Playing without a tank

Guild Wars 2 dungeons, World of Warcraft scenarios, there is a trend towards group PvE without the holy trinity of tank, healer, dps. So how does that work in practice? I've been running the Fall of Theramore scenario a couple of times, and unlike everybody else I wasn't concentrating on the horrible story, but on the gameplay. The first question of course is: "Does it work?". The answer is yes, for small values of "work".

Stated simply, playing without a tank and healer works as long as the challenge isn't too difficult. Three pure dps characters with zero healing nor tanking capabilities can only be in battle for so long. They are able to kill a group of enemies faster than a tank - healer - dps trio, but the holy trinity can keep up their act for considerably longer, and thus ultimately beat harder challenges.

Where it gets interesting is when you look at hybrids. Imagine a perfect 5-man group with a tank that always holds all the aggro, and a healer who always keeps everybody alive. In such a group a dps class with ranged dps and no means to mitigate damage or heal himself works perfectly. In fact it works so well that over the years developers attitude towards hybrids has changed: It used to be that if you had hybrid abilities that allowed you to do other things than just pure dps, developers believed that had to be "balanced" by you having less damage output. But as those hybrid abilities don't count for anything in a holy trinity group, and only the damage output counts, hybrids now deal exactly as much damage as pure dps classes.

And there is the rub: Take away the tank and the healer, and suddenly a hybrid class becomes a lot better. As Keen said, a GW2 dungeon is like a WoW dungeon after the tank dies: "Have you ever been doing a dungeon (probably in a pug), had your tank die, and suddenly the mobs are all over your healer or DPS and people just start running around trying to “dodge” the mobs but instead constantly die? Yeah, that’s Guild Wars 2 dungeons, but all the time." Dodging and kiting are instinctive tactics which simply don't work without a tank pulling off the mob from you. (And I'm an expert on kiting, having done it since quad-kiting with a druid in EQ). What you need in a group without a tank or healer are ways to deflect aggro, to self-heal, or to mitigate damage.

As a consequence my retribution paladin was a lot more comfortable to play in the Fall of Theramore than my mage. While in a 5-man dungeon the mage is easier, because he doesn't have to be so close to the mobs he wants to damage, in a 3-man scenario the armor and self-healing of the paladin are just brilliant. I ended up pseudo-tanking (that is being always the one that pulls and takes the first brunt of attacks from the mobs, but not holding aggro very well afterwards) in a group with two pure dps, and still did rather well on damage output.

I'm not certain what that means for class balance in World of Warcraft. That class balance is already screwed by having to take into account very different activities, like soloing, PvE groups, and PvP. And now we get yet another combat mode, where yet a different set of abilities is optimal. The risk is that in the long run certain classes will become prevalent in certain activities, because they are consider to "suck" in other activities. I don't think that can be what the Blizzard developers had in mind.