I also want to completely shit on Lithose's theory here. Mankind didn't have healer support in the back, tanks up front and DPS scattered about while we fought 'dragons'. Different strategies have been used depending on the weapons available and the skill of the leaders. The Holy Trinity is the best system for 'games' used for the past decade but it's laughable to think it's an evolutionary tactic of mankind. It's also sad that people aren't excited to maybe try to do more than extremely simple basic things in their games. The genre NEEDS to evolve badly.
Healing is an abstraction of logistics/command control/supply. Tactics has always been about forming a front line, with logistical supply in the rear.
Are you really arguing with this?
Edit: And just to expand, healing itself is an abstraction required because of how things like HP evolved to give people persistent characters. Hit points is an abstraction of luck and toughness and actual armies (Yes, armies, your character represents more than just himself--"real" "heroes" had armies), it's there because most "games" would be dumb if the hero were
actuallylike soldiers and got their heads cut off when the "monster" swung at them. The reality is, in real combat, entire soldiers are injured and then brought back behind the lines where they are "healed" in hospitals, or they get hungry/thirsty and their needs are met through supply lines---all these systems are abstracted down through Hit Points and then the resupply of Hit Points through "healing".
You people that talk about "evolutions!" in combat are myopic because you think it's some big revelation that combat shouldn't be a tank/healer paradigm. When in reality, your analysis is extremely narrow and completely insufficient if you really want to change games. Healing and tanks and the trinity evolved because they were the most effecient way to mimic real combat, given the constrained rules of a system in an RPG. You don't just pluck one out and say "Derp, now combat will be revolutionary!"
You have to examine WHY it was set up in the first place. Unfortunately we have tons of people like you that think "we der are no dwagons in the real world, so this stuff must have been just pulled from a developers ass! Tehee!"--You don't rationally examine the why, you just think "it needs to be different!" like some ADD fiend trying to satisfy his urge to do something new.
Come on, "shit" on my theories some more. Lets really pull back the curtain so we can see to what depth you've actually explored this thought process.
