Recently, I believe that I’ve successfully realized how to express a trinity of roles for an RPG game like Diablo 2 which avoids the movement speed problem. See I think most people have looked at a trinity of roles and just laughed at it because “extremity of capability rate” always seems to destroy a hope for a diversity of roles. But I suspect that we’ve just failed to express our way out of this problem where our first mistake is mixing extremity with an absolute measure. So I will provide an expression that hopefully gets us out of this problem. As you can see, I believe there is no way to express legitimate diversity without taking the bad with the good. And people of criticism are going to frown upon this expression because taking the bad with the good doesn’t necessarily generate a confident impression of attractive goodness. So what I’ll do is include an additional positive aspect to each iteration in order to favor composite virtue over primary vice.
Barbarian: Predictable yet Persistently Forceful
Assassin: Inconsiderate yet Consistently Critical
Sorceress: Fragile yet Potently Powerful
Now some things need a little clarification here, but then I feel like you have it. First, the way I see what “consistently critical” is is that you could land critical strikes ranging from 1/3rd of the time at the low end up to 2/3rds of the time at the high end. Second, potent power is like both being able to output a 100% reliable attack chance with a 100% chance to be critical. But what’s not mentioned about potency is it’s limitation to particular situations specifically but for the sake of clearly serving a purpose. Now I also do think that heroes cannot be limited to just one specialized description. There has to be a sharing of the positivity so that individual hero play can be as significant as the team play. Individual heroes could major in one description and minor in another. I will demonstrate this with a set of 3 additional points.
-A Sorceress may sometimes also be persistent and forceful with a skill like Ray of Frost(borrowing from D3) where the beam is not just persistently streamed but holds enemies where they stand, not just because of the freezing element but because it’s actually knocking enemies back against their effort to move forward. I looked at the D3 runes and non rune enhancements and there was nothing that indicated the involvement of force like a crowd control effect because it’s apparently assumed that cold damage already naturally provides the crowd control effect. There’s some truth to this but I think that it leads to confusion that holds back the beauty of what could be.
-An Assassin’s critical strike may sometimes be powerful and potent. So let’s say on top of the chance to crit, there’s also a chance for the crit to randomly hit a specific body part causing a particular debuff. And then maybe if you’re really lucky and get a few head crits it results in a buff to yourself for a limited period of time that grants guaranteed hits and crits.
-A Barbarian’s persistent force, like with the skill whirl wind let’s say, might also be applying a rotational effect on the position of the opponent where they would have to turn back to face the Barbarian, but sometimes it may also be consistently critical. This might mean something like tornadoes being cast 1/3rd of the time. Or it might mean that we find ourselves in situations and against certain monsters where persistence and force is critical to turning a disadvantage into an advantage. Maybe the niche of each hero should be considered in perspective like this as well.
Now let’s get into raw technical diversity instead of conceptual,
Some have claimed that diversity is nothing and nothing is a negative. While I can understand their grief, I think that the relating value they are failing to detect here is one of flexibility. Flexibility is actually the critical fundamental value that the Zerg race failed to achieve in Starcraft, not necessarily so much the “strength of the swarm” although it could be involved. Consider the following layout and it’s obvious. Terran: Strategic Position , Protoss: Brute Force, Zerg: Flexibility. And so when it comes to the supposed “balance of nothing” claim, I think what determines use vs uselessness is proportioning, which again indicates flexibility. And I mean for example, I don’t want a throw Barb that can throw his weapons as far as a an Amazon can shoot an arrow. Conversely, if I have say a melee Sea Witch hero that is as naturally fragile as the Sorceress, I would expect some pretty hefty damage output.
But let’s say that most people have a fair point about this “nothing diversity” as being negative in a deceptive kind of way. Well that’s fine because there’s another way to look at trinitarian diversity that isn’t being fairly credited, although it’s not exactly based on the trinity, it just ultimately ends up narrowing down from the value of 4 to 3. Let’s say that we have 3 varying degrees of proportion of mage and warrior aspects in the Barbarian, Assassin and Sorceress. So technically there is no 3rd class beyond mage and warrior. What I’ve come to find is that the Barb and Sorceress would inversely oppose each other in this classification. The 2/3rds warrior Barb against the 2/3rds Mage Sorceress while the Assassin would ultimately be half and half. This is not exactly a trinity even though the proportioning is out of 3rds because the Sorceress and the Barb technically oppose each other in polarity. BUT! if you understand that the hero that would oppose the Assassin in the arrangement would just be an inversion of the 50/50% mage/warrior that the Assassin is, let’s say it’s the Druid, then you can make the same criticism that this is “a nothing” that was made about the trinity of equality. So even though each hero is just a varying balance of mage and warrior, and it’s still technically a quad or square arrangement, you’re still only left with 3 types of proportion as all the half mage/warrior heroes, even though inverted are only going to count as one type of proportioning. And so you’re left with just 3 types of proportions, 2/3rds warrior, 2/3rds mage and 1/2 mage/warrior.
In realistic equity of diversity, you might have an imbalance and hierarchy in your trinity in terms of clear weighted significance, but then you also have to consider and factor the shadow that is of pure functional potential. There’s no doubt that purity is more difficult to measure than clarity, but when it comes to the obvious human element in all of these heroes, how can you not let the value of purity compete against the value of clarity? You don’t know the value of the human element at all until you get this through your heads which are stuck up your rears in a set up of self deterioration. This is a video-game where you’ve also managed to find a way to degrade the critical element of the pure child role itself. Inconceivable.
A lot of this is some pretty deep and technical stuff to try and explain, so I will post a diagram image as soon as one person comments.
