Those of you familiar with Futurama will probably know where this is from. Anyways, a bit more specific than my usual stuff, but I think I get my point across.
The problem with the modern MMO is that of roles, builds, and expectations of those roles. In the MMORPG world, there is something called the “holy trinity”. This is your basic group build of a tank (absorbs damage and redirects aggro or the attention of monsters), a healer (they heal), and dps (damage dealers). Some games, like the early World of Warcraft, had a fourth category of “cc” or crowd controllers that could stun monsters. Though these were usually damage dealers as well and there were even more roles, such as kiters, buffers, short order cooks (you mages know what I’m talking about), and so on. Having the right makeup to your group was essential to the survival and success of the group.
But you all know this already. The issue is that classes (like warriors, priests, paladins, etc) tend to have multiple roles they can fill. These classes are called “hybrids”. Through either a system of skill trees or changeable paths, these kinds of classes can fill two or more of the extended holy trinity roles. For instance, a Paladin in wowcrafts can be a tank, healer, or dps. But that’s where problems start. Because of their multiple roles, the general consensus is that they should fall into the “jack of all trades and master of none” category. Meaning, a hybrid tax.
This tax is meant to keep hybrid classes below the threshold of possible damage output of a “pure” dps class, like a hunter or mage. I’m using wow terms here, but this echos to almost every MMORPG game. The theory is that if you can have some mitigation or self healing talents, then you should also not be allowed to toss out as much damage as the other classes that can’t. Makes sense, but on the other hand, if you are not currently using the tank or healer skill trees, then there should be no reason why you are not on par with the other damage dealers.
To me, if you spec in a dps tree, then you are dps. Yeah, there may be some cross over with abilities and talents, but in the end you’re still fulfilling a role and there is no reason you shouldn’t be on par. The only difference between the classes are how they serve up the damage and what utility it provides. So a choice in styles and flavors are what I like to see. I mean, they could just boil us all down to mages, but after a while, you’ll be wanting to pick up a few swords to jig things up a bit. The way I see it, for classic skill tree styled games, you have three trees and even though they spill over, they are like three different classes pushed into one. So next time you see a dps warrior or druid or marauder… treat them like dps!
Also… there seems to be some new MMOs coming out that seek to break this, like the impending Elder Scrolls Online, which seems to not have any kind of holy trinity setup. Good times ahead!!!
dps tax? do you mean more roles for dps?
He means that, for example, because a shaman can cast healing spells regardless of his or her spec, (s)he should do a bit less damage; if you are in favor of taxing hybrid classes.
A mage, rogue, hunter, and warlock can ONLY dps (except for those few older fights you had a warlock tank, but that is not the norm) so therefore they should do more damage than classes that can be more flexible and tank or heal (or both!).
Those are the two arguments in favor of it.
I pretty much think that if everyone is close enough, everything is dandy and if min/maxers want to go flavor of the month to push progression, have at it. Just let me do stuff as frost without being laughed at.
Speaking of frost and laughing, hilarious frost mage bug!
We’ve been given a way to heal ol’ Fizzy! We can cast frostbolt at it and heal it. But…. the coding got screwed and we can heal ANY friendly target with it. I’ve been standing in stormwind a bunch just spamming frostbolt at folks because it’s so dang funny. The funnier part is that we can also cast it at neutral targets (and hostiles as always) and because those neutrals aren’t flagged as allies, it will HURT them. This ranges from booty bay gaurds to pandaren npcs in pandaria to unflagged horde/alliance! That’s right, watch where you afk in the beta until blizz fixes it because joe schmoe frost mage can waltz over and kill you. The catch is because the game thinks you’re healing, it won’t cause aggro (thus no mobs of angry npcs) and if you see an enemy mage trying to kill you, mount up and run away, you won’t be in combat.
