field a "tank" unit (high toughness, low damage) alongside a "DPS" unit (high damage, low toughness), and all of these units are in range of your enemy's units, they will target the "DPS" units over the "tank" units because the DPS units pose more of a threat. Your tanks become useless turtles, as they are no longer able to hold aggro in the absence of such a concept. And if your DPS units aren't in range to be attacked, then they also aren't in range TO attack, so aren't doing any DPS. You thus can't use "tank" units to draw fire away from "DPS" units. Your DPS units must therefore also be tanky enough to handle their own aggro, and thus this trinity system has ceased to exist. You could see it segmented into "tanks", in the vein of main battle tanks rather than "aggro tank", "artillery" units that have damage and long range, but not protection, but this still doesn't create "tanking" because the prospect of counterbattery fire exists where enemy artillery units can directly target yours. You just have "melee" attackers and "ranged" attackers.

[TKVNC]

Not quite. In this case, you're mostly relying on positioning and blocking to protect your backline.

This is basically it.

PvP is the best example of why the trinity system is ********. It only works with lobotomised AI that can be compelled to attack.

Damage dealers can be improved by simply removing the idea of a damage dealer. Tactical flexibility is the superior way to structure classes.

By having a trinity system you effectively dismantle half of someones combat role and make it unengaging to actually play, as you are heavily reliant on someone else by necessity, and not choice. Most forced choices are not fun.

[Norfleet]

Damage dealers can be improved by simply removing the idea of a damage dealer. Tactical flexibility is the superior way to structure classes.

Well, damage-dealers vs. NON-damage-dealers will still exist unless you remove healers and other support classes that don't deal damage from play entirely. Which is certainly doable. You don't actually NEED to have in-combat healing, after all.

[DemoGraph]

But your weapon and equipment build effectively defines your class, since you can't switch in the field and the cost of changing your build is quite high.

But I can, because secondary weapon is a thing, I can loot, etc.

Skill based system is inherently more varied than a class-based one.
Suppose that each class has 2 skills. Then if you have n skills, you could have either:
- n/2 classes, or
- IIRC, n*(n-1)/2 skill-based combinations.
For n = 10 it's either 5 classes or 45 skill combinations. Yes, some of those combinations would be suboptimal. But that also could be said about class-based system as well. The answer is to not make ****** skills or make their efficiency context-dependent.

Class-based system is pretty much a subset of a skill-based system.

[WaterMage]

Stop being a generic gear farming, cooldown managing boredom would be a good step imo. Instead of "best rotation", have different spells good for different situations. Eg - Be more like underrail psychokinesis instead of wow dps.

[A Chinese opium den]

Stop being a generic gear farming, cooldown managing boredom would be a good step imo. Instead of "best rotation", have different spells good for different situations. Eg - Be more like underrail psychokinesis instead of wow dps.

There would just be a known best rotation for every fight in every raid, MMO players are human bugs and they will use optimized dps rotations made by someone else with minimal thinking no matter how many fun options you give them.

[Val the Moofia Boss]

Stop being a generic gear farming, cooldown managing boredom would be a good step imo. Instead of "best rotation", have different spells good for different situations. Eg - Be more like underrail psychokinesis instead of wow dps.

There would just be a known best rotation for every fight in every raid, MMO players are human bugs and they will use optimized dps rotations made by someone else with minimal thinking no matter how many fun options you give them.

In WoW and its clonest, the fixation on DPS rotations stems from the "endgame" being that you are speedrunning raids and dungeons over and over again to get higher ilevel. Almost all raid and dungeon encounters are about killing a boss to win (and the bosses take about 2 to 10 minutes). Therefore, to optimize your chance of success and the rate at which you can speedrun these instances to get your weekly upgrades in as little time as possible, people optimize their DPS rotations. Same issue with RPGs that with a heavily emphasis on just killing bosses over and over, so people begin drifting towards what is most optimal. You don't see this as much in scenario/mission based games where long boss fights are not the core experience.

[asf]

kill whoever invented the dps-tank-**** system

[WaterMage]

There would just be a known best rotation for every fight in every raid, MMO players are human bugs and they will use optimized dps rotations made by someone else with minimal thinking no matter how many fun options you give them.

If the game has only situational spells, there wouldn't be a optimal rotation.

Can you say to meh what is the most DPS efficient rotation in UnderRail or BG2? No, because this doesn't exist.

[A Chinese opium den]

There would just be a known best rotation for every fight in every raid, MMO players are human bugs and they will use optimized dps rotations made by someone else with minimal thinking no matter how many fun options you give them.

If the game has only situational spells, there wouldn't be a optimal rotation.

Can you say to meh what is the most DPS efficient rotation in UnderRail or BG2? No, because this doesn't exist.

Autismos haven't ran the numbers for those games yet, if they did I would google it and tell you. There is always an optimal rotation if you know the fight is always going to play out the same way every time.

[WaterMage]

Autismos haven't ran the numbers for those games yet, if they did I would google it and tell you. There is always an optimal rotation if you know the fight is always going to play out the same way every time.

LOL.

UnderRail has a very autistic community.

[Norfleet]

But I can, because secondary weapon is a thing, I can loot, etc.

If there's a significant cost barrier involved, it might not be. If all your skills are allocated to one weapon, a secondary weapon is effectively out and your weapon is basically your class, as a "secondary" weapon would either impede your character's normal effectiveness through wasted points, or simply function exceptionally poorly to the point of being basically useless.

Similarly, if weapons themselves are very expensive, you probably can't afford a secondary weapon of comparable efficacy.

And finally, if you can't even BRING a second weapon to a fight, the option just DOESN'T EXIST.

Skill based system is inherently more varied than a class-based one.

Not necessarily. It's not about how many skills or classes there are, but about how many actual non-fake choices you have. If you have a skills-based system, but one build outperforms all the others, your game has precisely two classes: Vets (who all use the same build) and Scrubs (who have no ******* clue what they're doing). Meanwhile, if you only have 3 classes, but each class has enough different viable build options that "subclasses" effectively emerge, you have more variety than a freeform skill system which ultimately has very few actual choices.

Yes, some of those combinations would be suboptimal. But that also could be said about class-based system as well. The answer is to not make ****** skills or make their efficiency context-dependent.

Ultimately, a class is just a fancy wrapper for skillset options that may be mutually exclusive for any number of reasons. It doesn't, in and of itself, add more or better choices to play.

[Norfleet]

By having a trinity system you effectively dismantle half of someones combat role and make it unengaging to actually play, as you are heavily reliant on someone else by necessity, and not choice. Most forced choices are not fun.

The funny thing is that trinitarian systems naturally emerge even when they aren't healer/tank/DPS. They tend to emerge rather organically in real life: You have a big powerful unit designed to kill the **** out of things (battleship), a cheaper unit that is able to kill that unit (torpedo boat), and a unit that is made to kill that thing to protect the first unit (destroyers). Or maybe a typical assault unit (tank), that is countered by a second unit (attack helicopter), that is in turn countered by a third that doesn't effectively combat the first (anti-air). I wouldn't say this necessarily "dismantles" someone's combat role, but rather, defines it.

It's just that SOME systems clearly have roles that are unpopular to play.