Role Call: What do you do?

Well, I chose the wrong time to start up a blog. Sorry about the long stretch of nothingness.

Today we’ll be talking about party roles. These are simple in concept: The tank, the healer, and the damage-dealers. But everyone has their own idea of what each role <i>means</i>. So, I’ll open with my interpretations. Feel free to chime in with yours!

We’ll start with the damage-dealers, colloquially called the dps. These guys get all the bad rep, unfortunately. But why? They have three goals, and often times, some of these goals conflict. The first, shared by all roles, is to stay alive. You do zero damage when you’re kissing the floor, after all. The second is to deal as much drop enemies as quickly as possible, so as to put less strain on the healer and tank. The last is to not have aggro. If you’re watching your threat, you often can’t do your maximum dps. If you’re doing your maximum dps, you’ll likely out-threat the tank and die. And if you die, you weren’t watching your threat. Simple cycle, yeah? But what if you were pushing your threat boundries and suddenly get string of crits? What if something happens and the tank’s tps drops a bit? Most classes have a way to drop a bit of threat, but the fact remains that a good dps can do bad things through no fault of their own.

Which brings us to tanks. When those mistakes happen, the goal of the tank is to lessen the severity of it. The obvious feature shared by all tank classes is taunt, but each individual class has their own tricks; Intervene for warriors, hand of protection for paladins, and so on. Sometimes it’s too late, but usually, a perceptive tank can take care of things well enough. When mistakes aren’t happening, the two remaining goals for a tank are to put out as much tps as they can and to stay alive. Sometimes, they have to sacrifice some of one goal to improve another (be it through gear choice, GCD use, or resource use), but both are of equal value and related to each other.

Last but certainly not least, we have the healer. In addition to keeping alive, their primary goal is to ensure that everyone else stays alive, too. This can be through healing, buffing, or removing debuffs– All of these things end in the goal of keeping people alive by allowing them to perform without hesitation. Their third, sometimes controversial goal is to be a judge of the rest of the party. Sometimes, when a situation goes badly, the healer literally cannot keep everyone alive. At those times, they have to make the choice of who lives and who dies. Typically, they follow this priority: Themselves, the tank (in some situations, this can be reversed), and the most to the least effective dps. But situations differ, sometimes the most effective dps is out of range, sometimes you really just cannot stand someone, and simply sometimes you don’t notice something. But regardless, a healer must act quickly to make this decision, for a moment’s hesitation can result in more deaths than necessary.

Thoughts? I’m sure there are people out there that disagree with me; Please feel free to speak up.

The Fundamental Problem of Class

We’ll start off by reviving an old argument, and we’ll pick on the developers here, since they’ve been trying to mesh two contradicting ideas for a long time now. And whew, this is a long one! I’ll keep it shorter next time, I promise. And for the tl;dr crowd out there, here’s a summary: Pallies and druids are inherently and irrevocably more difficult, if not impossible, to balance to other classes.

Now, from the get-go, each class had between one and four roles that it could easily compete in, and in some cases, those with less than four had some they could, in certain circumstances, be competitive in. These roles are tanking, healing, melee damage, and ranged damage. Some would argue that there is also a “controller” role– Alright, I’ll give you that it exists. However, virtually every form of crowd control will only work against certain groups, or is too short of a duration to be true CC (stuns, for example). Given that, it’s nigh-impossible to consider a specific class a “controller.” Mages and rogues tend to be the most versatile for this, and even they run into plenty of situations where they can do nothing but damage.

Knowing all of this, there are two approaches I’ve noticed taken to balancing classes. The first is to give certain classes a priority, saying that they should be better at this role because it’s basically all they can do, and have “jack of all trades” classes be ever-so-slightly less effective. But, then, who would play the jacks when you could be playing the kings? Which leads to the other approach: If you are sufficiently specialize in the role, you will be as effective as others that are also specialized in that role, regardless of class. This means that a feral druid should be on par with a rogue for dealing melee damage.

But then what’s the incentive to play a rogue? With a rogue, you will always be melee damage, and if you want to do something else, well, you’ll just have to roll a new character. With a druid, you can switch whenever you feel like it, and you can even collect BoP items for use in your off-specs.

The closest solution I’ve seen to this problem is to make strict one-role classes on-par with multi-role classes in some situations, while in others, a one-role class will excel. Even this has problems, though. A paladin will typically excel fighting undead and demons, despite being a three-role class. And a rogue actually has a number of cases where they fall signicantly behind– Anything immune to poison will drop a rogue’s dps like a brick, especially if they’re in the assassination tree; That poison is there to make up for being forced to use lower dps and higher speed weapons, not to be a bonus on top of existing comparable damage (Something we’ll talk about later, bonuses being added to make up for being gimped by the system).

So, what can be done about this? It seems to be an inherent part of the system. As far as I can tell, nothing short of a complete overhaul could fix the contradiction. Sometimes, I think that wouldn’t be such a bad idea– In Dungeons and Dragons, roles were named and assigned when fourth edition came out. Every class has one and only one primary role, and sometimes one or two secondary roles. These secondary roles are rarely enough to get by without someone having it as their primary role, but help ease the other character’s burden in performing it. And I’ll hand it to WotC, it works.

But no. Personally, I’m rather fond of holy paladins, and I’m confident that that’d be shifted to secondary (or removed all together) if such an overhaul were to take place. Thankfully, Blizzard probably wouldn’t listen to a blog like this.

Welcome! Come in, come in, have a seat.

Welcome to the cafe.

This place is a little different from the usual WoW blog, as I’ll rarely talk about theorycrafting (Oh, but I do love it– Others can do it better than I can, though), specific raids and instances, or what certain classes should be doing. Those are the kinds of things you usually see in these blogs.

No, I am here to talk about people, and to encourage you to talk about them as well. Now, that’s a very vague goal, so let’s elaborate: I would like to spark discussion about why players do the things they do, why developers do the things they do, and why people in general do the things they shouldn’t do. If you have something to say about it, say it! Simple as that.

So, pull up a chair, grab a mana strudel, and enjoy your KB’s Gourmet Coffee, thistle tea, or pure glacier water.