We Didn't Start the Fire
I have a song stuck in my head now…*sigh*.
Starting the Fire
The blog community has been in a bit of an uproar ever since Gordon from We Fly Spitfires wrote a guest post for World of Matticus about the idea that healing and tanking should garner greater rewards. I don’t think Gordon quite knew what he was getting into when he published the article, and I hope he has a thick skin. I’d like to think he wasn’t intentionally trying to outrage the community, but rather generate some good discussion (and I think Matticus felt the same way or he wouldn’t have posted it). He has certainly achieved that result.
A conversation with Big Bear Butt last night got me thinking about class design in WOW, and MMORPG’s in general. He wrote an interesting blog post about some of his ideas. Since I didn’t want to fill up his page with an enormous rambling comment, I thought I would put my musings here. Some of it is in reply to his post, and some in reply to the We Fly Spitfires post.
Asking Ourselves Why
First lets address the apparent shortage of healers and tanks in the game. Why are these roles filled less often? An obvious reason is simple supply and demand - for a 25-man raid you need roughly 3 tanks, 16 DPS and 6 healers (depending on your encounter of course). In a 10-man you’ll usually have 2 tanks, 5 DPS and 3 healers. The need for tanks and healers is much smaller, hence less well-geared tanks and healers. The advent of dual-specs may have helped this slightly, as most hybrid classes can perform DPS and/or Tank/Healer roles. Unfortunately since one spec is usually more geared than the other, we still see the imbalance. You can’t gear up a tank set fully if you never are needed to tank.
Another reason for the shortage of course is the idea that tanking/healing are harder or more demanding roles. People are less inclined to play roles they think are high-pressured. This leads to the majority of people choosing the DPS route. But are they actually harder, or is it just perception? We often see good healers and tanks carry bad DPS in a 5-man, but is this just because the less skilled players choose the DPS? It’s not impossible for good DPS to carry a bad tank or healer, it just happens more infrequently. A good DPS can save the healer’s mana by staying out of the fire and self-healing, or assist the tank by managing adds using Crowd Control and threat redirectors like Misdirect or Tricks of the Trade. I think that we are trapped in a bit of a vicious cycle here – the perception of healing/tanking is that its harder, which leads to those that are not very committed to the game playing DPS, which leads to the everyone thinking that DPS is easy, and “just meat in the room”. Skilled DPS players are nearly as hard to find as good tanks or healers. I think Blizzard is partly to blame for tuning content to lower DPS requirements, enabling the carrying of DPS.
We also must consider that throughout leveling we learn how to DPS. The solo game is mainly based upon killing mobs to earn XP, or doing quests that require us to kill mobs to get certain drops, etc (yes, I know that you can level without this but it is not easy). Only those that step foot into instances really learn how to tank or heal. Healing and tanking seem hard at first because they are different from what we are used to – an entirely new skill set.
A common misconception is that healers and tanks are required to be leaders in the raid. Miss Medicina said this well in comment on the post on World of Matticus, ”Perhaps it’s actually the other way around – leaders take on the healing and tank roles because they see a need for more of that group role, and, as leaders, feel it is their duty to step up to the plate.”
It’s also important to note that in a true progression raid, all roles need to perform skillfully, or a wipe will in ensue. If all the DPS die in a fire then it is unlikely that the healers/tanks could survive the encounter alone. Yes, I’ve seen it happen on fights like Heigan, but generally you’ll hit an enrage timer, or the healer will run out of mana. Conversely I’ve seen fights where the tank and healers die and the last remaining DPS are able to burst down the boss.
A real problem with the imbalance in tank/healers vs DPS is that some tanks and healers think they deserve greater rewards. Whether it’s because they have a huge ego, or they’re tired of carrying terrible DPS, this idea is becoming more prominent. The LFG tool helps enforce this because due to supply and demand, healers and tanks have shorter queue times (this is partly due to the fact that the ratio for tanks/healers vs DPS in raids is not the same as tanks/healers vs DPS in 5-mans. It’s also true that many DPS that are doing 5-mans would never be skilled enough to raid in any role – and they chose DPS since they think it’s the easiest, remember.). This “I’m special” attitude is enforced, and we have tanks/healers leaving groups in LFG if things don’t go their way (and there is no real punishment for doing so).
My main is a DPS, so I’m aware my opinions are biased. I’m not saying that without a doubt DPS is equivalently hard as Tanking or Healing, I’m just saying we need to be aware of all the factors involved. In fact, I think that despite all the arguments above, there is still the inherent flaw that the tank and heals are Single Points of Failure. If a tank or healer dies right away, the group probably won’t succeed. A good group of DPS can only help prevent them from dieing in the first place. On the other hand, if a DPS dies, the others might be able to pump out enough to make up for it.
A Better Solution Than Rewards
After considering all the above arguments, if tanking/healing really is still harder or more important than DPS, then something needs to be done. As BBB said, the solution is not to grant more rewards to tanks and healers, but rather to make the DPS roles more valuable. In Burning Crusade, DPS was valued for their Crowd Control abilities. In Wrath, we don’t need to use CC, which took away a huge portion of the utility of DPS. CC might not be the only answer for making DPS more valuable though (after all we have to consider why Blizzard took it out in the first place).
BBB’s solution was definitely food for thought – he proposed that all classes should be hybrids. All classes can tank in a certain stance, and when doing so they only generate threat (no damage), and everyone else is a dps/heals hybrid (like hyped-up Blood DK with self-healing dps, or priest doing Holy Nova). I’d love to see this done in an MMO, although I’m not sure if Blizzard will change things so drastically. They are looking at how to make healing more interesting though, and this would certainly do it.
