(The following paragraph was to boring so I decided to eliminate all vowels from it, though Y has decided that it is definitely not a vowel...this time! - The Editor)
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MMORPGs, initially, took after the Video game RPG philosophy and made a bunch of niche filling classes for characters to play, like in Everquest where the roles filled by said classes consisted of tank, healer, aoe DPS, single target DPS, buffer, debuffer, mana battery, puller, crowd control, kiter, death touch bait, token ranger to make fun of, butcher, baker, and candle stick maker. The problem here is that since there are so many secondary roles, it becomes desirable to try and cram as many as possible into a group/raid, which in turn means content that requires groups/raids gets designed around the assumption that the group has a tank and healer at the lower end, and the whole super cheap, economy style, one pound role buffet for the larger content. This adds to the logistics challenges of forming and coordinating groups and raids in generally unfun ways.
World of Warcraft(WOW), which is by itself most of the MMO market, has, in recent years, taken to the approach of boiling roles back down to the basic trinity and made less and less buffs unique so as to ease the logistics problems for big groups, as well as some quality of life changes that make it easy to switch roles on the fly. All of this is a vast improvement over the older ways of doing things, but the problems with needing a tank and a healer in every group persists, so, as someone who has played all three roles, I propose a simple solution for any future hypothetical MMORPG designer who wants to tackle this problem before arises: don't make any tanks or healers as the minor added diversity is not worth it and the encounter design based around having them has been done to beyond death and back again, you damned necrophiliacs.
The game play for tanks is, usually, almost identical to a DPS to begin with, except he tries to keep mobs on him, and does lamer damage. Tanking is basically a glorified and heavily repeated encounter mechanic that gets glued to a few classes that could just as well be DPS. Healer game play has had problems over time, and has evolved recently in WOW from the old design which mainly consisted of spam regeneration spell on party or whack a health bar with your efficient heal spell, to a more interesting dynamic balance of resource management and applying the right spell to the right situation. The problem here being the old style is extraordinarily boring and while the latter idea has been interesting to play, but is also very complex and highly stressful(when gear doesn't make content trivial, at which point it returns to basically being exactly like the old style of boredom) which makes even fewer people want to play it. Any future MMORPG that eliminates these two roles would benefit greatly, but doing so proposes questions so I'll issue a preemptive FAQ:
This idea by no means is for every MMORPG, and trying to apply it to one that already exists would be problematic since it's already built from the ground up with the idea of there being tanks and healers in mind. If you were hypothetically building a new MMORPG, however, then making the game a DPS haven and forsaking the other two roles from the start would be a design choice that, at the very least, screams "I'm not trying to completely copy WOW", which, at least as far as I'm concerned, is a good thing.
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