We often post about the bonds created with this game -- there are some terrific bonds between guildies, and Arena teams and battleground groups have some strong bonds as well. But Omen of Clarity and Resto4Life, two great Druid blogs, recently took a look at an even more intimate bond ingame: that between tanks and healers.
Omen started it off -- after stepping into a tanking role, he noticed that a certain Paladin healer had really bonded with him in terms of keeping each other up and running, and it really made them both better players -- the tank was more willing to step up when aggro got lost, and the healer had more reason to keep up buffs and rely on the tank, even at his own expense. Resto, from the other side of the spells, agrees -- even out of raids, the healer there will send the tank potions and go out of their way to keep both together. And from my time raiding as a Resto Shaman, I was always thrilled when I got to be in the same group as the tank I was healing, and got to Earth Shield them and spend my trinkets just to keep them up.
It's not the only major relationship in the game (there's also a nice relationship between the tank and the rest of the melee and DPS, as well as the buffers and the buffed in a raid group), but it is an interesting, minute one, and it's something pretty specific to these MMOs that we play. Playing together isn't just fun and games -- by building bonds with other players in other roles, we both become better at the roles we play.
Update: Just in case, like Ratshag, our little hint on the picture wasn't enough for you, the two characters in the pic above are another fairly well-known tank and healer combo, Tree of Life and Pretty in Plate. You try to hide a subtle little easter egg in there for those of us who read all these WoW blogs, and Ratshag won't let you get away with it. Thanks for keeping us honest.
It seems like far too often we take the contributions of our fellow players for granted.Whether that happens when moments are tense or we forget that the other four people in our instance (or 24 people in our raid) are real folks, Bellwether of Dark iron set out to change that on the official forums today.She posted a well considered list of the roles that everyone should be thanked for in the game, just for doing their jobs.Here are some of her comments:
To Warriors:
Thank you for standing in front of me and letting things hit you.
Thank you for shouldering the massive repair bills that come with your job.
Thank you for preventing my death.
To Shamans:
Thank you for every single totem.
Thank you for Brain Heals.
Thank you for Ankh and saving us from having to run back
Most players choose their role based on what they want to do the most -- if you like playing as a ranged character, Hunter is probably a good choice, while being a Rogue will let you sneak around. But if playing in groups is your thing, says GoW, then you should aim for one of those roles that groups want: healer or tank. That's one reason I personally chose a resto Shaman -- everybody always needs a good healer and/or tank, and with a Shaman, I can fill that role, or go off and do my own thing as well.
GoW compares it to being a woman at an engineering school, where you've got your pick of the 1:6 girl/guy ratio (my alma mater, fortunately, had odds stacked slightly the other way). But other than the hot engineering sex, the point is a good one: if you're on a realm suffering from a lack of tanks and healers and you want to group up, why not fix things yourself and roll up one or the other?
In the last two weeks we've discussed where to go for an instance and what to do once you get there.Since dungeon runs usually require five members, this week we'll talk about how to find people to go with you.Remember that the typical instance group is made up of a tank, a healer, and three DPS members.It's not always easy to find people that match those requirements.
Since there is a shortage of tanks, it's probably easiest for tank classes to find a group.That also means it's hardest if you are not a tank to find someone to play that role.The next most difficult is a healer.There's usually plenty of DPS to go around.It can take some time to make a group, but since dungeons provide excellent loot and good experience it's usually worthwhile to stick with it.
Last week on WoW Rookie, I showed you the instances you might want to run in your first forty levels.This week, I'd like to tell you more about what to do when you get there.As you level up, playing your intended role becomes more and more important. There are three (or four depending on who you ask) main roles in an instance: tank, heals, damage (dps), and crowd control (cc).The typical instance team includes a tank, a healer, and three dps/cc characters.Read on for more about these specific roles.
Josh had his leadership role in WoW pop into his mind during a job interview, and he channeled that into an interesting little article about how to convert WoW roles into the roles people play around the office. I think he's really got something here-- stay tuned for how you can buy a ticket to his "Management, Azeroth-style" seminar, which will teach you and your staff how to tackle even the hardest raid bosses projects.