I think in WOW, we need to either add more utility to the DPS, or make sure that DPS is absolutely required to run an instance. Blizzard could add at least one boss per instance that has an enrage timer, and tune tanks in such a way that they could never generate enough DPS on their own. Now this might make it a pain for tanks to solo, so give them some sort of solo mode in which they can do real DPS but generate very little threat.
It would also be great to address the Single Point of Failure problem. Ideally, if a tank or healer goes down a Hybrid class could switch something around and quickly fill in that role. This is currently awkward to do. Maybe we need to make all hybrid classes like druids that have forms or auras which benefit a particular role (but more viable and less clunky than the current druid mechanics). This would be a little unfair to the Pure DPS classes though – perhaps they need some kind of mechanic so that if a member of the group goes down, they get a small DPS buff?
Other Somewhat Related Thoughts
Class design is certainly a challenging thing. The “trinity” of Tank, DPS, and Heals has been the defacto standard for a long time. Hybrid classes complicate this quite a bit. If a Hybrid is as good at a role as their Pure counterpart, then why bring the Pure class? Conversely, if a Hybrid isn’t as good as the Pure classes at anything, then it is better to bring multiple Pure classes. Blizzard has struggled, like all MMO designers about what to do with Hybrids. Currently a Hybrid must specialize all the way into one role (in a particular encounter), and they are equal or nearly equal to a Pure class performing that role. This calls into question whether the Pure classes are really valuable, and there has been a lot of debate about that.
Another issue is how to make classes diverse, but not too niche-focused. You’ll commonly hear “bring the player, not the class”. If certain classes are necessary to complete an encounter, then it will be hard to put a group together. You might have to bring a less-skilled player or someone you don’t like simply because they provide necessary buffs or utility. Spreading out these special abilities among the classes tends towards homogenization, which is also a cause for concern. Players want to feel that their class is unique and interesting. In Wrath, Blizzard moved towards sharing previously unique class abilities among other classes. Did they move too far in this direction? If not, how far is too far?
I do like the thought of making everyone a hybrid. You’d have to give each class its own unique flair for each role, while not specializing them so much that they were required for certain content. This is certainly a challenging proposition, but that’s not to say it can’t be done well.
Hints at Blizzard’s Future Plans
The Path of the Titans coming in Cataclysm really intrigues me. We have really very little information about it, but my understanding is that it adds a new system for enhancing your character in addition to the class-and-spec-based system we currently have. I’m excited at the possibilities of further making my character unique. I do worry though, that it will making balancing too complicated for Blizzard to handle. I’m sure we’ll see certain combinations of specs & titans completely overpower others.
Other Interesting Articles
While writing this blog post I came across two interesting articles at Gamasutra on the subject of MMO class design:
A possible way around this to me would be to have a set number of badges per dungeon. Then have the amount increased for time, no death or things of this nature. Then for those that can’t overcome certain elements as a team they receive the standard number. I imagine blizz can track instance deaths as well as raids deaths and time events are already included. This would be away that could prove the group is greater than the whole and nobody is just meat in the room. I mean come on tanks have been refereed to as meat shields from the beginning so this tank type person hopefully meant a tongue in cheek reference to that.
Rewarding emblems/badges for success is a fantastic idea. Blizzard already rewards raiders for completing TOC with limited wipes (tribute run), so they’re on the right path. Bringing this down to heroics would be very beneficial to all.
Pingback: Big Bear Butt Blogger » There! THAT’S what I was trying to say! | January 12, 2010 at 5:31 pm
[...] Go read her blog post, and then pretend that my post was somewhere nearly almost kinda as good as that. [...]
Our raid leaders generally end up switching to a dps role whenever possible, because having one dps sideline his rotation for a minute to figure out the overall tactical situation or identify a problem has much, much less impact than a tank or healer doing the same thing.
The dps is important, but it doesn’t have the less-than-a-second impact that tanking or healing does in the current form of WoW. I think that the GMs have acknowledged this, which is why they are promising bigger health pools and less gibby-spikey tank damage in Cataclysm.
I must say, this is one of the most insightful, well-written articles I’ve seen in quite awhile. I rarely add WoW blogs to my feed reader anymore, but yours is added.
With respect to the questions you bring up, I brainstormed a bit on Twitter last week about a “dual-class” concept. I didn’t flesh out the idea then, and won’t try to now, but basically, you level two characters to 80. You then select one spec from each of them, pick the character to receive the second spec, and the original character is deleted (all possessions are moved to the other character).
For example, I level a priest and a hunter. I combine the two, so that my dual-spec is priest (any talents) and hunter (any talents). So instead of changing from Holy to Disc, or from BM to Survival, I now switch from Priest (Disc) to Hunter (SV).
Yes, there are holes in this idea, but I’m not a dev.
Thank you Kestrel! *Blushes*
The dual-class concept sounds very intriguing – it would create more unique characters, and allow people to choose their favorite specs to combine on their main.
that’s what guildwars does. it does make for some interesting combinations. I could see a warlock that can heal his own lifetap… I could see a rogue able to frost nova, or a mage that could hold a shield and wear plate.
Oh my did this get the gears turning.
What that will evolve into I don’t know, but it will likely be a post of its own.
Well done.
Very well done.
Thanks Dech! I look forward to seeing your post on the subject.
Well written article, I enjoyed it.