In other news, alter time is fixed, and longer! You now have 6 (up from four) seconds to do things before your procs, health, mana, and locale are reset.
righteo! typically we see anywhere from 5-10% differences in dps, though some specs can be as low as 20%, depending on the game. if it’s just a general 5% target area regardless of spec, then that’s fine, but if hybrids are designed to do less damage, then I have an issue.
lol, wonder if that faxmonkey guy is still around… seems like something he’d do.
ok next question does 5%-10 % really make a diffrence? that a small amout that not even 1/3 of it! this is why i like the new talent system less doing math probelms and more fun stuff!
well… real answer… no. not at all! 5-10% is hardly noticeable especially if you’re in a raid and even more so if you’re doing content that’s not super hard.
however, if you’re a min/maxer and trying to squeeze every last decimal of dps out of your character (and everyone else’s), then it becomes an issue. some people want to top the dps charts and even worse, some expect every other member of the team to top them as well.
for this reason, BW has been very shy with allowing mods or seeing combat text… they don’t want a whole other “gear score” thing happening again…
I only see hybrid nerfing making much sense if they made the class a true hybrid. More of a jack of all trades and not a “yeah your are dps but you can also do a few lousy heals as well”. The problem with that is there usually isn’t any incentive to not just bring someone who can do more dps or better heals the way most games are now. Then people get stuck “sitting on the bench” alot of the time. I guess you can blame dammage meters a bit for that. So, unless games are going to come up with some solution to encourage parties to bring a jack of all trades, there really is no room for a “hybrid tax” as it stands, or at least not a significant one.
@Niv I like your tales from the beta, that frost bug is way funny. You almost make me want to get in on that since I have access, but there is so much other stuff out right now that I find it hard to talk myself into spending the time on it. At least your reports fill a bit of that gap in for us, so thanks!
Pretty much, I think it works well enough right now, they can sorta psuedo-heal/tank for brief spurts and us pures bring others things, such as cc that works on multiple mob types and ways to kite or peel things off healers.
I totally get that beta isn’t for everyone, it can be annoying (quest on a plateau bugged? guess I’ll slow fall down and do other stuff. NEXT DAY quest fixed, and there’s a flight path up there! No, you don’t get it for free, stupid mage. shoulda just logged out there) but unless frostbolt healing got fixed (no evidence of such at the time of this post) you should just download it and make a free 85 mage, and bounce around the capital spamming frostbolt at people. I really cannot fully state how FUNNY it is. Partly because the people you “heal” are like, OMG HAX sometimes.
Another goofy (and old computer breaking I would think) thing you can do whilst bouncing around is spam ring of frost. It’s a talent, and it has a 3 second cast time (little shorter with haste) and the ring will freeze things right after. The FUN part is that a ring will appear on the ground the moment you launch it there (mimicking the old coalesce time) but it STAYS there even if you interrupt the cast. You can literally spam RoF all over the ground. It looks like a winter wonderland. I’m posting from my phone but later today I’ll get on my computer and put a picture of it to picasa.
Should I include some other spell visuals? Frost orb is going in no matter what (so pretty), but I can take any requests!
Ok, promise fullfilled!
http://preview.tinyurl.com/6mjov5b
That goes to google’s picasa. This will be the first and last time I mention the link, because I feel a bit guilty using coffin’s site to do so. If you want to make requests of spells or bugs you heard about or just to ask questions about beta things, send me an email using the username in that url, which being google based, will be gmail.
ah beta… it’s like a sitcom version of the real game!
Nice, thanks for the picture run-through, that was informative and interesting. You are doing a pretty good job of talking me into it. As for characters, luckely I have an 85 mage (actually every class at 85 or 80) so I wouldn’t have to use the pre-made character. I may not be able to explain it well, but for me it’s important that it’s “my” character if possible.
Also, that huge pile of ring of frost effects is hilarious.
I totally get it, I actually copied niv over twice (which is why you see nivella in mogu’shan and otherniv at the dummies) because
A) mounts and pets bugged out in a major way and I lost all of them and bringing a new character in will bring those mounts and pets and niv has the most of both and
B) I was an idiot and left my frost mogging suit in void storage before I copied over and your void storage does NOT come with you.
Hence beta nivella wearing the imbued netherweave robe (an old relic from when I was leveling her, it is still enchanted with spirit; when it turned into crit, and I didn’t want that strip that) and sorta cobbled a look together and Otherniv is in her usual getup.
It was. That evening was such a waste of other wise useful time, spamming frostbolt at everyone then keeping ring down. Me and two other frost mages kept northrend down south for almost an hour.
Hah! Okay good to hear you know where I am coming from. Great info on the void storage as well, thanks for taking one for the team there.
Also *furrows brow and crosses arms* your evening of frostbolts and ring of frost does NOT sound like a waste of time, but a damn good time and I wish I were there!
I’m pretty sure it was well known at the time I did it, but I was impatient and wanted to make friends with pandas and freeze everything else right away.
I don’t regret it at all, it was highly entertaining, just not useful towards anything at all.