We've heard quite a few times before that WoW can help you on the job, but I don't know that I've ever seen the roles detailed so clearly. Josh says the Main Tank is the outside communications person for the project, and fends off managers and other departments to make sure members can get their jobs done. The Main Healer keeps motivation up rather than hit points, and make sure everyone stays on task and working. And the DPS are the meat of the project, doing the day-to-day damage to accomplish objectives. The idea works pretty darn well, actually-- at least until your project manager starts taunting the CEO and your senior producer stays up late one night and catches aggro. But definitely an interesting read if you've ever been given the task of running a team of people, in or out of game.
Of course, there's such a thing as overconfidence, and I'm sure that we've all met those players who go well beyond overconfidence and into full-bore cocky arrogance, but it's still the case that as we play the game we have those little epiphanies where a new understanding of how to use all of those expensive to train abilities blossoms. It's a fantastic feeling, that sense of pulling out a victory when failure would have been your reward before, of figuring out that proper combination of intervene - intimidating shout - thunderclap to save your healer or managing to walk out of a six mob train in one piece for the first time. It signifies the beginnings of true mastery of a class, when you suss out for yourself how to best make use of all the options available to you.
One of the reasons I'm so addicted to playing Warriors (and I'm not alone, it seems, as this post from Mike brought to my attention) is that I got to have that feeling multiple times, once with each spec/character I leveled to 70. It moved me from a diffident tank to one who would willingly try and tank any mob in the game, knowing that my skills were up to the task. Similarly, I've had that sensation of 'Ah, that is how a shaman kills three mobs aggroing at once' as well as 'Do not die on me... I love you, Nature's Swiftness' by leveling my two shamans, and even my tiny ret/prot pally has given me that sense of wonder and accomplishment recently by being the hero on a Archaedas kill.
Now is when we turn to you, gentle (and not so gentle) readers: have you had a breakthrough while playing that revealed a whole new facet of your character? Done what you would have believed impossible, saved the day, or just learned something new about your class? Felt like you took a step towards mastering the playstyle or even just figured out that an ability actually did something cool? The comments await you.
This week on Ask WoW Insider, we've got an interesting question about how to get along with PuGs in game. As you might already know, in patch 2.3, players will be able to see everyone else's spec simply via the Inspect screen without leaving the game. This information has already been available on the Armory, but in 2.3, it'll be just one click away. And that's got reader Mylittleponykiller worried:
Hello. I play an MS warrior, currently specced for PvP, but I also tank for pugs in non-Heroics and offtank in Karazhan when needed. I do a fine job, and often on the journey from 1-69.99 I was mistaken for Prot when I tanked instances (as Fury). However, in 2.3 I know that I will get kicked out of/not invited to PuGs if I am not Prot. I have spent hundreds of gold and many hours getting geared to tank and to DPS, and now it seems half of that might just go to waste. What can I do to prevent this from happening or at least prove myself as a tank to PuGs (even though I have over and over again)?
Interesting question. First of all, readers, would you kick a warrior out of the group if he was there to tank and not specced Prot? When you have the ability to see someone's spec at a click, will you use that information to determine what other players can and can't do in your groups?
And if so, what can those other players do to "prove" that they can tank, or main heal, or do DPS? If you are going to make judgments based solely on spec, what can "offspecs" (haven't heard that word in a while!) like Mlpk do to "prove" that they can fill their roles?
Blizzard says we do, and it's an old standard of the MMO genre that someone stands up front and annoys the monster into hitting him, so that healing can be concentrated and DPS doesn't have to take a beating that would likely kill it. But do we really need tanks, or should the game move away from emphasis on the tanking/DPS/healing troika?
Everyone in the game can DPS and many choose to: DPS classes seem to be the most popular. We could debate why all day, but at the end whether it's 'big number syndrome' or it comes from a desire to feel more like you're actually hurting the monster than simply poking it with a sharp stick and calling it names (or any other reason) the facts remain clear. Now, removing tanking from the game would mean many, many changes. Healing would have to become much more dynamic and would need the ability to either switch targets more rapidly or more area of effect utility. DPSers would need to be able to take more of a beating, making the cloth DPSers more vulnerable. Raids encounters would in many cases have to be entirely rethought.