Just want to touch on a secondary point regarding ‘bring the player, not the class’ and homogenization of abilities.
For a number of reasons, not just the one I’m going to mention, I think the game would be better off if 10 mans became the standard or preferred raid size. Class and ability homogenization feels much less like an issue when trying to manage buffs in a small group and more of an interesting puzzle. On more than a few occasions our raid has said “okay, if the hunter changes away from survival, then the warlock needs to switch to his replenishment spec, and the shaman should switch to…”
In 25 mans, when I ran them at early stages of gear, it seemed like we always just needed to push one hunter into marksman spec to get the buff for hunter’s mark and trueshot aura while the rest stayed in their survival spec which did higher dps at the time. I’m sure the same reduction of interesting choices between group needs and personal dps (or tank or healing abilities) in larger groups pertains to other classes as well.
It’s interesting to see this to me — my main is a healer, but I’ve been asked to raid as DPS on a different character a lot lately. It seems that healing is more immediately necessary while DPS is, for me, more stressful. If I’m healing as hard as I can and people still go down, I’m usually reasonably confident that I’ve done what I could do… meanwhile, as DPS, there is ALWAYS more I can do: tweak the spec, perform the rotation more perfectly, etc. etc. Even if I don’t feel I’m competing with other DPS, I’m competing with myself as a DPS in a way I’m not as a healer.
Perhaps it’s because healing is a more time specific zero-sum game. The boss can always take damage, even if everyone else is damaging him; the tank can’t necessarily take more healing, especially if there are other healers with whom I am cooperating.
That said, I’ve also been yelled at a lot more as a healer (NO I CANNOT SAVE YOU WHEN YOU GET ONE-SHOTTED) so I WOULD like a cookie for putting up with that please.
*Hands Cassie a cookie*
I agree that healing is more time-sensitive, especially with the spikey damage. There are points when no healing is required or beneficial, and other points where extreme healing output is required. This can certainly stress a lot of people out – it’s often unpredictable. Success in healing is more black and white – your target is either dead or alive.
DPS on the other hand is more of a sliding scale – you can always do a little better and contribute further to the success of the raid. Perhaps this is one reason why DPS can be carried easier – it’s harder to notice when they fail.
Wow, this is awesome food for thought. I’d love to brainstorm for a bit and write on it later. Excellently laid out.
Something hugely important has been overlooked by most posts and comments I’ve read about since this whole thing exploded on the scene. We all know that dps has been devalued a ton since Wrath came out. We all have heard that dps is a bunch of face-rolling damage meter spewing weak links. Just log into trade and see how undervalued they are. You ask why this is? It’s simple.
Numbers. If one person out of five (or 10 or 25) is a terrible player, odds are it’s a dps. Not because dps is easy. Not because it attracts lesser skilled people. There is just simply a higher chance of seeing a dps person in a group performing badly, if you average out the numbers. Because there are less tanks/heals. So starts the perception. Play wow long enough, or at least raid long enough and you will find terrible, terrible people at every role. They simply don’t know their class, and have zero inclination to learn. The problem now is that many of these people are being shov…er, inserted into our groups in the daily random. And it’s slapping everybody in the face.
I myself am very guilty of this. On my friends list (unless you are actually a friend) exists mostly tanks and healers I can call on when I pug raids. Very few dps are there. For a mage (that I don’t know the person behind the computer) to be on my friends list, he must have impressed the HELL out of me. And not with high dps numbers. He must have been a good raid leader, or pulled off a clutch poly morph or something. Yet, to be on my friends list as a tank/heals, I merely must have survived in a group with you at some point and felt you adequate. That my friends, is sad.
It’s numbers, so few decent heals/tanks, so few REALLY GOOD dps. But since the dps outnumber the heals/tanks required in everything I want to do, I don’t have to remember them unless they were outstanding players. To change this is to change WoW into a totally different game. The whole storm will even out over time as raiders don’t run randoms anymore (don’t need badges nor the headaches) and it gets back to a more even skill set pressing the LFG button. I do one random a day on my tank for frosties, and one random a day on my hunter while I’m farming herbs. Some times I can’t squeeze the hunter into one due to time constraints. Soon I won’t run my tank in there because I won’t need the badges. And I’m a novice hunter at best, so I guess I’ll see all you new tanks in the LFG, here’s to hoping I don’t face pull something with my pet.
Very good point Copey. It is statistically more likely that a DPS is an under-performing member in a raid.
I’ve DPSed, tanked, and healed in raids. And I can definitely say that in 90+% of cases, the tolerance for error for a DPS is much higher than it is for a tank or healer.
It’s *often* the case that a single mistake by a healer or tank can wipe the raid. It’s *rarely* the case that a single mistake by a DPS can wipe a raid (though the DPS may die, or his or her damage done may be poor that fight).
In my opinion, the lower margin for error (not just perceived) for tanks and healers helps to select out some of the best players to these roles. Mostly because a truly bad tank or healer is going to know it in short order, and will either work to fix it or will find another role (DPS).
That being said, do tanks and healers deserve better rewards than DPS? No. At least not more so than they already have. Speaking from experience, it’s FAR easier to gear a tank to relatively “high-end” than it is to gear a DPS, just because of the availability of runs and the lack of competition for drops. Not to mention, many guilds will already gear their main tank preferentially.
A final note, in many of the hard modes you have to have 100% performances from every single player in the raid or you are going to wipe. I think that tanks and healers “carrying” members of their group is most pronounced in easy mode content. And I’m not sure it’s going to be easy to change that, as if you put really tight DPS requirements in all raids (or god forbid all instances) then you are going to lock out a large % of the population that Blizzard WANTS to see this content.
