Tanks and Healers and DPSers

Right now, I’m not running a lot of heroics. Or raids, but that’s a complaint for another day. I’ve got five toons at level 80 (druid, warrior, hunter, death knight and priest), and working on my mage, who is up to level 75. My warrior only tanks, my druid and priest only heal, and my death knight is only for DPS. As is my hunter, but you knew that..

They’re all mostly geared. The priest is in the best gear, mostly T10, gear score nearly 6k. Everyone else ranges from 4800ish to 5200ish, and they’ve all done all the heroics, and several raids too. I got them geared by running many, many heroic instances, some days on all five of them. Now I’m mostly trying to get that stupid scorpion trinket on my DPS toons (19 scorpion-less runs so far on my death knight), and my druid needs to go grind out a whole set of feral gear – I’m in denial about that, because I also need more tree gear. Having a hybrid means gearing twice. Which is annoying, and is why I tend to go for single purpose toons.

The game is a different experience from each of these perspectives. I’ve heard lots of comments from people who only play one type of toon. Sometimes they complain they have it rougher than anybody else, or that all people who play X have Y type of personalities, or whatever. Since I play all three, I think I’ve got a few things to say on the subject, so here I go.

DPS

The first rule of DPS is that your position is precarious. There is always another DPS that does more damage per second than you. Also, you are very easy to replace. If you are the 10k DPS rogue you might be a little harder to replace than the 3k DPS death knight, but not much.

This tends to lead to a cut throat, backstabbing mentality among the dps. In a five “man” group there are three of you. In a raid, depending on the encounter, there could be 16 of you. All wanting to prove “look, I have massive numbers, this means I’m the most important DPS here!! If you need to toss someone out, it should be someone other than me!”

You are also expendable, and the healer will sacrifice you to save the tank, or themselves, if it comes to that. If they’re a decent healer anyway. Healers who let the tank die to save the DPS aren’t very good. Which sometimes comes as a shock to the individual DPSer who assumes their life is at least as valuable as those of the other players.

So your game time, as a DPS, once you finally get into a group (it can take 20 minutes through the looking-for-group interface, unless you cultivate friendships with healers and tanks), is spent walking a fine line between trying to top everybody else and getting killed because you cut your margins too close in an attempt to top everybody else.

People are more forgiving of inadequate DPS than they are of bad healers and tanks, assuming they don’t go out of their way to pull player agro. You can stand there in the background wearing your greens and blues, struggling to put out 1k of DPS while the hotshots stomp all over your meager numbers, and people will most likely smile indulgently, and might even offer you sage advice.

Unless, of course, you try to step above your station in virtual life by doing things like ordering people around, or attacking mobs that aren’t being tanked. Then you can expect lots of abuse, as well as getting kicked out of groups, which can result in sitting in the penalty box for half an hour waiting for your debuff can go away so you can stand in line for 20 minutes again.

Eventually you will get to the point where you do good DPS, maybe even the best DPS in your group, which is extremely relative. My death knight has been both highest and lowest DPS on the same evening, depending on who the randomizer selects for my party.

Being a good DPSer in a sea of bad and average ones can definitely put a swagger in your step, and make you more acceptable to impatient and demanding players, such as raiders. They will then expect you to do your marvelous DPS while dancing out of fire, void spots, poison novae, frost waves and other hazardous things (and competing with other DPS who can do all of that while doing more DPS than you).

The game is centered around DPS players, so you’ll have a comparatively easy time doing all the PVE chores required for raiding, such as earning enough gold from daily quests for your repair bills. You’re the average guy, the cog that makes the wheels turn, the face in the crowd, distinguished only by your skill and gear (and possibly by whether you can make reliably funny wisecracks, or whether you chose an annoying name for your toon).

Healers

Healers are the reactive role. Reactive means that what you do depends mostly on what the other players do. If they choose to go stand somewhere dangerous with monsters biting at their ankles, you get to follow them, while repeatedly casting spells that basically boiled down to “that didn’t happen.” Battleaxe swing at the tank’s head? Didn’t happen. Mage took an arrow to the chest? Nope, not today. Hunter pulled agro and forgot how to feign death? Well, it all depends on how much you like that hunter. Maybe it did happen, actually.

As the healer, it’s all up to you. But before you get drunk with your mad power to control the game, consider the flip side of the equation: anything other than success is probably your fault. Maybe it is your fault, as in “oops, gave the tank a stamina buff rather than a heal.” Too bad, everyone will die and blame you. Maybe it’s not, as in “hey, where did everybody go while I was replenishing my mana?” Too bad, they’ll still die, and still blame you.

Healers don’t normally get a lot of respect despite controlling the game, mainly because it’s always their fault when something goes wrong. It also could be that “reactive” part. Proactively charging into mobs, like the tank does, is manly, and brave, and assertive. Reactively casting “that didn’t happen” is feminine, and weak, and cowardly. Don’t blame me for those stereotypes, I didn’t make them up, and I don’t really like them either. The player base, which is not very sensitive toward individual feelings, has decided that healing is somehow equivalent to “mom, could you follow me around and make sure nothing harms me while I play my video game?” It’s very typical to encounter couples where the guy tanks while his girlfriend follows him around keeping him alive. It is not at all typical to find a role reversal, where she tanks while he stands in the background patching things up. Maybe it has to do with that reactive versus proactive thing.

