When I searched the Internet for a definitive explanation of the MMO Holy Trinity to provide context for a friend of mine new to MMOs, all I seemed to find were articles debating on why it is good or bad. For someone that might be new to this genre of video games, this is a little disheartening.
Class Archetypes
To understand the holy trinity of MMOs we must first understand MMOs. I will mostly be drawing from my experience of playing World of Warcraft, a very popular MMO (at least it was when I played it.)
Players are divided into classes, or gameplay style groupings. These are originally based on fantasy archetypes. The three most universal archetypes are the warrior, the thief, and the mage. If this sounds familiar, that’s because many games have simply used these words to describe some or all of their classes. The archetypes have a game style as follows:
Thief — Defeats their opponents with cunning and a quick wit. They strike unexpectedly, and often use some sort of stealth. They’re quiet, and a good thief will have won before the enemy even knows they are there. Alternative names: Rogue, Assassin.
Mage — Defeats their opponents with a myriad of spells. Masters of arcane magic they can cast lightning from their fingertips or turn you into a frog. Mages are very smart, as their studying is what got them into the arcane. A good mage will know any spell for a situation. Alternative names: Wizard, Sorcerer, Spellslinger.
Warrior — Defeats their opponents with their might and brute force. Warriors can take a hit and keep going. They’re the sturdy and unmovable. A good warrior is one that has known a thousand battles, yet is ready for a thousand more. Alternative names: Brute, Barbarian, Knight.
Each archetype comes with flourishes of variation from game to game. A game developer will have their own take on these things, as well as mixing and matching them. Perhaps there will be classes that mix a mage and a warrior to make a Battlemage. They would be more sturdy than a mage, but smarter than a warrior. They could cast spells, but not quite what a mage could cast. They could take a hit, but not as many as a warrior.
Sub-classes
Among the class systems are sub-classes. This is born from that mixing of classes. In World of Warcraft (WoW) the core classes are Warrior, Rogue, and Mage. However there is also the Priest. This class acts as a Mage, but with a certain spin. The spells this class have are not as focused on killing the enemy, but on keeping themselves and their friends alive. They are most typically the healers, and in some games called ‘clerics.’ In WoW Paladins are a mix of the warrior and priest classes. Depending on how you chose to play a paladin, you can either specialize in healing, in dealing damage, or in taking damage. You could mix these and be a jack-of-all-trades master-of-none, but there are reasons not to do that which I will get to later.
My favorite class in WoW was the Druid. This class was the ultimate jack-of-all-trades master-of-none class. It could be specialized into a warrior, priest, mage, or rogue depending on how you decided to play it. The utility found in such a character was incredibly useful and appealed to me greatly. Maybe a druid couldn’t do quite the amount of damage a rogue could, but in a pinch when healing was needed and priest wasn’t nearby it’s the druid that could fill that gap. The WoW druid class knew a versatility that I never have quite found in another MMO.
In the end the sub-classes are based around taking advantage of the game systems. These sub-classes are: defense, spell damage, physical damage, healing, and crowd control. I’ll explain crowd control later.
Damage Systems
MMO games have damage systems, and ‘damage’ isn’t as simple as ‘remove an amount of health.’ For example, if a warrior is more sturdy than a mage, how do you represent that? The solution is to give each player a number. Call this number a resistance. A player’s ability to resist damage will be higher on a warrior than on a mage. Perhaps we can make it even more versatile by having different types of damages, and each damage has a respective resistance.
Let’s have physical resistance for physical damage, and spell resistance for spell damage. Hitting someone with your sword is obviously physical, and shooting them with lightning is clearly a spell. But wait, what about the thief archetype? How do we represent their cunning and agility? They wouldn’t take a hit head on, they would rather avoid it. “Why fight if you can win without fighting?” is the mindset I would expect from a thief.
So let’s have an agility attribute. Warriors might not be that nimble, but have a high resistance. Thieves will have a high agility and that will allow them to dodge incoming attacks and prevent damage, as opposed to taking it head on. Wizards will have higher than normal spell damage, but still lower on all fronts than a warrior.
Aggro
The term “aggro” is short for “aggression.” This is a term players have given to describe the behavior of computer controlled opponents. Most MMOs will have NPCs (or Non-Player Characters) that are part of the game world. Maybe they’re bears in the woods, maybe they’re an evil troll under a bridge. Now if you’re playing with a friend and you want to defeat this troll, the troll must attack back, yes? Which one of the two of you does the troll attack? If it’s the first one he sees or the first one that hits him then the encounter isn’t very exciting. The troll doesn’t feel alive, it becomes very obviously a computer.
Say you and a friend attack two enemy NPCs. There is a healer and another NPC. The computer-controlled healer will simply heal its computer-controlled friend. What do you do to defeat them? Well of course you have to target the healer first, they’re more of a threat. You can’t win if your damage is undone by the healer, after all.
