Okay, okay, I know my last two blogs have been utter crap. I know it. The good news is that I got my druid to 85 last night (I got the main character that I play to the maximum level that can be achieved) so the caffeine fueled insanity will slow down a bit and I can go back to concentrating on crazy stuff like writing and work and eating. At some point I am going to realize Christmas is coming up, I am excited for that panic to hit me. Anyway, it is my sincere intent to craft a better quality blog for you today.
I think it is important to understand the four different roles that characters can play in the World of Warcrack. Time for one of my awesome rundowns.
Tanks:
These are the guys that stand in front of the group and get hit by shit. Their main jobs are to make sure everything keeps hitting them and staying alive. It sounds simple enough but the problem is that they have to play with other people called dps (more on them next) and dps often feel the need to be dipshits and piss off the monsters and make them hit them instead of the tanks. This means that often tanks have to go chasing after monsters to save someone’s ass.
Now good tanks use spells and abilities to keep themselves alive because they care about not getting yelled at by their healers. Bad tanks don’t use these abilities and die. They generally blame everyone else including God for their own stupidity.
Classes that play tanks: Warriors, Paladins, Druids, and Death Knights (generally poorly)
Melee DPS:
These guys hit shit. Basically their job is to stand behind the monsters and stab, beat, bludgeon, or slice them to death. It sounds very simple but there are many many ways to screw this up. I don’t have much experience with melee since I feel that hitting shit is weird but I can tell from the many fails that melee has caused that this is far more difficult than it seems.
I know that if you don’t know what you are doing you can do too little damage and make everything more difficult on everyone else. I know that if you do too much damage you can make the monster hit you instead of the tank, pissing off both the tank AND the healer. I know that all melee classes have abilities that make fights easier by interrupting or stunning the monsters and sometimes players don’t use these abilities and piss everyone off.
Since melee stand behind the boss (big bad monster or mob) and stab them in the butt, they are often damaged by attacks the boss casts in the area close to them. These attacks are often announced and completely avoidable. Most of the time melee dps chooses to stand in them anyway. Healers and tanks LOVE this.
Classes that can melee dps: Warrior, Paladins, Druids, Shaman, Rogues, and Death Knights (generally badly)
Ranged Dps:
There are two sub classes of ranged DPS; hunters and casters.
Hunters are different from the other ranged dps because they don’t cast magic, they shoot shit. They have pets and traps that either burn things, freeze things, or release a bunch of snakes. They have an ability that makes them play dead.
The rest of the ranged dps cast magic spells to damage mobs. In theory they are supposed to stand away from the monsters and cast spells so they cause damage without taking much damage in return. This is a great theory that doesn’t often happen. Casters are some of the worst about stealing monsters off the tanks. Their spells often make either big numbers when they single target or many numbers when they cast spells that hit many targets (aoe or area of effect spells) so sometimes its hard to resist the temptation to keep seeing those numbers.
Ranged DPS classes: Hunters, Mages, Shaman, Warlocks, Druids, and Priests
Healers:
Healers are the players that attempt to keep other players’ health bars full. We call it “fill the green bars.” Healers are the biggest prima donnas in the game. We have a tendency to get bitchier than even the tanks. There are reasons for this but still we can be cranky assholes.
One thing that makes us cranky is when someone dies and they blame us like when a dps stands in a pool of poison that is also on fire while getting hit by 15 mobs that they pulled because they did not wait for the tank to pick them up and they still think we should heal them through it.
We also have a tendency to develop god complexes. (Tanks have this issue too.) I think its because if we are going to get blamed when everything goes wrong, we think its our fault when things go right too. This is normally only slightly true. We also play a major part in who lives and who dies. Sometimes I can heal that jackwagon who is standing in the flaming poison but I choose not to because I believe in Darwinism.
Like the other three types, there are bad healers. Bad healers are a terrible terrible thing. Healing takes a while to figure out, so in the beginning of something new they have to figure stuff out just like everyone else. Its a learning curve. The problem is that some healers learning curve is a straight line. When you have a bad healer it is just best to drink potions and hope for the best.
Healing Classes: Priests, Paladins, Druids, and Shaman.
Geeks a Geeking