I have a tank spec as my primary spec and all it would take me to run as a tank is a little consideration. I started tanking a couple of weeks before the LFD came out and didn’t have the chance to tank a lot of the instances. I have a lot to learn about threat management and some situational awareness to work on, but as it stands right now Blizzard could offer me a Shadowmourne and I still wouldn’t tank in the current state of things. I would forgo all rewards to have a considerate and respectful run. Most of the time those in my guild are pre occupied with their own LFD to help me in the little time I get each day to play.
Tanking is certainly less attractive when you are mocked for not being perfect, or people pull mobs without consideration for the fact that you’re still learning. I tried tanking on my low-level pally and found that I just couldn’t handle the rudeness of PUG members. It was too easy for them to take the control of the situation away from me, and prevent me from doing my job. That is not a good environment to learn in.
I have a tank spec on my heals (druid) and I have only done one heroic instance on her as tank, mainly for this exact reason. I do find though that if you really want to get into tanking, queue yourself in some of the low wrath regular instances. You will be over geared in just about anything you are wearing and you will have a chance to gain the aggro sufficiently to hold it against some of the players at that level giving you a bit of confidence. In general, this range of players is stepping into instances in Northrend anyways and it will be a new experience for both of you as you will be noticing different things from the front of the pack. This group of players is also likely to be more inclined to take your commands/suggestions as long as you aren’t a butt.
Yes despite haveing two well geared tanks I have opted out of the instant queue a few times recently to afk in the dps /heals queue just because I did not feel like the responsibilty, Its OK if I make a mistake in a guild run, but people can be very verbal in a pug.
If found it interesting that “A good DPS can save the healer’s mana by staying out of the fire and self-healing, or assist the tank by managing adds using Crowd Control and threat redirectors like Misdirect or Tricks of the Trade” was used. I would have used the words should not can. Perhaps that why so often I end up heal tanking casters that “should” be interupted.
I have a healer as my main, but my first love has been and always will be my protection warrior. I recently got her to 80 and kitted her out in crafted and BOE epics to help her out in her chose field, but I too am afraid to put her into the LFG tool. My guildmates are willing to help, but we don’t always log in at the same times.
As a healer in the LFG, I find people are easy to please, and for the most part, forgiving of a healer who has to take a minute or two for a toddler emergency. I have seen how hard most are on the tank, and just don’t think the same courtesy would be extended if I had to stop pulling to take care of the kids. That, and I have never been a good multiple target tank. I can only imagine the chaos I would be part of in some of these groups where DPS fires where they wish, regardless of the tanks current target. YIPES!
Nice post, interesting ideas there. To put in my two cents about this, i don’t think giving every class a tank/healer/dps option is really a good idea, because then it would start making every class too similar. Then again, i’m not a game developer, so i’m sure they could get creative and do it, but i wouldn’t hold your breath. There definatly need to be a change in things. Personally I have a druid that heals and i enjoy it a lot, even doing randoms. Though i would be afraid to become a tank because of how impatient people get in parties, I would probably never truly learn to tank well because no one would give me time to learn, tell me i suck, and leave the party. Thats just why i don’t like tanking, lol.
I had a huge ramble typed up in response but deleted it to be more concise.
I totally agree with your everyramble (I swear thats a word).
It is a part of WoW society that the tanks have extra responsibilities above tanking (marking, knowing fights, leading in general). The people who play WoW have unconciously imbued tanks with extra responsibility. This in turn fosters an idea that tanks are better. However, all of the things which we imbue tanks with outside of taking hits and keeping the mobs off of the other players, are things that any person in the group could take responsibility for. Since everyone assumes the tank will do them, the idea becomes that being a tank is harder. Over time the tank (and in this case the devs) unconciously buy into these ideas and bada bing bada boom you have the issues we have now.
(That was the concise version lol)
Very thoughtful, inspiring, and well drawn out post. I have 3 lvl 80′s… my main is a mage, my secondary is a druid tank, and my poor holy pally has been abandoned in the sewers of Dalaran. She only gets brought out to see the light on rare occasions now.
My mage is my main for a couple of reasons… mainly she was my first toon, and the one I’ve spent the most time on. I’ve spent so much time theory crafting and working on her that I can’t just abandon her. She’s like an old friend… I always know what to do, and it’s never uncomfortable. I don’t think she is less worthy of rewards simply because she has one role in a group.
My pally has gotten ignored simply because I find healing to be incredibly stressful… for me personally. I get upset if people die. Yes, it’s just a game, but there are real people behind those toons, and more often than not, those people are my friends. And I feel bad if I let them down. When I realized that this inability to just let people go when I couldn’t save everyone was overwhelming my enjoyment of the game, I sent her to the sewers. Maybe someday I will bring her back out and try again.
My druid is my newest 80… and I am having all kinds of fun with her. I brought her up simply because finding a good tank is difficult, and we needed more for raiding. I stepped into the role of tank all kinds of scared… but found my previous experiences as dps and heals had given me a real insight into what I need to watch for. It helped immensely that our main tanks were both more than willing to help me learn to become the best bear I could be. Now, unless I am actively raiding new content, I am more likely than not on my bear. I do have her dual specced as kitty… but I can count on one hand the times I’ve been asked to do something as dps on her. And I will have fingers left over. I have had to deal with rude and abusive dps pugs with the new system… and I hate that I have to. I will gladly stand in front and take hits for guildies for hours… but I draw the line when some random pug person blames me for his/her idiocy and mistakes.