Game developers try to mimic this logic with the aggro system. Any given enemy NPC will attempt to gauge a player’s threat to them. If you’re healing your friend, you will generate threat. By generate, I mean there is a (usually) hidden number that increases when you do something threatening. This could mean hitting the troll, it could mean healing your friend. If the game developer makes the troll attack the one with the highest threat, that means the healer may end up the target. Some games even call this ‘threat’ instead of ‘aggro.’ To ‘keep aggro’ is to try to have the highest amount of threat points, so that you are the target.
Resources
Most MMOs will have resource systems. The vast majority use “mana” as a term for a character’s internal pool of magic that they can draw upon. Using spells depletes mana, waiting a time or drinking a potion restores mana. This resource system is a way to balance a player’s time and effort. Some games will have different resources for different classes. Maybe thieves have a “stamina” or warriors have a “rage” meter. These resources can be implemented differently, and usually behave in a way that encourages play in the style of the archetype that it belongs to. A warrior’s rage will increase when they do something warrior-like, and can be depleted to do other warrior-like things.
The fear in having a resource, is in not having any more of it. A mage without mana is useless. A thief without stamina is tired. If you are playing with others and you have fallen under the designated role of the ‘healer’ of the group, that means that if you run out of mana, they die. If a healer can’t heal, the players they play with suffer. For someone to fill their role in a group, they must balance their resources so that they use each and every point as efficiently as possible.
Crowd Control
Often times when fighting as a group in an MMO you aren’t fighting a single enemy. If you’re fighting a crowd of enemies then one solution to fighting them all simultaneously is to… not. If you can trap one of the enemies in, say, a cage, that means that is one less enemy you have to fight for now. If you can cast a spell to subdivide the enemies and fight them in smaller groups that makes everyone’s lives easier.
You control the crowd of enemies to how you see fit. Perhaps you cast a spell on the enemy to make them fall asleep for a small time. Maybe as a warrior you make a display of your heroism by letting out a mighty shout that induces fear in the enemy, causing them to run for their lives for a short duration.
In the end, any time an enemy spends not doing their job is time that they had might as well not exist. Also, enemies that don’t exist, are much easier to fight.
Purpose of the Holy Trinity
Before I tell you about the Holy Trinity, I need to tell you why it is necessary.
MMOs are about overcoming greater and greater obstacles. They almost always include a progression system, to give the player a sense of growth and improvement. The Holy Trinity comes into play when multiple people play together. In order to defeat a particularly mighty enemy, sometimes you must play with others. If no individual can conquer something, teamwork is required. The Holy Trinity came about as a result of the players of MMOs desire to defeat the greatest enemies that they possibly can.
Imagine a scenario where three people are in a group, and are fighting a large monster that takes many people to defeat. Say each person is a mage. These mages hit hard with their fireballs and what-have-you of spells. However they can’t take a hit like a warrior can. So this enemy isn’t going to just stand there and be alright with getting fireballs in the face, he walks over to one of the three mages and knocks him over. The mage can’t typically take a hit so now there are but two mages. The damage being dealt to the enemy is now two thirds of what it was, so it’s going to take even longer to defeat him. The enemy can just do the same thing twice more and win the encounter. The mage have wasted their time and effort.
One of the mages leaves, and is replaced by a warrior. This guy can take hits. Even though he can’t do the same damage as a mage, if he can last long enough for the remaining two to compensate for the missing mage, then the encounter will have improved as a whole. Unfortunately even though this warrior an take some hits, and lasts much longer than the mage he replaced, he too falls eventually. When he is gone the other two mages are swept up like before. More damage is dealt to the great enemy, but he still was not defeated, and each failure will reset the enemy’s health, so each next try must be from square one.
So, now one of the remaining mages is replaced with a priest. This healer-type mage will try to keep everyone alive. This encounter works, because while the healer isn’t doing damage, if he can keep the warrior alive twice as long then the remaining mage can still eventually do as much damage as all three would have done in the first place. We have sacrificed the speed at which we can do damage, for the longevity of continuing a fight to do that same damage in a longer period. The healer keeps everyone alive, the warrior makes sure he has the most aggro and is the only one taking the hits, and the mage focuses on dealing the very most damage that he can.
Flawed Role
Imagine, again, that the mage tried to specialize. What if when his character grew in experienced, instead of researching how to do more damage he tried to research how to stay alive? Now the mage won’t die as fast, but won’t deal as much damage. However he still pales in comparison to the stalwart warrior, which has a defensive ability he will never match.
If this mage is the mage in our previous scenario then the entire fight will take longer, and may even fail. This mage is dealing less damage. Yes, he can take damage better, but in this scenario he isn’t taking damage, the warrior is. So his time spent making sure he can take damage without dying has been for naught, it was useless. He isn’t filling his role as best he could, which is to deal damage.
