Although I never played UO myself, I think it’s also analogous to the BYOB style of GvG play in Guildwars, where everyone brings a heal and some support/movement skills so they can take care of themselves – as well as helping each other, where possible.

That style of play always felt more exciting and natural to me. I think it also allows for a lot more common-sense tactical play, such as “oh crap! big guy’s running at me, better run”, rather than “ah, I’ll sort of wander away, but the healer will get me, it’s fine”. There’s something unsatisfying – perhaps anticlimactic – about having this giant monster incessantly pounding you in the face, and you just sort of go “eh, healer’s keeping me up.”

That said, there is also something deeply satisfying about how simple the abstraction of the trinity is. We shall see whether the changes in GW are for the best, I suppose.

Do you, playing as your character, stop to help someone for altruistic reasons? Or take advantage of the situation to get better goodies? It’s just a choice, that defines your character – not what class you pick, or what gear you wear.

I’m not an RP person at all, really, I prefer the mechanical end of the game and give my characters silly names, etc. But I’m irked that in a holy trinity game, this kind of simple choice is often supplanted and disallowed by a meta choice – what role in the trinity you want to play. It becomes Role-playing, where RPG just means a combat game with arbitrarily determined, abstract roles, created by the designers (never the players!), that you choose when you begin a character and can never change.

That is, in a trinity game, if you’re a tank or DPS, you probably have no option to help the person who’s lying in your path mortally wounded, removing that character-defining choice entirely. Which, I might add, is deeply illogical – in reality if you walk by someone who’s been mortally injured, you don’t need a mana bar and greater heal trained to offer them some water or try to bandage their wounds.

In short, I think these changes are great; they bring back some logical options and choices, and soften some of the calcified, abstract rules that have been considered un-questionable for so long. I think a similar point could be made for the shift away from having the very illogical idea of a dedicated healer, as another commenter mentions below.

The way they handle dying is great to see as well. Now instead of going away from the computer to get a feed, or just quitting the game in general. I will be able to become more involved with the game and be able to contribute something, even if its only a little, to the situation.

Good work Anet.

All in all, we get both: The ability to support allies (no matter which class we choose, which is even more amazing), and more active and exciting gameplay. Whenever I am going to be in a group (or only near some kind of ally), I am definitely going to switch to ‘support mode’, and it will be more fun than in any ‘holy trinity’ MMO; I am quite sure of that. So maybe there will not be ‘dedicated healers’ any more — they will simply turn to ‘dedicated supporters’.

If ArenaNet manages to implement everything as they want to, I am therefore sure that it will actually be the ‘healers’ who profit.

…I love being a healer. I play other things quite happily. But I love being a dedicated healer. This isn’t to say I don’t like being able to defend myself. Indeed, one of the greatest differences between GW and WoW for me, when playing a healer is, I can rely on myself to defend myself.

I’m hoping that GW2 doesn’t leave me, and others like me, out in the cold.

But to be honest, when my Alli chat was celebrating this announcement, it felt like a kick in the battery nuggetbase.

While I like CO’s combat approach in other areas, this was one aspect where they half-assed tried to do something different, with an escape route to fall back on the usual. So of course, fall back is what they ended up doing.

Age of Conan had similar issues where the content ended up dictating changes to the combat system they tried. In both games, there was a messy transition period.

The key is whether ArenaNet has had time to develop the content around the combat, rather than the other way around.

Those boss fights where over the duration the tank gets healed for hundreds of times his health are just ridiculous. The model where HPS > DPS for lots of characters is again just a bit silly.