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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Whizbang Dustyboots" data-source="post: 3442866" data-attributes="member: 11760">Agent Oracle's comments mostly sound like EQ1-era MMORPG analysis. It was very true then, but EQ1's success meant something of a backlash in games that came after, since so many people saw its very many flaws and went the other direction. Subsequent games, especially following the release of WoW, have much less specialization. Very few people enjoyed the hyper-specialization in EQ1 (I played a wizard, which meant I could do two things: damage and teleport, and that's it).In WoW, in contrast, priests can do damage, mind control, heal and more besides. Mages can polymorph targets, do damage, turn invisible and, yes, teleport. Every class can do damage, every class has out of combat utility abilities, every class has non-damage combat utility. This is the new model and I'd expect it to be the most common one from here on out.Likewise, enemies have gotten smarter. MMORPGs don't have dumb enemies due to a limitation of the engine -- knowing to attack the healer, or whatever, is pretty obvious and it's actually coded into the NPC response system of even EQ1. It's just, as Blizzard discussed during BlizzCon, it might seem more realistic for Onyxia the black dragon to kill all the healers first, but who the heck wants to play a healer in that fight after that?In D&D, with a small group, DMs can more finely tune an encounter. In a MMORPG, where wildly unpredictable combinations of classes (and equipment and races and skill levels) will show up, there has to be a more generic response from NPCs that will be fun for most of the players most of the time. (Within those limitations, Onyxia actually behaves more like a D&D dragon, minus the spellcasting, than any MMORPG dragon before her did.)In any case, I don't think the roles really come from MMORPG, so much as they are a simplification of roles that appeared in pre-3E versions of D&D. Yes, the cleric could do more than heal, but no one called out "medic!" in D&D games because they wanted a Hawkeye Pierce impersonation.But today's large-scale shared experience is MMORPGs, and it's only natural that the shared experience's player terminology would spill back over into D&D.</blockquote>

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