I do everything I can to be as successful as possible, no matter my current role. Unfortunately, not everyone does, but that’s a whole different topic.
All that said, having played all three roles more or less successfully, I don’t think my druid or pally should gain any extra rewards my mage would be denied. I work just as hard at dpsing as I do when healing, or tanking. All three roles have times when they do less work, and times when they are busting their butts off to make something happen. All three can be stressful. All three require skill to be played well. Simply because there are less people playing a particular role is not a good enough reason to give rewards that are denied to other classes/roles. Soon, there won’t be less people playing those roles… because more people will bring toons up to get those rewards that their previous toons couldn’t get.
I would rather get a reward for being an excellent tank… not just because I rolled bear druid and got her to 80. I don’t think that’s good enough.
Just a note about ratios of role:groupsize
Tanks…
5: 1:5 (20%)
10: 2:10 (20%)
25: 3:25 (20%)
Healers…
5: 1:5 (20%)
10: 3:10 (30%)
25: 6:25 (40%)
The tanking requirement is the same for all types of instance but healers actually are more required the larger the group/encounter. As people come up through 5-player encounters we can see why we end up with potential shortages of healers for raiding – you need twice as many, relatively, for end-game content.
The situation would be very very different if Bliz tuned instances differently to require the 1:5 ratio consistantly.
It also explains the wait times for various roles in the LFD tool. When I tank it’s instant assignment, when my wife heals it’s anything from a few seconds to a minute or three. When either of us DPS it’s 5-15 minutes of waiting.
I’m not great at math, so maybe I’m missing something here, but isn’t the percentage of tanks in 25-mans 12%? If that’s true then the percentage of healers in a 25-man is 24%. Obviously these aren’t always consistent depending on the encounter.
I think it would great if Blizzard changed the ratios to be equal, although it would certainly be difficult to design an encounter for 5 tanks.
Pingback: It’s about class, in more ways than one « Dechion's Place | January 13, 2010 at 9:42 am
[...] days it has spawned posts from Blessing of Kings, Spinksville, forbearance, The Pink Pigtail Inn, Azure Shadows, and the Big Bear Butt to name a few. Actually I suppose I could include myself in that, but you [...]
… from BBB …
/wear_asshat 1
My main is DPS. When I run heroics I ALWAYS heal (in my pvp heal spec) and, unless a guildy asks for help, I run no more than one heroic per day. IMO, running heroics is a necessary evil and thoroughly miserable chore that I tolerate just to grind my frost emblems.
For me, the problem Blizzard has created is that there are now NO barriers between a 5 minute old lvl 80 wearing mismatched ilvl 130 greens and heroic bosses with “weird spells” that have never been seen before.
If a healer or tank stumbles into a heroic wearing the ragtag garbage that was accidentally collected while leveling, we would have a wipefest* on our hands. Before long (15 minutes max), everyone will go home. I have never seen the tank/healer equivalent of a dps crawling along at 850 dps successfully complete a WotLK heroic.
Why would anyone say that achieving success in an heroic as a tank or dps is NOT significantly more difficult than a dps? How can you possibly say that? I see crappy dps get through heroics all the time and I KNOW that similarly skilled and geared tanks/healers would not be able to cut the mustard.
To complete some of the easier WotLK heroics in 2010, the following is necessary (unless accompanied by a stellar party members):
Tank – geared at or near def cap (as appropriate), 22k health un-buffed, understanding of threat, vague understanding of bosses and their abilities.
Healer – 1,500 sp, 200 mp5, 14k mana, ability to pay attention to parties health bars.
DPS – ability to use LFD and click the ready button when the group is ready.
In my mind, dps are just passengers in heroic dungeons. Please show me that I am wrong
/wear_asshat 0
* I’ll make an exception to my position for an immaculately geared and competent tank/healer plus solid dps get carring a terribad tank/healer.
I wonder, is it possible to complete a timed culling of strat run with just a tank and a healer?
I doubt that a 2-man timed is currently possible — at least not at my gear/skill level. A 2-man completion is certainly doable. And I have done a 4-man timed run. By accident. In a pug. (A Hunter fell asleep /OD’ed on heroin / went AFK at the start of the instance.)
Is your question perhaps an attempt to illustrate how DPS are more than passengers? While I see your point, I would still maintain that they are nice to have, but not essential.
The character I consider to be my main is my hunter. I have an alt paladin who tanks. She is starting to outgear my hunter just because her services are that much more in demand. That, I think, is all the reward that should be needed. You come in to the instance, you do your job, you get your emblems or what have you, and you leave.
To be honest, I find DPS more stressful than tanking. Sure, I feel responsible for my party, and if a pull gets FUBARed and I can’t get all the mobs, I feel bad because I don’t think I did my job as well as I could have. But my hunter, I choose to play Beast Mastery. So every time I play her, I put immense pressure on myself to perform to the absolute maximum of my ability. I know that people who know what they’re doing will think less of me for choosing the current “worst” DPS spec, and I feel the need to prove to them that I CAN be Beast Mastery and do decent DPS.
It would be nice if there was some gauge of skill or performance that would bring greater rewards, but that’s such a nebulous and individual thing, I’m pretty sure it would be impossible. I think that judging success or skill on deaths or time to complete the instance would probably just make things worse. The “goooooo gogogogo” players will just get more vocal, berating the rest of the group if they can’t keep up a pace that will ensure the best reward.
