That’s part of why action looters like the Diablos or PoE are so popular while WoW struggles to not spin wheels, though.
The problem is quite simple. Healers are not enjoyable to play for various reasons (in WoW, on top of everything else, there is also the fact that nearly every Mythic+ affix disproportionately dunks on the healer while often being a minor nuisance at best for tanks and dps), but almost all groups need one.
The result is a shortage of groups vs. players wanting a group and no happy solution with existing design. On further reflection, it seems that having both the tank and healer roles has a natural tendency to lead to this doldrum, whereas setups that omit one or both tend to be much less negative, e.g.:
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GW1 has healing as a core aspect but it’s on a flex basis, since you can change your loadout whenever you’re in an outpost or town and there are damage loadouts for Monk and Ritualist (the main healing oriented classes) as well - in fact one of the most prized content soloing specs was actually a Monk build (the so called “55”). Tanking, on the other hand, is fiddly at best (as mobs will typically glom onto the puller by default but don’t have a traditional aggro table and certain things such as spamming AoEs will actually induce them to scatter and retarget).
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Blade & Soul has tanking as part of some group strategies but the tank is simply a dps with good survivability that can keep mob attention (all classes being dps, as with many Korean games).
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Black Desert has no dedicated tanks or healers, though it does have a buff/support oriented class (Shai).
Even WoW sometimes has viable runs with a tank and no healer (e.g., most leveling dungeons can typically be handled solo by the tank, so the healer is already merely additional safety, and there have even been a fair number of M+ runs in the past that used a tank+4dps setup successfully, especially if the particular dungeon has little or no unavoidable damage).
The big question is if the trinity has outstayed its welcome and actually become a factor that limits rather than fosters enjoyable gameplay.
Nobody likes waiting forever for a healer to join, or not being able to get into a group because since, once again, most groups need a healer and so few players want to play one because, as I went over in the earlier post, healers aren’t fun to play, while also lacking a clear path for this to be rehabilitated without there being valid complaint about the solution (pretty much either the game becomes too easy, or becomes too much like FFXIV for the WoW community’s liking, and honestly, as I went over, the FFXIV solution feels a little artificial i.e. “this mechanic is quite obviously here because the game is built for a 2-2-4 comp and without it the healers are a purposeless group DPS sacrifice”).
TBF, there are on social communities people who apparently enjoy seeing people struggle to get groups because of this, but that type of behavior is one of the few things that can legitimately be understood to be toxic by any reasonable person …
Tanks don’t seem to be as subject to this problem, fwiw. Most likely this is because -
- Tank specs tend to be much more enjoyable to fly solo on, generally doing respectable damage even if not as much as a dedicated DPS, and the survivability can allow for some neat shenanigans as well (like the various broken interations of prot pally of which TBC’s was probably most famous; Brewmasters in Torghast were notable as well with how absurdly OP TOD got with HP boosting Anima powers)
- Group mechanics for the tank often materially add to the fight in interesting ways, while as we’ve gone over, this is not, and increasingly is not, the case for the healer.