I kinda liked how SWTOR made a lot more hybrid classes. To bad it lacks the secondary spec. And a dungeon finder. If it had those two things, the game would have kept me interested.
fear not my friend! dual spec is coming soonish (post 1.3) with a legacy unlock to reset talents on the fly, and dungeon finder is coming in 1.3 and will probably happen before juneish.
so… good things on the way! >D
I agree SWTOR needs dual spec and dungeon finder. Though I hate that dungeon finder killed the community a bit in wow (people just jumping in with randoms from other servers instead of waiting around to team up with their friends or making new friends from the people you teamed up with on your server) there doesn’t seem to be as strong of a server based community in TOR so it could use it.
That and so many of the servers are so low population now, especially late at night, putting a team together or getting some pvp going is often impossible. They need to stop pretending everything is fine and just do a big merger. I’m getting close to unsubscribing because what is the point of paying if I can’t even do anything but solo when I log on at night? If I want to do something solo these days I’ll load up Diablo 3 and have more fun.
I would like to see a more streamlined auction house too. As it stands I rarely if ever use it, and I know most people are the same way. People complained about Bioware copying things from Blizzard (I wasn’t one of them), but this is one thing that they really should have just copied and pasted the way it works.
Honestly, Guild Wars 2. Every class is either dps or hybrid tank-dps, and there are no healers, only self healing spells which every class has, (well there are certain aoe heals but they take a back seat to the main skills of each class) and this seems to solve the problem pretty well. They have a ways to go with PvP balancing though, it seems. But the game isn’t out yet :) so can’t complain…the beta was amazing though, I can’t wait for this month’s beta.
Basically they absolutely take a hammer to the trinity, and I love it.
man… idk… I usually like playing healers (well… except pally healers… they cause me great stress)
I am however, looking forward to Elder Scrolls Online!
So I hope I don’t get hunted down for suggesting this on such a WoW based site but have you looked into GW2? I’ve been playing the beta and the trinity is dead to say the least. Sheer numbers are typically what you use in place. It sounds a lot more boring but actually gives the game a more war-like quality to it instead of the single dude on this epic quest that you could never really do.
ha! well… although this started off as a wow comic, it ended up covering much more. I play a lot more swtor than I do wow atm.
I haven’t heard much about gw2 other than good things so I think I’ll have to look into it!
The hybrid tax has been gone since Wrath in WoW. The “original” hybrid tax meant that you bought anything that wasnt a rogue/mage/warlock/hunter for buffs to buff the previous 4s dps, then you stacked as many pure dps as you could. A good example of this was the early druid- nearly all raiding druids were speced into proving improved Marks buff and Innervate for the healers. If you speced as a dps, you wouldnt even be 1/4th the dps that a rogue or mage could do. In TBC, the gap lessened- you could dps as a feral, or as a boomkin, and do decently, but you were still mostly there to buff the straight 4, with either Leader of the Pack, which increased thier crit and gave them a self heal when they crit, or with some strange boomkin buff, given that the others could do between 20-40% more dps then you could
In Wrath, the hybrid tax all but disappeared- Warriors and Ferals where among the top dps, both theoretical and in practice. Its even more gone now- sure, you have theoretical specs which have all the specs of the big 4, minus frost, crowding the top, but in practice, all dps are generally within 5% of each other, with certain classes shining during certain fights (Arcane Mages excell at Spine, due to the large amount of burst potential they have)
In Mists, the pure dps are gaining even more healing capability then they previously had, or at least self healing, with the sad exception of the warlock, although the locks are still in the middle of a large amount of change, and thier self-healing can easily be changed between now and launch.
So, playing since early classic raiding in WoW, when the hybrid tax was easily notable, I will say that it being gone is for the better. I can hope that the current pure dps classes will eventually get the ability to fulfill other roles (Blizz SEEMS to be experimenting with Warlock tanks, although its still beta) Instead of spamming Frostbolt to heal allies, having a repitiore of skills, and a spec for healing on a mage would be pretty neat, imo.
ah, very good! haven’t played cata much so I’m not really sure what the state is now, but I remember the good ol days when pallies did like no damage and feral druids were a laughing stock. so I hope things will continue to improve.
I would LOVE to see more hybrid type classes come about!!! lock tanks would be great and I am still confused why they don’t let shammies be tanks either… though I’d still like to see an official frost mage tank! I’ve seen people do it with some creative gear choices, but at least in an official way I could see it making sense.