I’m also still pondering the benefit of hybridizing every class. While it could probably be done, it would not happen without a massive outpouring of QQ from those who would be losing their favored trees. Imagine if they made Fire the Mage DPS tree, and replaced Frost with a tank tree and Arcane with a healy tree. Granted, they’d probably make the DPS tree a mix of all three current trees, but how would that affect the overall DPS you could do? Part of the beauty of the tree system as I see it is that you choose a class for what it can do, then figure out for yourself just how you want to do that. As versatile as Druids are, I think in some ways they’re missing out on the refinement that you can get when speccing a pure DPS class.
Just my thoughts.
At 80 I have two tanks, two healers and one DPS. Or I suppose I could say I have four DPS, since they all have DPS off spec except the priest, who is disc/holy. I just have a few things I want to mention, in no particular order or having anything to do with each other:
1. Healers and tanks have the ability to be “good enough”. At some point, more threat or more healing is just overkill. I know both of my tanks have the ability to drop some attacks from their rotation and maintain perfectly good control over mobs. Likewise, my healers can often get by with hardly healing at all. I’ve often challenged myself to heal instances with just Riptide and Earth Shield on my shaman, or just PW: Shield and Renew on my priest. DPS doesn’t get that luxury. They’re required to be at peak performance all the time.
2. Tanks and healers need to have more situational awareness than DPS. Often, as long as an effect isn’t on a DPSer, they don’t have to worry about it. Tanks and healers, however, usually need to know what’s going on with every debuff/effect that happens, so they can react appropriately.
3. We learn to DPS while leveling, but we don’t necessarily learn to do it well. I know my Death Knight kills most things in 3-4 global cool downs. That doesn’t require a well tuned DPS rotation, nor does it need perfectly placed talents. We don’t NEED well tuned DPS until we start getting into raiding.
4. Not everyone in WoW is a seasoned raider with intimate knowledge on how to be good at your class. Tanks and healers have to learn quickly how to be good, or their groups wipe, so they’re driven by self preservation to learn how to be better. DPS does not have any frame of reference on whether they’re actually good or not. I know I never had Recount until weeks after I had actually started raiding Kara, which was months after I was running heroics.
5. Some dps are able to fill in as temporary tanks in a pinch already. I know rogues do very good at evasion tanking for 10 seconds or so. DKs can pop into frost presence and Paladins can put up righteous fury. Both can be successful back up tanks if something happened to the original tank. Perhaps not if there was an over-pull, but if a bad fear put the healer and tank to far apart… or the tank falls off a ledge and/or bridge, not that I’d know anything about that.
I don’t think I would appreciate hybidizing (homogenizing) everyone. If you want to be able to do any/everything, roll a druid.
(I thought that dual specs even took things too far. 50g per respec was certainly not a hardship.)
Wholesale hybridization will, I suspect, just change the nature of the problem, instead of solving it.
It would allow the good/skilled players to carry shoddy ones even more. Instead of DPS being sneered at, poor performers would be. If the skilled/geared players don’t feel like doing charity work… well then 5-man dungeons might soon become 4- or 3- man dungeons.
And the QQ ensues…
I don’t think that Blizzard will make all classes hybrids – it would change the game too fundamentally. I’d like to see this in another MMO though (maybe even their secret new one). There is certainly the risk of homogenization, but I think it is possible to do it well and give each class it’s own unique flavor.
There will always be terrible players and idiots in WOW. There is nothing we can do to change that. It would be great though, if they couldn’t be carried through all instances. I think the ideal solution is to have the Heroics in the future tuned in such a way that they require the full team to work together. If every member of the team is required to do their job well, then all roles will be “stressful” in different ways. Unfortunately this would result in a lot of QQ because people just want quick runs to get their emblems. I’m sure people QQ’d about BC heroics, the time to complete them and the need to use CC. In Wrath Blizzard aimed the heroics at the more casual players that don’t have 3 hours to run an instance. I think they sometimes lose the point that a casual player is not necessarily a bad player. Quick instances are good, but they should still require teamwork and tactics. The gear resets and nerfing of the current heroics only further enabled bad players to keep progressing. I would love it if for each gear reset the heroics got slightly harder, rather than easier. There really needs to be a better balance between content accessibility and content difficulty. There are plenty of casual players who are looking for a challenge – I hope those are the people that Blizzard is trying to appeal to rather than those who don’t want to put forth any effort into the game and still see all the content.
Obviously if there was a right answer to any of this, Blizzard would have implemented it by now and everyone would be happy.
Just a brief tangent: I’m very casual in my schedule, but I like a good challenge, too. I despise time sinks, though. If there are challenges to be explored, let them be ones of player skill, not of time commitment.
Great article, by the way!
I really love the idea of giving DPS more personal responsibility for the success of the group and accountability for success in general.
And yet.
And yet I remember the pain of trying to find 3 good DPS to do Magister’s Terrace – an instance that basically required 5 good players. I remember how painful it was to do Teron Gorefiend, where if it got THAT GUY you were hosed because they barely knew how to press buttons on their keyboard but could at least do adequate DPS. Or Malygos, which requires the same.
I think you are right that the leaders tend to step up into tank/healer roles; virtually every guild I”ve ever interacted with had the GL and RL as tanks or healers, and our GL recently switched from DPS to healing because he felt he had more of an impact on the raid’s success that way.
I also think that something is a bit overlooked, which is that for the most part many people don’t want to do tanking and healing because it’s simply not as fun as DPS. I don’t entirely agree with that, but I do think that the types of personalities that enjoy tanking and healing are not as common in life as the ones that enjoy DPS.