The healer game can look a lot different from the game everybody else is playing. They’re all facing down a bloodthirsty ogre or a fearsome dragon. You’re staring at a bunch of health bars, trying to figure which button to hit to keep them all approximately the same length. I’ve heard it compared to tetris, or whack-a-mole. Sometimes you get what’s called tunnel vision, where you’re so busy staring at those bars that you don’t notice the dragon is munching on your leg. Then everyone will die (and it’s your fault).

Most of the time it takes a healer two or three minutes to find a group. Usually you will be appreciated by your fellow players, unless you develop a reputation for constantly healing things where everyone dies (which might not be your fault, but if you continue to hang around with people who fail hard enough to get a bad reputation, not ditching them to find more competent friends is probably your fault).

Being an undergeared healer is playing the game on hard mode, unless your tank and DPS are overgeared enough to make your life less difficult. I’ve had situations where the game moves away from being “exciting, adrenalin-packed adventure” to “incredibly stressful exercise in rationing your magical healing powers among deranged suicidal noobs constantly flinging themselves into mortal peril.” Especially if you get into a raid full of tanks and DPS that have no idea how to play healers, and assign too many targets, or make you responsible for conflicting emergencies. Being an overgeared healer means you have to spam fewer buttons, and can sometimes even watch the fight rather than the health bars.

Tanks

Tanks are the most valuable players in the game. I know this is true because when my tank enters LFG, I get a group instantly. Not only that, but they all defer to me, and expect me to lead them. They sit there patiently waiting for me to start the action, and then they all work together to give me the illusion that I’m soloing everything, by healing all my damage and covering up my weak DPS.

In return, I have to scoop up all the mobs and get them to stand in the same place, focusing on me. This is harder than it looks, unless you’re a paladin with your magical “look at me, everybody!” spell. I tank with a warrior, who has to do a little more work yelling insults while stomping my feet in a fit of pique. And sometimes the mobs insist on going for healers (especially if they start healing me before I attract the mobs’ attention) or DPS (especially if they are also pretending they’re soloing everything and took a potshot at mob C while I was busy yelling at mobs A and B).

I’m also expected to know everything when I play a tank. DPSers and healers just basically follow me around, helping me with whatever I attack. Responsibility for knowing where to go, what to hit, and what (if any) unusual things they’ll do when hit is all mine. Yes, yes, all tanks go through encounters for the first time, but most players are in denial about that. The tank is the de facto leader. Before the recent patch that let everybody mark mobs, party leadership (as well as control of loot, and kicking people out) was automatically handed over to the tank, as soon as one joined.

This could have something to do with the reason why tanks are comparatively rare. Hardly anybody wants that burden. And not only that, but tanks are absolutely required to know enough number crunching to assure they never get hit with a critical strike, and to gear themselves to prevent that from ever happening. This takes some knowledge, and investment of time and money. I used to compare gearing my tank to restoring an obscure sports car that you only drive on weekends. You aren’t going to want it for everyday use, because repair costs are huge and it’s not that versatile.

Although you can play a tank every day, and usually find a group, or even a guild, without any trouble at all. The repair bills still cost, oh, over a hundred gold if you get completely red. Which means that most tanks end up being elitists to some extent. Unless you like spending a fortune to have the dents removed from your shield after dying twenty or thirty raid deaths because your pals are playing like people whose repair bills are much smaller. It’s easy to find a group; what’s hard is finding a group that will make your life easier (by healing and DPSing you through encounters where you can find even better tank gear, without failing).

Griefing and Abuse

Many mono-role players like to whine about how their role is the hardest, because you run into asshats all the time. I can vouch that all three roles attract asshats, but they don’t all inspire the same kinds.

Tanks are vexed by healers that don’t, as well as DPS that try to steal their agro. As tank, all the agro rightfully belongs to me, and if some upstart DPS thinks they can share my burden, they’ll probably die, with the healer laughing at them. Many DPS don’t understand this and think your job is to follow them around distracting the mobs they annoy.

Healers are vexed by tanks that go too fast, or too slow. Pally tanks in particular have a super speed buff that allows them to zip out of range and get mortally wounded while you’re still scurrying over to assist. Some healers get mad when tanks refuse to slow down and let them replenish their mana. Not me, I’m usually overgeared, plus I’m accustomed to playing with maniacs, so I’ll be dispatching shadowfiends or replenishing myself or sneaking a hit of leftover eggnog during my .37 seconds of downtime. When I was undergeared, though, I needed to replenish, and I used to get pretty cheesed when tanks failed to take that under consideration.

DPS just want to win and get the prize, and tend to resent anybody who adds additional slowness or thought to the process. Especially DPS with suboptimal numbers who facepull mobs. For some reason, a DPS player is usually sassier when inexperienced. Although good DPS can be pretty saucy too, especially if the tank is undergeared and can’t hold agro over their eleventy-k onslaught or if the healer is undergeared and having a hard time keeping the tank going without sacrificing some of the more careless DPS.

“Your class is easy!”

Meh, if you want a really complicated game, WoW might not be your cup of tea. But as far as WoW goes, being a healer is the hardest. Until you’re overgeared, and your job consists of hitting F2 every thirty seconds.

Being a tank is also the hardest (especially a warrior tank, which can involve hitting several buttons, as opposed to pallies and bears, which only have to hit a few) because you have to find special gear, learn how to herd mobs and then find a guild that is desperate enough to let you tank while still being skilled enough to avoid death most of the time.

And being a DPS is really hard, because you have to convince people to let you into their raid and not the thousands of other DPS whose numbers are just as good as yours (although actually playing the game as a DPS is easysauce). Then you have to negotiate with all the other DPS egos while outperforming at least some of them, without alienating the healer or the tank.