If the healer is flawed, they won’t heal as fast or be able to heal for as long. The warrior dies, then so follows the other two. If the warrior is flawed then the healer has to struggle harder to keep him alive. The healer’s struggle expends their resource (typically mana) faster. If the healer struggles for long enough and they run dry on their resource, they can’t heal. That warrior dies, then so too do the other two.
The Holy Trinity
Hopefully it’s starting to make sense, this system that we have. The three roles are the Tank, the Healer, and the Damage Dealer (DPS — Damage Per Second.) The Tank was the warrior, built like the armored war machine he excels at taking damage, and making sure he has the most aggro. The Healer was the priest, they can’t take a hit, but they are tasked with keeping everyone alive. Ideally only the tank should need healing, but not all encounters are perfect and some game systems make a perfect encounter almost impossible. The Damage Dealer is the mage, but could also be a thief. They are measured in Damage Per Second, and are meant to shorten the fight as much as possible. After all, if the enemy is dead then they can’t do damage.
Also you hopefully see why characters need to specialize in their role. To focus on two roles might mean accomplishing neither. Balancing too many plates could cause everything to break. Instead, the tank focuses every bit of his experience into being a tank, so too do the DPS and healer.
In MMOs groups that form to take on enclosed sets of encounters with enemies are typically done so in groups of 5. A 5-man group consists of one tank, one healer, and three DPS. The reason you have three of the last type, is because if the enemies die as quickly as possible, all other roles will have an easier time. It’s hard to run out of resources if the encounter happens in a flash.
DPS Types
Since there are two types of damage, there are two types of DPS: Ranged DPS and Physical (or melee) DPS. Sometimes ranged DPS is called spell DPS because spells are typically cast from a distance away from the enemy. These flavors play slightly differently.
For Ranged DPS the player keeps away from the enemy. If they’re far enough away the enemy must either retaliate by moving closer to them, or by casting a ranged ability of their own. For this reason ranged DPS tend to take less damage. This also means they can focus more on doing damage than staying alive.
For Melee DPS the player gets up close and personal to the enemy. This means they might take some damage, but that’s okay as melee DPS types are typically more apt at taking damage than their ranged counterparts. This may sound like a flawed role like I described earlier, but their survivability makes them easier to heal. This makes the healer more mana-efficient, and allows for a longer fight. Needless to say there are trade-offs for each DPS type, and in a properly balanced game neither rein supreme.
Healing Types
This is more simply-put than the DPS Types. To keep other players alive you either undo damage done to them, or prevent it from happening in the first place. Healers typically have multiple types of healing abilities. Some of them are slow but mana efficient, allowing you to manage your resource to keep people alive while also keeping you from running dry.
They will also typically have some emergency spells. These are very mana inefficient, and should only be used when there is a sudden need for them. This sacrifices efficiency in order to improve a situation going downhill very quickly. Sometimes this is worth it to keep people alive, because being mana inefficient is worth it if the alternative is having lots of mana, but your team is dead with you soon to follow.
Shielding your allies from harm is also applicable, but rarely are there whole playstyles that revolve around this. This includes putting up barriers that reduce or eliminate incoming damage, using CC to keep enemies busy, or increasing ally’s resistances to certain types of damage.
HoTs and DoTs
Healing over Time and Damage over Time spells usually play a part in MMOs. Normal spells sound something like “cast a fireball at the enemy, dealing 2,000 points of damage.” If the enemy has spell resistance they might take less, but it’s a really straightforward calculation. Their health is reduced by that number, modified by their resistance (whatever that may be).
A DoT sounds like “set the enemy on fire, dealing 300 points of damage every second for 10 seconds.” At first glance 300 is much smaller than 2,000. However after 10 seconds you have dealt 3,000 damage in total with that DoT. As well, while that DoT is hitting the enemy every second, you can still keep casting other spells. It’s a sort of hands-off set-it-and-forget-it way to deal damage. It’s an investment that doesn’t pay off for 7 seconds, but continues to pay off for another 3. The reason this isn’t the only type of spell is because you typically can’t have multiple of them going at once (with exceptions of course). This means most every class will have a combination of DoT abilities and normal abilities to deal damage
Healing over Time spells work in the same sort of way. It does slow healing amounts that eventually add up. If your tank is constantly taking small amounts of damage then maybe you only need to cast one HoT on him to keep him topped up in health. This makes you mana efficient, and he stays full on health nearly constantly.
It should be noted that when a DoT or Hot effect occurs (in our example once every second) this is called “ticking.” The event that happens with every increment of time is called a “tick.” You, for example, might ask “How often does that tick?” or “How much does that tick for?” when referring to a DoT or HoT ability.