As someone who spends about 75% of my time in World of Warcraft tanking, it would be a big change for me. I'm PvPing more and more now than I used to (especially now that there's actual, honest to murgatroyd players standing in my way in AV... I spent an hour in one match today crawling up to that flag over hunter bodies, it felt like) but I still tank and frankly enjoy tanking when I'm with a good group. I don't think I would like to lose that role from the game, even if I do sometimes wish I'd rolled a mage or warlock instead.
Generally my answer to the question is yes. Not only do I personally like tanking, but I think the game has been designed and has evolved around the tanking idea: the paradigm shift would require too much alteration to the game at this point. What do you guys think? Should WoW move away from the three role mindset or should we keep on tanking?
It occurred to me the other day that something I would never have understood before has, thanks to WoW, become part of how I think about gaming, to the point that I instantly recognized it when I heard that the new version of D&D is basically copying it - I'm talking about the role a character plays in a party or raid.
Before WoW, I played a lot of pen and paper RPG's, and the one thing that always stayed the same about them when compared to games like World of Warcraft or its MMO antecedents is that, in most pen and paper games, there is no mechanism for roles like 'tank' or 'dps'. There would usually be a healer of some kind or another, but in a tabletop RPG no one cares if the strongest melee combatant in the party is a holy paladin, a brutal sword-swinging warrior or a stealthy rogue, and whether or not any of them did more damage to the monster than, say, the wizard would be totally irrelevant. There was certainly no mechanism in the rules to keep a monster or monsters attention fixed on the guy with the most health or armor, either. So when I first started playing WoW I had no idea that my first character, a paladin, would be asked to heal people nor what 'tanking' even was. And since I was playing it at the time it first came out with other folks new to the game, no one bothered to explain to me what tanking was because none of my friends knew, either.
It wasn't until my first Scarlet Monastery run that I even realized I was supposed to do something there besides just hit things. Now, MMO's like WoW are so popular that the oldest pen and paper RPG is trying to learn from them, including incorporating how the various classes work in combat to some degree. It's all gone full circle, I guess - the first MMO's seemed determined to be D&D, and now D&D is becoming more like an MMO.
Did you immediately understand what you would be expected to do in a party? Did you accept it or reject it? And do you think it will translate into offline play? I went out and bought every book for the World of Warcraft Roleplaying Game but I never tried to actually run it... maybe I was just behind the times.
Welcome to Shifting Perspectives! This is a new feature here on WoW Insider, which will bring you various perspectives on shifting forms as a druid, from David Bowers one week, and Dan O'Halloran the next.
I'm here kick off our little druid feature for this week with a simple pair of questions to answer: "Is playing a druid fun?" and "should I play a druid?" I reply to both with a resounding yes, of course. "But why?" you ask. "What has the Druid class got to offer me that other, so-called 'superior classes' haven't got?" The answer is, naturally, everything! Well mostly everything.
You see, more than any other class, druids have such a variety of abilities and can specialize in these abilities to such a degree that there are many very different play styles available to each druid player. The Druid is the ultimate class for the player who wants to tank sometimes, stealth and kill sometimes, heal sometimes, and then sit back and nuke things from a distance for a few months in order to get a change of pace. A druid can alternately be very good at healing, tanking, dealing up-close melee damage, or dealing far-away nuking damage, filling the roles of a priest, warrior, rogue or mage -- all in one class!
We often post about the bonds created with this game -- there are some terrific bonds between guildies, and Arena teams and battleground groups have some strong bonds as well. But Omen of Clarity and Resto4Life, two great Druid blogs, recently took a look at an even more intimate bond ingame: that between tanks and healers.
It seems like far too often we take the contributions of our fellow players for granted.
Why wouldn't you want to have hot engineer sex? That's the point made over at "Groups of Words" in 
Josh had his leadership role in WoW pop into his mind during a job interview, and he channeled that into an interesting little article about 
Of course, there's such a thing as 
This week on Ask WoW Insider, we've got an interesting question about how to get along with PuGs in game. As you might already know, in 
Do we need tanks?
It occurred to me the other day that something I would never have understood before has, thanks to WoW, become part of how I think about gaming, to the point that I instantly recognized it when I heard that the new version of 
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