Lethal Shots

A post by Larisa over at the Pink Pigtail Inn brought to my attention a debate floating around about whether or not tanks and healers should be given extra rewards as an incentive to try and solve the shortage of each. The whole discussion was spawned by a guest post by Gordon (of We Fly Spitfires) at World of Matticus and has been followed with articles from several blogs (check Larisa’s article, she linked them well so no need for me to do it again).

And you know what I think on the whole idea? Bullshit. Allow me to explain my reasoning though. Below is a direct quote of Gordon’s article with my thoughts, comments, and rebuttals between the paragraphs.

Tanks and healers are the most important classes for any group. Tanks set the pace of the group, the flow of experience and man the vanguard as they lead the team into battle. Healers mend the broken bones of their companions and keep the tanks a live – without the healers there could be no tanks and there could be no group. These are the two most important classes that exist in any MMORPG. But the DPS? They’re just meat in the room.

What Gordon forgets to take into account is that a group also requires DPS to progress. Simply because DPS are more plentiful does not make the job any less crucial and far more than just “meat in the room”. ¹

Look at it in terms of supply and demand and stress and responsibility. Tanks and healers are in consistent short supply whereas DPS are a dime a dozen. And there’s a reason for that. Tanking isn’t easy and it comes with a lot of pressure and responsibility. Do it right and the group will sing your praises for days to come yet do it badly and you’re on the receiving end of every criticism and jibe. Healing is much the same and also comes with it’s own set of stresses and strains. If the tank dies who gets the blame? Not the DPS classes that didn’t burn the mob down fast enough but the healer who didn’t heal well enough. They carry the heart and soul of the party on their shoulders and all of the difficulties that come with that.

It’s a known fact that tanks and healers are in high demand. And yes, DPS are plentiful. But you can’t gloss over the fact that many DPS can barely faceroll out 1000 on the meter. Good DPS are just as rare as tanks and healers. Also, as DPS I’ve carried my fair share of sub-par tanks and healers though runs. It is amazing how shitty of a tank and/or healer you can run with if you can kill things fast enough. And while I can’t speak for Gordon, I know I have no problem calling out a DPS if they are the source of the problem.

And raiding? That’s even more stressful. Not only do we even already acknowledge the importance of tanks and healers in this situation. We have Main Tanks and even Main Healers but who’s ever heard of a Main DPS before? There’s a huge amount of pressure to do these jobs right. Sub-par DPS can join a raid (even if it’s not desirable) but sub-par tanks cannot tank one and poor healers cannot heal one.

I’m sorry, but that whole paragraph is riddled with inaccuracies and assumptions. Progression raiding is stressful on the whole group, not just the tanks and healers. Everyone has a job, and if one person fails the whole group goes down. Rogue missed an interrupt? Wipe. Not enough DPS to beat the enrage timer? Wipe. A mob not CCed properly? Wipe. See where I’m going with this? And as to the titles of “Main Tank” and “Main Healer”, Gordon is giving way too much prestige to a simple way of saying who tanks the boss, who tanks the adds, and who heals who. And I have heard of a “Main DPS”, but it is more commonly referred to as a Main Assist and is actually a quite important role when it is needed.

All of this stands to reason that tanks and healers should get bigger rewards than anyone else. I mean, it’s in our culture to reward those that do the most and work the hardest, right? Call it a Tank or Healer Bonus, and a well deserved one at that. They are more important and necessary than anyone else, rarer to find, and they’re jobs are a lot tougher and far more stressful. They’re like the mommas and papas of any group, bringing the necessary order and structure. Without a tank there is no group, without a healer there is no group. DPS can just be picked up randomly as required.

I’ve got nothing against DPS. It’s fun and there’s nothing wrong with that but they simply don’t deserve the equality of rewards. Tanks and healer should get a little something extra on the side (maybe a nice ‘Thank You Drop’ from the boss mobs they fell) because they have the hardest and most demanding jobs and are traditionally the slowest to level up (unless you turn them into DPS). They require the most effort and who can argue that as a result they should get the biggest rewards?

Again, full of inaccuracies and assumptions. Just because DPS are more plentiful does not mean they deserve less of a reward than tanks and healers. They are a key part of the group dynamic, the third node of the Holy Trinity if you will. Tanks and Healers with no DPS get nowhere. Gordon claims that healing and tanking are more difficult and stressful. Well, I’ll let you in a little secret: they’re not. I have three end game characters, a Hunter, Resto Shaman, and Death Knight tank. I have filled all three roles in both heroics and raids, and they all carry the same level of difficulty. Anyone can faceroll a DPS class, but you have to be good to earn your raid spot over the rest, paying attention to aggro management, crowd control, etc. Tanking and healing might have a steeper learning curve, but neither are too difficult once you have a little practice and a solid group of players.