But as you say – most of it comes down to giving DPS more responsibility. I’d love that, but I’d never PuG again.
As someone who started off playing a hunter to the best of my ability, who then got tired of being talked to like a special Ed student by anyone who had never raided with me, I have to say good DPS is both valuable and rare.
I currently play a tank because of how strangers in the game would treat “dumb dps.” I know the fights, I come up with tactics, and I research my class to continually improve my performance. If I did 10k DPS in every run I would be trying to do 12k, it is just the way I am.
However, that is not common. Most of the DPS I see in the game now just wants to get moar lewtz and does not know anything beyond a single rotation they read on one website. They do not look at mechanics, they often stand in fires, and I am shocked most days to see a DPS targeting my target. This is not a reflection of the requirements of the spec, it is a reflection of a large group of players. If those players try to tank or heal they are yelled at by other similar minded people or actual elitist jerks and are discouraged from taking these single point of failure roles.
I do not believe homogenization is a solution though, I am proud to be a tank, and a good one at that. I was proud to be the most skilled hunter in my guild, possibly on my server.
But what I think really needs to change is the attitude that everyone should see everything. It is a point of pride that I rise to the top in any guild I am in, and always get a raid invite based on my skill as a player. Understand, top level raid invites are a reward for playing well, not something everyone should expect just for paying Blizzard.
I don’t know what the solution is, but for me the pride of succeeding in a difficult role is all the reward I need. As for extra rewards, I’ll take them, but I don’t think they are necessary.
Filidh, I actually see that a lot. Some of the best dpsers in our guild are our current tanks and healers, and we try to run with as few of each, not to run through the fights quicker, but because to add another healer or tank, we would often have to take our #1 or #2 dps off the damage chart, because they are the only ones competent and experienced at tanking or healing. Our 10-mans generally run with two tanks and two heals for that reason — because our run would go from 2tanks, 2heals, 2 good dps and 4 middling dps to 2/3/ 1 good dps and 4 middling dps.
Frankly, if our middling dps was any good at tanking or healing, we would quickly shift them to it. (And we actually just did so last week, when one of our middling dps starting tanking randoms just to get in, and found out he wasn’t bad at it.)
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Re: CC “we have to consider why Blizzard took it out in the first place”
Blizzard didn’t take it out. If you were running 5 mans in late TBC you’ll remember the demand for Paladin tanks. Everyone (at least, every DPS) wanted a Pallie tank for their Mechanar badges… SO THAT THEY WOULDN’T HAVE TO CC!
All Blizzard had done was make the mistake of having one tanking spec with a powerfully scaling AoE ability. I doubt they foresaw where this would lead. Where it did lead was… the direction the players took it.
And when warriors and bears felt left out (and in cases were left out) the mountains of QQ left Blizzard with one of two choices.
1. Nerf Consecrate.
2. Buff the other tank specs with equivalent abilities.
I don’t think you’ll find anyone at the time supported the idea of a consecrate nerf. It would have been a desperately unpopular thing to have done, so the players were given what they wanted.
If you think that DPS want a challenge, find an undergeared tank and healer to do a few random heroics with and count up in one column the number of DPS who leap at the chance to organize some CC (everyone can mark in 5 mans, and all DPS classes have CC now), and in the other column the number who criticise, bitch, throw abuse, or drop group (or even just plod on wipe after wipe after wipe). What do you think the ratios between the columns will be?
This is not Blizzards choice. This is the choice of players. Players CC’d when they didn’t have a choice. Now they do and overwhelmingly they choose to AoE faceroll. The only way Blizzard can make players CC again is by removing the choice. Which, as before, would be a desperately unpopular move.
It would need a combination of nerfs to AoE tanking ablities as well as nerfs to tank suvivability and healing output. It would lead to wipe-free 5 man pugs becoming a rarity again. It would be the most unpopular thing Blizzard would ever have done to the game.
It is definitely difficult balance the wishes of the players against having an interesting and challenging game. Blizzard has been listening the players, promoting the faceroll-through-heroics tactic, and even nerfing the heroics when players QQ. This has resulted in the current state we’re in – DPS are undervalued, and easily carried. The question is, how far should Blizzard really go when listening to the complaints of the players? Will they continously make the game easier and easier? I never said that all DPS want a challenge – I’m sure that most of them don’t, because they like how “easy” their role has become. In the long run though, is this good for the game? I hope that they will find some way for DPS to be a more important role, whether it is CC or something else.
I’m all for periodically wiping on 5-mans if it means having to play with some sort of strategy. Right now, it’s run through trash, consecrate, volley, blizzard, mind sear, bladestorm, etc..move to the next pack, rinse and repeat.
Completing heroic Shattered Halls felt like an accomplishment. Completing heroic UK feels tedious and players get disappointed if it’s not finished in 15 minutes.
Even before the gear resets, players were completing heroics a week after Wrath was released. QQing about the wonder years, I am.
I think you made a lot of good points in your article and it certainly matches my experience!
I have a level 80 priest. I leveled the priest up shadow and so I am a lot more comfortable with dps on her, though I rarely get a chance to practice as we’re usually more short on healers than ranged dps. I will deliberately queue her for the new heroics as dps though after a few calamitous experiences healing them. I know I am a good healer, but they’re not easy instances and I was sick of getting blamed for people dying if they couldn’t get out of the aoe damage, didn’t know to cleanse stacks on Garfrost, and or bitched about not getting healed on HoR when I was out of mana and desperately trying to keep the tank up, etc. It’s not that dps is easier necessarily (actually, I find it challenging b/c I’m not used to it), but it is less stressful in a group. My dps isn’t amazing, but it’s respectable, and I don’t get the grief.
