The Holy Trinity and Team BuildsAlthough it has been around for a while, this is a pretty well written article explaining the Trinity team config and various pro's and con's.
:idea:
Team Structure beyond the Trinity
While a trinity build is effective (especially since it provides an easy way to difine the roles of people joining PUGs), this article explains some of the pitfalls of trinity teams (such as the death of the tank, which often results in a party wipe) and some viable alternatives. Perhaps the part of this thread that I liked the most was the suggestion that there should be some contribution by each character to both offense and defense. I'm sure that the reason I liked that part was my tendency to run with very defense oriented builds and to build a little offense into builds that are often defense only.
Examples:
:arrow: MM necro, with interrupts. The minions help with offense and help body block to provide defense. The interrupts help the offense defeat enemy monks and defensively help to reduce the amount of damage that the party takes from enemy casters.
:arrow: SS necro with earth skills. SS does damage, and also helps take out enemy healers. The earth skills (usually Eruption and Churning Earth) blind melee attackers and knock down enemy runners trying to take out your party's healer.
:arrow: Ice ele. With skills like Maelstrom and Water Trident, the enemy casters are interrupted and take damage at the same time. When combined with slowing skills (like Deep Freeze), the enemy is prevented from beating up on your monk, while leaving them open for AoE damage and direct attacks.
:arrow: Prot and Smite Monk. Prot monks have been around as long as GW. While Prot Spirit and other protection skills are great at damage reduction, they don't do anything directly to help with offense. But add in skills like Shield of Judgment and Smite Hex/Smite Condition and now your healer is helping to contribute to the damage done by the rest of the party.
There are of course lots of other ways that other classes can pitch in to help the party as a whole with the use of wells, wards, shouts, weapon spells, etc. While hench lack the ability to be set up manually for dual roles, heros can easily be configured in such a manner. Reflecting on my vanquishing with Sheep, and our frequent use of duality builds, I can say that even with only 2 people and 6 heros (as opposed to a single person, 3 heros and 4 hench), the difference in resilience and speed of offense is dramatic.
Hopefully duality builds will continue to grow in popularity, as it would seem that it lessens the need for a dedicated tank and makes the party far more resilient (since the party is not reliant on a single focal point, the death of one person/hero would appear to be less likely to lead to a party wipe). Add to that the fact that it is harder to interrupt 8 characters than it is to interrupt 1 or 2 and the team will be less impacted by hard core interruptions and/or energy drainage. Redundancy is a good thing when you have a character that is limited by a condition, a hex, the terrain or death.
Let me also encourage everyone who has a duality build to please post it under the applicable profession sub-forum. I think all of us could benefit from such builds, especially for activities such as vanquishing or HM missions - even if those activities are done with few, or possibly only one, human player.