Any class that can tank or heal can also DPS. It is a choice made by the player. No one is twisting their arm or holding them at gun point to play that role, they have freely chosen it for their own reasons. There is absolutely no reason to reward that choice other than to try and convince more players to tank or heal. But, while extra rewards may bribe players into filling those roles, it would only create more sub-par tanks and healers hoping to be carried by good DPS.

So far I’m thoroughly impressed with 3.3. I’ve yet to set foot into Icecrown yet (scheduled for Friday night with the guild), but so far I really like what I see. Like every other patch day, it was pretty rocky, slow loading while trying to zone in, lag, intermittent DCs, and pretty much everything else we’ve learned to expect. My initial thoughts:

• Forge of Souls – Short, fun instance. Two quick emblems.
• Pit of Saron – Fucking awesome. What’s better than a shit talking gnome riding a zombie? A gauntlet in an ice tunnel that is literally falling down around you. And the Pit features both.
• Hall of Reflection – Lore wise this one rocks, though it will become rather boring once you have farmed it a while.
• New Dungeon Finder system – Overall it seems to work pretty good. I like being able to teleport to and from instances (huge timesaver). It seemed a little buggy last night, but that may have been due to general server instability.
• Emblem of Frost gear – Have you seen the stats on this stuff? It’s completely insane. I’m decked out in the best ToC-10 had to offer with a smattering of stuff from ToC-25. This stuff blows my current gear out of the water.
• Misdirect – Amazing. This is a huge change. How huge you ask? In a heroic 5-man I was dumping almost 50k threat on my tank with one Misdirect. Now imagine multiple Hunters in a raid all doing it at the same time. Can you say goodbye to aggro problems forever?

That is all I was able to test out last night. Tonight I plan to hit up the Frozen Halls instances some more along with a few random PuGs for fun. So what do you think of 3.3 so far?

When you run an instance, who is the boss of the group? Is it the tank? The healer? One of the DPS? In my experience as a Hunter that role is most often filled by the tank, and if not then it is the healer. It never bothered me. I am more than happy to sit back and just kill things, leaving the details of strategy to others. But last night that all changed.

I was on my Shaman healing Nexus for some friends. By far, I had the most experience running the place (all of it on Santyn). I started the run pretty normal. I just stood in the back and did my best to keep everyone alive. It wasn’t long though before it became different though. We hadn’t even gotten to the first boss before I was telling people how to position for pulls. Then I was calling out CC duties. This was soon followed by me telling kill orders. By the time we got to the third boss I was calling out what abilities for people to use.

It was at that point that it hit me what I was doing. I was telling other people how to play their class. Needless to say the thought made me somewhat uncomfortable. I quickly apologized, and luckily no one was offended (the joys of running with friends).

It seems they were so quick to listen to me because I had so much experience in the instance. They just assumed I knew what I was doing and went along with it. I really should have recognized this since it is what I do when I raid. When the raid leader gives an order, I follow. They are the raid leader for a reason, so I don’t tend to question them.

This was the first time I ever felt like I was in that position. It kind of scares me how naturally I took to ordering my friends around, but I would like to think that in doing so I helped the run end successfully. This is something I will have to keep an eye out for in the future. The last thing I want to do is go to far and piss someone off. But if taking charge leads to a successful run then maybe it is a good thing.

I would love to hear what your thoughts are on this. Or even acounts of similar situations you may have been in.

When is the last time you ran a heroic? No, not for achievements or to help out a friend, but because you actually needed gear and/or badges from it. I haven’t in a quite a while. I’ve even gone so far as to turn down invites besause I would rather level an alt. I don’t need anything from it. All of my upgrades come from raids now, and there is nothing else I need from the Heroism vendor.

This leaves me with very little motivation to run heroics. And I don’t think I’m alone in this. Sure, a lot of people run them for fun, but the only ones that people want to run are the ones I am sick of. Nexus, Utgarde Keep, Violet Hold. Keep them. They’re played out. Now if someone wanted to throw me an invite to Halls of Stone or Halls of Lightning, I might be more interested, but no one ever wants to run them.

So what does that leave us with? A whole bunch of stale content that only gets worse. Blizzard needs to do something to revive 5-man content. Introduce new dungeons. Make a second level of Heroic and offer Valor emblems. Something. I like 5-man content, but something needs to be done to make it more appealing.

At least in TBC there was only one kind of badge and they kept introducing new equipment to buy with it, providing plenty of incentive to keep running Heroics. In Wrath, the Heroism emblem has a very finite usefulness. And now they are talking of introducing a new type of emblem for Uldar, effectively making all of our Heroism and Valor emblems useless.

Heroics may not be dead yet, but they are already in intensive care. If Blizzard doesn’t do something soon, they are going to have a ton of content that isn’t even 6 months old to put on the shelf with old world 5-mans.