My shaman is a healer too, and I play her as dps less because I’m not used to it. I leveled her as enhancement, then switched her to elemental dualspec because of the gear overlap. But I honestly don’t know a lot about how to be a *good* elemental shaman, and I am usually always healing on her so I haven’t had the opportunity to learn.
It’s always disappointing to me when healers get blamed immediately. I’m always scared of that happening when I jump into LFG on my shaman, but so far it hasn’t happened yet (I even got a compliment once). Some people are just rude in general and will blame anyone but themselves for a wipe, and unfortunately the healer is an easy target. The nice thing is, if a group sucks you can leave and get into another one quickly. This is still rough though for those of us who tend to take the insults too personally. The fear of insults definitely keeps a lot of good healers and tanks out of the LFG tool.
I only heal PUGs if I know I’m going to be at the top of my game and not distracted, otherwise I go elemental. I’m not really a *good* elemental shaman either, as I’m not entirely comfortable with ranged DPS, and my gear is mostly just resto gear with some hit added. My DPS is definitely sufficient for heroics but I know I have a lot to learn. Planet of the Hats is a fantastic elemental shaman blog btw.
Thanks so much for the blog rec! I will have to take a look at it!
I think one of the reason I get stressed is I tend to take people dying very personally! If it’s obvious there’s a problem, I can let go, but I’m a perfectionist and I like to make sure everyone stays alive to the best of my abilities. Not a bad quality for a healer, but it can be a little rough in PUGs without backup!
I’ve never been criticized for my healing in a pug, but if I ever am, I’m leaving immediately. If I can effectively 2-heal ICC-10, and make healing assignments up through ICC-25, I can sure as hell heal a pug. So if people are dying in a pug, it’s not due to a problem with healing.
I think we can discuss this all day (great post btw) but the essence boils down to again supply and demand. When you are over-supplied (dps roles), you are generally treated like shit. And you would have to be exception to raise to the top. Of the top of my head i know only a handful of friends that are great, skilled dps players. The rest of them are facerolling monkeys. Lets face it, you just dont need much skill to play a dps char at the min level, especially now that CC is out the window.
On the other hand, it takes a little more to be a healer, and bit more than that to be a good tank. None of the roles are hard, I heal alot as a druid and i tank alot as a DK, and dps alot as a hunter. None of this stuff is hard in heroics.
Raid encounters usually are fun because they stress one or more of the roles at the same time. For example saurfang is all about the dps, they have a critical role. The tanks and heals just sit there. I can go on and on, but you get the point. Raids are fun for the little tricks they do, and some encounters are all about the heals (i raid as a healer), so they are particularly fun/challenging for me.
Anyway, since there are so many dps and so damn few tanks, I really think the tank should get extra, maybe more money in loot (to offset the repair costs). I am remembering my AN run when the dps insisted on killed just 3 bosses, and I insisted on killed the full 5 bosses. As the tank and party leader I felt I had that right. However they booted me
It was a horrid group to be sure and I was glad to get out of there (i was doing the most dps, for example).
But it’s not like anything we say is going to make a damn bit of difference. People still are going to be jerks in LFG because they can. Maybe I was a jerk to insist on the 5 bosses, idk. However I at least will think about and modify my behavior and I can guarantee that the terrible dps that I had to put up with won’t. They are far too immature for that.
I think nowadays LFG is just getting poisonous, the kids have come out in full force and its just a pain in the ass. Maybe I should have a age check like ‘where were you when JFK died’.
“my gear is mostly just resto gear with some hit added.”
Well yeah, that’s basically the only difference: swap MP5 for Hit and you’re good to go
(apart from tier set bonus stuff obv).
Rob: I guess you mean Old Kingdom? I tanked that for the first time the other day on my up-and-coming frost DK tank and it was horrible. To be fair it was partly my fault things kept going wrong (bad pulls), but having a healer who seemed to be half asleep didn’t help.
Then there was VH, wherein another DK kept taunting the mobs, deathgripping them away from me, putting DnD down under the portals before I’d even put mine down (I tend to group-pull with HB anyway), all this despite repeated requests not to do so. After the 3rd wipe on Xevoss (is that his name? The dude with the shiny balls of light the DPS need to not stand in) he left. After that, we finished the instance with no more wipes.
Oh and tanking in Gundrak normal. Bunch of level 76s and an 80 priest. “We’ll be fine!” thinks I. The heals seem a bit slow in coming. WTF, he’s spamming Prayer of Healing when only 1 person has taken any significant damage. I check his talents. 71 points in Holy, because apparently he “can heal better that way”.
Or DtK with a couple of ele shaman alts twinked to the hilts pushing me forward and pulling stuff “for” me and generally acting like inconsiderate dicks. Cheers guys.
Er. Not sure what my point was here, except to say tanking is really stressful if you’re new at it. I’m really worried about the kind of abuse I’ll face when I start tanking heroics. I’m cautious by nature and I expect that when I don’t chain pull the entire instance I’ll be booted for being too slow.
One thing I’ve found is it really helps to have a healer friend/guildie you can take along (and talk to on Vent) so you can request that they accidentally forget to heal certain idiot DPSers who for pull aggro. Having them mark stuff helps too as at the moment I’m still finding my tanking feet so one less thing to worry about is good.
Sorry, rant over.