Answering Crygil’s “Test”

Just yesterday Blizzard poster Crygil posted a series of questions for the World of Warcraft community to answer. It’s an interesting way to get some feedback about what people think of the game straight from the people who play it. It’s become quite popular already with pages and pages of responses. The question posted is as follows:

crygil's test

It’s commonly held that there are three or four main segments of the game: Ranged/Melee DPS, Tanking and Healing. What does that mean to you and what defines each role in your mind? If you had to break down each class, and section it into its most appropriate area, where would you place them? After hashing that out, which segment do you fall into and why do you enjoy playing in that segment?

It’s actually not very clear exactly what kind of answer he wants from us even if he expounded on it later in the thread. Anyway, I’ll try my best to give a good answer for my case.

What each role means to me

DPS

To me the essence of the dps role is fairly simple. It means putting out the most damage you can possibly can without pulling threat from the tank. Whether you’re melee or ranged, this is your job. Now generally being ranged dps means you’re more squishy than melee dps. This is the balancing factor since you have the luxury of being away from your target. While there are some fights in the game that can very well be done with just a tank and a healer keeping him alive, it becomes evident that the dps role is also very important. Not having your dps or even not having enough dps could mean disaster since not only will the fight take too long but this length could be taxing on the healers and their mana. DPS makes the fight faster and in the case of bosses with enrage timers, we know that faster is good!

Tank

For me the tanking role has been something I’m not very familiar with. I have always wanted to have a tank but I found out the hard way that tanking doesn’t love me. So what I know about tanking is purely from reading and watching other people do it. The essence of tanking is to keep his/her target(s) away from the rest of the group. That’s really all there is to it. He does this by generating more threat than everyone else. there’s another aspect to tanking but to me it’s not it the essence of the role but a consequence. Mitigation only important for tanks because a dead tank cannot hold threat and taking too much damage can be taxing to the healers. But there’s something else to tanks that separates good tanks from bad ones – mastery of the fight. Knowing that you need to kite a boss to an area of the room, knowing that you need interrupt something, knowing that you need to pop a cooldown to survive that attack – these are things that not all tanks really know how to do but when you see a tank do these things it makes the job easier.

Healer

The essence of healing is to keep everyone alive especially the tank. The healer has to manage his/her mana to make sure that a heal can be cast when its needed. It’s an art of anticipation and reaction and knowing which heal is best for a certain situation. There isn’t much more to it but it’s more complicated than it sounds.

Breakdown of classes

In today’s WoW it difficult to pigeon hole all classes to a certain role since all specs are viable. The only way to do this would be to go back in time to the days of vanilla WoW and see how the devs designed each class for the raiding environment. For example, all druids were pretty much forced to go restoration and heal if they wanted to raid. I would have to make an exception for the paladin. While paladins were pretty much healers in vanilla wow, their emergence into tanking now really fits my view of them. While DK’s can tank just as well as others, my primary view of them are as DPS especially when seeing their ghoul companion and their big two-hander.

Tank – Warrior, Paladin
Healer – Shaman, Priest, Druid
DPS – everyone else

What role do I fit into?

I used to think I was dps all the way, with my mage being my main from vanilla wow to mid-TBC. But after trying out healing, it’s become a sort of obsession. I actually found that healing can actually be a relaxing change of pace at times. I also have this feeling that I’m helping out more when I’m healing. It seems to me like even if you’re not the best healer in the raid, your presence actually helps someone more than if you were dps and didn’t do much damage. Of course being a healer gets you into groups more and that’s definitely a great plus.