The Holy Trinity - A Rant

[Shrandar]

You make some very valid points. It's true that part of the predictability of a given encounter is that you're repeating what you've done before. However, there's more to it than that.

When I do a jigsaw puzzle, I always do it the same way. I start with the corners...because there are only four corner pieces, then I get the frame, then I fill in the middle. It doesn't matter what jigsaw you do, you approach it the same way..and trinity players approach bosses the same way. Limited creativity means limited amouts of things it can be. The actual trinity is hamstringing devs as much as players.

What Anet is giving me is a round jigsaw puzzle. I can't start at the corner, because there are no corners. Even if bosses in dungeons do one thing, I can't expect bosses in another to do the same thing, because I'm not leading with a tank.

That's more of what I'm talking about.

I know and it is true that the trinity or any kind of design determines how an encounter is build. That being said I see a huge variation in WoW's boss encounters. I think WoW pushed the limits of trinity design based fights and hopefully for them will continue to do so. I have a great respect for Blizzard when it comes to their dungeon design and while I certainly agree on the gear threadmill, the loss of world and repetetive endgame I can honestly not blame it on boring dungeon/raid design. I absolutely got bored of them after doing them for the gazillionth time, that however is an issue of gear progression, endgame design etc. Opinions will differ obviously :)

[Khyr]

I know and it is true that the trinity or any kind of design determines how an encounter is build. That being said I see a huge variation in WoW's boss encounters. I think WoW pushed the limits of trinity design based fights and hopefully for them will continue to do so. I have a great respect for Blizzard when it comes to their dungeon design and while I certainly agree on the gear threadmill, the loss of world and repetetive endgame I can honestly not blame it on boring dungeon/raid design. I absolutely got bored of them after doing them for the gazillionth time, that however is an issue of gear progression, endgame design etc. Opinions will differ obviously :)

See, varying something within limited parameters will always be more predictable than varying it without those parameteres. WoW didn't invent the trinity, and it may not have invented gear grind, but it certainly made the most of the opportunity gear grind presented. Blizzard itself isn't the problem. WoW's success is the problem. The game was so successful that it got copied to the point where if you don't like that style of play (and I don't, because I find it completely contrived) then you had virtually no options of any OTHER style of play.

Therefore the more popular WoW got, the more I came to dislike it, because all I really had the choice of was WoW and a whole bunch of other WoWs. If there had been more variety, it would have been a lot fairer to someone who didn't like it.

And a lot of people don't like it. Probably more than half of the WoW playerbase never raids, which means they're left with everything else. After you level your character, that generally means dailies. Since everyone copied that...since end game has become synonymous with raids, those of us who might want something different have been overlooked for years.

Do I disrespect Blizzard...not really no. Do I hate that the game became so popular that virtually all choice has been beaten out of the genre? You bet I do.