Does the group need more survivability? We’ve got songs for armor and resistance buffs. It wasn’t simply another flavor of DPS or Healer, it was a role that served an entirely different function from the Trinity.Īnd Enchanters were not alone Bards were a veritable swiss army knife of support functions. Their specific utility and contribution to a group was something only an Enchanter could bring their skillset couldn’t just be swapped out with a Rogue or a Monk. In addition to their crowd control, they were often sought after for their powerful class-specific mana regen buff, Clarity. They could charm enemies into being their pets, and if a fight got too large for a tank to handle, they were tasked with mesmerizing the excess mobs into a non-hostile state so that the group would not become overwhelmed. In addition to the Trinity, EverQuest hosted a plethora of support and utility classes whose roles were not so rigidly defined.Īn Enchanter, for example, was tasked with crowd control.

Much like modern MMOs, EverQuest featured the Tank/Healer/DPS trio that would populate most groups, but that’s far from where the list stops. The differences between EverQuest and today’s MMOs could populate a list worthy of its own article, but a major divergence that we’ll be focusing on is class identity and interdependency. In its time, it was a titan of innovation that saw unprecedented success in a genre that was, until that point, rather niche. To say it broke new ground would be underselling the impact EverQuest left in its wake they more or less created the template on which every modern MMO has been based to one degree or another.

Published by Sony Online Entertainment and helmed by the ambitious team of Steve Clover, Bill Trost, and the sadly late Brad McQuaid, EverQuest serves as a monumental cornerstone of not only the MMO genre but of gaming as a larger medium. Launched 5 years prior in 1999, a massively successful MMO of a vastly different breed was king one whose like we have not seen since. While Blizzard may have taken the crown in 2004, the throne was hardly vacant before their meteoric rise to power. Try as they might to dress it up with free-form class building (ESO) or throwbacks to old-school talent trees, the three-role meta had become–and remains–a staple.īut what of World of Warcraft’s progenitors? As much as a decade’s worth of stale Barrens chat would love us to believe otherwise, World of Warcraft was, in fact, not the first MMO. Heavy-hitters like Elder Scrolls Online, Star Wars: The Old Republic, and even Final Fantasy XIVwould all come to gravitate toward the formulaic triple-threat, and a trend had now solidified, for better or worse. With the game’s player numbers being what they were, many larger MMOs began to follow suit. The Tank, Healer, and DPS trifecta trend seemed to solidify itself over World of Warcraft’s tenure. For all of our unique classes and varied rotations, we are unavoidably homogenized into the MMO’s “Holy Trinity”: Tanks, healers, and damage-dealers (often referred to as DPS).Īt the risk of sounding like a “back in my day” curmudgeon, it hasn’t always been this way. Sure, there are plenty of classes to pick from with all sorts of exciting rotations to fit a given playstyle, but at the end of the day, players invariably wind up in one of three roles. For a genre that offers us a seemingly vast array of choices and paths, the realm of triple-A MMOs has become a rather limited one in recent years.

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