Combat Roles

Originally fully developed as an MMO concept, Combat Roles are a somewhat useful concept in designing individual combat systems. These roles have been imported into Tabletop games over the years, most notably by Dungeons & Dragons 4e.

In MMOs

The original trinity was:

• Tank. The guy who goes up front, and absorbs all the damage from the monsters.
• Healer. The guy who makes sure the Tank and Damage stay in combat, rather than dying or needing to retreat.
• Damage. The guy who actually kills the monsters. Usually comes in two varieties, Burst, who does a lot of damage all at once, but is usually fairly slow about it, and DPS ("damage per second") who focuses on doing damage at quick bursts, and DoT, "damage over time", spells and abilities which inflict status effects that do damage continuously.

There are a plethora of side roles, usually one of the above with a little bit below, or two or more of the below:

• The Off Tank, who could fill in for the Tank for a short while so he could heal or reposition.
• The Buffer, who boosts his teammates' abilities. May sound useless, but most systems go out of their way to make Buffs valuable. Likely to be combined with Healer, Tank, or Debuffer.
• The Debuffer, who penalizes his enemies' abilities. Similar to the Buffer, but for enemies. Likely to be combined with Tank, Damage (frequently a DoT type), or Buffer.
• The Area of Effect (AoE) guy, who focuses on large groups and areas, as opposed to a Single Target specialist. More a modifier for the trinity; both have value, as sometimes you're fighting a horde (and so the multiplicative effect of AoE is useful), and sometimes you're fighting a singular big monster (and thus, the multiplicative bonus of AoE is lost)
• The Petmaster, who has a pet or pets, who are either an Off-Tank or extra Damage.
• The Jack of All Trades (or just Jack), who can fill in for more than two of the above, usually at the cost of being good at any one. Usually, has a hard time, as the other classes are more valuable to a group, but as long as they have their own niche, being able to fill in for another in a pinch is still valuable.
• The Crowd Controller, or the Mezzer, who focuses on disabling monsters, particularly large groups, so that their teammates can focus on a few monsters at a time.
• A few games have Area Denial roles (or, more frequently, monsters, especially bosses), who make an area inhospitable to their enemies. Rare, because most MMOs have very weak AI systems, and thus such a role would make AI more complicated than it needs to be.

One important concept to understanding the Tank is "Aggro": Monsters target whoever has done the most damage or healing nearby, but Tanks have abilities that either force monsters to attack them, or greatly increase their own Aggro rate without necessarily doing any damage or healing. Aggro management is quite important in most MMOs, as most Healer and Damage classes are fairly fragile.

As applied to /tg/

Dungeons and Dragons 4e Roles

Dungeons & Dragons 4e included four roles that overlap with the above, so we'll use the vocabulary from above.

• The Defender, essentially the Tank, with a small region of Area Denial interrupting anybody who tries to attack anybody but him, since 4e lacked an Aggro system.
  • Class differentiation was usually based on how they stopped monsters from attacking others.
  • Examples from the original PHB: Paladin (for a more Leader-leaning Defender) and Fighter (for a more Striker-leaning Defender)
• The Striker, a Single Target Damage/Debuffer type.
  • Class differentiation within the role was usually based on what kind of damage, how they dealt it, and how close they could get to their opponent.
  • Examples from the original PHB: Rogue, Warlock, Ranger.
• The Leader, a Healer/Buffer, who usually also did Off-Tanking.
  • Class differentiation within the role was usually based on how much of those three the class could be.
  • Examples from the original PHB: Cleric
• The Controller, who did Area of Effect Damage, Area Denial, and Crowd Control-focused Debuffing. The most poorly defined of the four in the initial book.
  • Class differentiation within the role was usually based on very little, as Controllers were all based on "the same as Wizards, but slightly different in some way".
  • Examples from the original PHB: Wizard

Outside of 4e

Both the MMO and 4e versions roles are used by other systems, since the terms will be understood by others.