Monday, October 4, 2010

Fail DPS makes my game more fun.

The current player mentality in WoW's endgame is unfairly biased to place responsibility on the tank and healer. The tank is responsible for holding aggro on all mobs at all times, and the healer is responsible for healing any and all damage no matter how preventable. I tend to think that this type of mentality is partially responsible for the shortage of people willing to play these roles -- some people either do not have the capabilities or simply lack the drive to develop them from scratch in a sink-or-swim situation with people who shouting things like “ur a fail tank y did i get agro u nub”.

I’ve come to realise something just at this moment -- I like it this way. Not as DPS, obviously; I already know how to target an AoE spell and doing it for the five-millionth time is not my idea of fun gameplay. But as a tank, this is brilliant. You need to use all the tools you have to control the whole playing field at once. As a healer, this is brilliant. You’ve got people who couldn’t take more damage if they tried and you’re the one who has to save them from death. When the DPS drops the ball, I'm forced to jump back and forth to keep it in the air, and this creates fun gameplay for me.

So now I’m filled with mixed feelings. I suppose at least playing DPS is going to be interesting again. And for that matter the healing game promises to require a lot more thought so it wont be so monotonous. But we’ll have to wait and see whether the changes in the tanking game are going to make tanking necessarily more fun, or just easier.

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