Hello Agents,
I would like share my opinion upon the (more or less) forced trinity on higher difficulty content in the Division.
Just a short explanation, in most massive multi-player online games (like World of Warcraft, Star Wars - The Old Republic,...) there are three roles to fill for a group. Those are tank, heal and damage dealer. The roles have unique skill trees to fill their job, they also have numerous skills to support this playstyle. They all specialize in their role and lack in the other aspects. With WONY and the current NPC scaling the game forces a trinity on us agents. For those following some of the Division streamers, you will have seen they play with tank+heal+2 dps in legendary difficulty.
In my opinion a clear specialization for agents is a nice idea but nearly impossible in this game. By now I played some missions as a healer and still find my self shooting most of the time, my healing skills are fire&forget and players are often not tanky enough to make my healing meaningful, e.g. I can not heal an agent tanking enemy fire as the enemy burst damage is just too high (looking at you black tust healing stations). The limitation to two skills is another aspect which makes those roles a bit more meaningless. Last but not least the game does not teach the roles in any way and the group finding also does not represent this aspect.
I would like to hear other opinions on this aspect.
Regards,
styg
The version of the trinity The Division 2 offers is trinity-lite. That's the most important detail about this conversation.
One of the reasons this game can't handle the complexity of a trinity system is because you can only use 2 skills. That doesn't leave room for anything else. Everything will always be forced into a hybrid.
In most games that utilize the trinity they have multiple skills at their disposal. For instance a healer, they have a couple strong single heals and a few groups heals with maybe a buff or debuff in-between. A rotation might look something like this: single heal --> group heal--> debuff-->group heal-->debuff-->single heal-->attack-->group heal. You keep your rotation by pftt (playing from the tray). The Division can't offer anything like this. Your rotation is stripped away to the bare bones of gameplay and is uninteresting and dull.
Let's say you try to make this work in division though. You make a healer with the healer seeker and restorer hive. Sounds logical right? Well, since there is no room for anything else, how does a healer mitigate damage? It wouldn't make sense for a healer to use the defender drone or clusters to pop enemies from cover, so, who would bear the burden of these other talents? The dps likely will. I guarantee you, in every end game group, the dps will be using something along the lines of a defender drone and/or the reviver hive, etc. If that is to be the case, then they should probably spec into skill tier which essentially makes them a hybrid.
Now look at tanks. They've tried to implement this, but how do you maintain aggro? The concept of aggro isn't even really in this game and is the staple mechanic needed to even try and have a trinity system.
This game will always have hybrids, and that's what everyone will always be. The game is not complex enough to properly implement a trinity or maintain it. The old system was much much better at mimicking a trinity system because players had more options in how they built their hybrid agents.
Huge step backwards if this was what they were going for.
there is no such things as Tank in The Division 2.
Tank, in the mmorpgs, means "taking & maintain the aggro to avoid DPS to get hit"
Do you have any way to increase your threat yourself ? Absolutely not.
The holographic lure can increase his threat through skill tier, can the shield do the same ? Absolutely not, even in overcharge where your shield is supposed to be invincible.
If everybody is under cover and you're the only one out of cover with your shield, you don't received damage that other DPS could have had, you are receiving damage that nobody could have got because you are the only one not in cover, which makes you the only target and obviously the only one getting shots.
There is no tank build, but there is shield build.
You will be much more effective with 2-3 DPS and 1 healer-status effect hybdrid, because the status effect will prevent the ennemies from shooting and the damage will decrease a lot from them while you have your survivalist specialization that gives +10% damage on ennemies under status effect.
DPS prevails, healer is secondary but yet necessary in some cases/instances, and tanks doesn't exist.
Thats a good way to put it.Originally Posted by Squalalah_FR Go to original post
well gear sets in hte first game worked as better examples of classes than specializations, i have yet to find out if survivalist is meant to be healer or not. The bonus is for status effect but hte skill is for healing but the bonus for skills are also so pitiful that doesn't point towards that direction...
Which is honestly why i made a few suggestion of gear sets very focused on each role (such as gas granade support build, that deals status effect ot enemies and heals allies)
I see this game more like a hack'n'slay. There is no need, or even the mechanics for tank/heal/dd roles. Maybe there is something like who did the most damage to a mob in the raid, or even some bosses to make them turn around, but it is all boiled down to pure DPS, regardless of the source (weapons or skills.) So far for me that is fine. A real dependence on a specific class would make this game less playable solo in my opinion.
But they should really work on the scaling. I mean I read that people enjoy a challenge and immediately think that just because one difficulty is called challenging it should be unreasonable annoying. I say annoying because for me there is quite the difference between having something challenging, or experiencing annoying things like bulletsponges. Also I find it very annoying being in cover and then showered with grenades, drones, flamethrowers that just shoot through the cover as well..... Sometimes I cannot stay in cover long enough for even a buff to fill and get enabled. I guess they should just make it a little more like it was before the patch and leave heroics and legendary for the people that enjoy the elitist content and suffering.
This is simply not true. There are plenty of MMORPGs that actually limit your abilities to a select number.Originally Posted by yasuredude Go to original post
As for how a healer would work in this game. You should not be worrying about mitigating damage through a skill. It's called using cover, it mitigates damage 98% of the time. Rolling and moving cover-to-cover help, as well.If you're taking damage then it's your own fault.
A theoretical weapon DPS would be focused on whatever they want may use support-offensive skills but their skills will never be efficient on the same degree (Not unlike Healers not doing good-great weapon damage). Translation: Self-Healing will never be good unless they sacrifice weapon damage for that possibility.
Tanks do need the Threat % back from Division 1 to nail it home but there is other methods/mechanics of tanking that was used in MMOs like DCUO which grouped CC into their role or through a method keeping groups buffed up in defense/attack. This game's version mostly comes from a shield build, defender drone build, decoy builds, or armored rusher build (not Face-tanking because it's a cover shooter). This is how Div 1 played.