My greatest strength is knowing my weaknesses

My warrior is different than my friend's warlock. This might seem like a rather basic and unimportant statement to a lot of people, especially those reading a WoW blog, but examine it further to draw some conclusions:

1. The way I approach encounters will be different

2. The way I approach the game will be different

3. I can do things my friend's warlock cannot

4. My friend's warlock can do things I cannot

Okay, so now we're a little deeper. The underlying premise of different classes is that the game becomes a different experience. When you play a game that's forced with one-on-one direct combat, versus indirect combat, the stress is changed a lot. You have to actually walk to to an enemy and shout in their face, while on a warlock you can just sit back and laugh at them making jokes about how they look and smell like a paladin while your pet takes the brunt of it all (and complains rightly so).

So what am I getting at?

Ghostcrawler tweeted this the other day:

I kinda wish that he'd have gone into a bit more detail or posted an entire blog topic on it, since it really gets at the base of what an RPG is. The way that the classes interact with each other is not done by happenstance, even in Classic WoW. It's all intentional. Where one class has a strength, another will have a weakness.

What makes things confusing though, and what I think El Crab could have gone into more, is the fact that these weaknesses are often not a binary thing. You don't either have great movement abilities or not. For instance I think that my monk has really amazing movement abilities with roll -- I can get out of a jam more or less instantly. It's my opinion (and just that, mind you) that this is a better movement ability than the warlock's portals or teleportation. I have to plan my escape route with those, and escape is something that I feel I can rarely plan for. Nonetheless, this isn't just a case where one class has something and the other doesn't, there's a lot of shades of gray (11 shades, if you will).

The important thing to remember is that when comparing and contrasting classes it's important to do so not in a vacuum. Yes the rogue might have more burst damage, but the warlock has higher long term damage. My warrior might not have as good movement abilities as my warlock, but my warrior can take a fist to the face without doubling over in pain and screaming.

To take your game to the next level you need to understand not only your class, but your teammate's class as well. Learning what their strengths and weaknesses are will help in every aspect of the game, be it PvE, PvP, or hanging around Stormwind showing off.