Tuesday, March 3, 2009

Viral blogging?

Is that the description of what happens when one blogger reads someone else's blog and posts about it then another blogger reads *that* blog and does the same?

Well whatever it's called, that's what I do quite often and I'm doing it today. From Forever a Noob to Tobold to me. And perhaps it went back farther than that, but I didn't check. Today's discussion is about dual-specs.

At Forever a Noob, the blogger, who has a rogue wants rogues and mages - and I assume hunters - to have the ability to tank and/or heal. What I find quite amusing about this is the last thing many dps would want is the ability to tank or heal. Heal themselves, oh sure! But to be asked to tank (lead) and instance, or stand back and heal noobs? Yeah, be careful what you ask for!

And I would wager, as easy as healing is, they would be horrible at it. Not because they can't handle it, but because I've heard time and time again players say healing is the most boring thing ever to them. I obviously don't mind it, but that's me.

I only know of a handful of players who are able to do a variety of roles well. And out of that group even fewer have the time or access to gear themselves up appropiately for all roles. Yeah dual specs don't give you access to a full set of gear for your second role - you have to do more raiding than the average raider. This is something I lamented literally years ago.

No offense to "skilled" dps, but there is a reason the majority of players are dpsers. You have less responsibility and you can many times get away with being mediocre. Have you grouped with a mediocre tank? Did you look forward to grouping with them again? And good healers getting blamed for a myriad of errors, how do you think a mediocre healer will fare?

So I say give them the specs they are begging for. Which tree branch gets cut is another can of worms.

I'm quickly reminded of death knights. A class fully capable of tanking, yet in my own guild we have 4 raiding death knights and I've only known one to ever tank anything.

2 comments:

Verilazic said...

I agree, but at the same time, I think there are way too few opportunities for a skilled dpser to shine in wow. I got in a heroic AN run on my mage a few weeks back with some players all from the same guild. My gear at the time was sub par for heroics, my dps was a bit lame compared to people in epics. But at the end, they were thanking me for being a great addition to the group, for doing things like pulling adds off the healer, and staying alive to the end (one of the other dpsers didn't move out of the spikes and died half way through the Anub fight).

Just last night, I was in a h-VH run where our best geared dpser d/ced and didn't come back, causing us to wipe on the second boss. We retried with just 4 people and managed to down the first and second bosses again without him. The biggest credit goes to our healer and tank for managing to keep going, but if either of us two dpsers had died or hadn't kept up the dmg, we would've wiped eventually due to our healer running out of mana, or the boss beating his healing out (first boss was the void guy with increasing aoe shadowbolts, we killed him as we all died, and tank dealt the final blow when she was at 1% hp).

Those were cases where everyone had to be on the ball and dps was given the opportunity and credit for bringing their a-game. But those were unusual cases. In the normal situation, you've just got a bunch of people in epics gathering up all the mobs in a pull and aoeing them down. So I'd say that there just simply isn't any reason for dpsers to have to be good atm in WoW. =/

Yane (Yet another night elf) said...

Without a doubt, high dps makes a fight go quicker and for a healer that is always a relief.

A dpser situationally aware requiring less "in the fire" healing also gets points from me!

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