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Ask WoW Insider: Proving your worth
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?
Should there be Tanks in World of Warcraft?
Do we need tanks?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?
When did you first understand your role?
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.
Shifting Perspectives: How fun is a druid?
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!
