Officers should all have Tanks and Healers

May 31, 2008, last modified on Aug 2, 2008
GoW
world of warcraft

(Related post: Take the Group Role)

The fol­low­ing state­ments are all true for raid­ing guilds:

  • The health of a PvE guild is dic­tated by its abil­ity to progress through the game’s con­tent at the guild’s expected rate.
  • Groups and raids live or die based on being able to assem­ble, launch, and progress. A suc­cess­ful raid has all three roles (tank, heal, dam­age) filled to suf­fi­cient levels.
  • The ratio of tanks/healers/damage in a typ­i­cal suc­cess­ful raid is some­thing like 2÷3÷5.
  • The ratio of tanks/healers/damage in total avail­able, raid-ready play­ers on my server (and I have no rea­son to think this is unique) is along the lines of 2÷3÷25. I just made these num­bers up, but this is what I’ve seen. You can always, always find another damage-person to come along.
  • Offi­cers are invested in their guild’s con­tin­ued exis­tence and success.

The log­i­cal sum of these points is that offi­cers of PvE raid guilds, even casual ones, should take up the roles that are most needed to keep their guild raid­ing, namely tanks and heal­ers. Even if the char­ac­ter is not their main, they should have an alt ready to step into one of these needed roles should some­one decide to retire from the game, lather up with crazy sauce, or just hit the next stop on the pro­gres­sion train.

Your abil­ity to raid, your entire health as a guild, can be brought to a screech­ing halt if a cou­ple key tank/healer roles leave the guild. I’ve seen this hap­pen and have dealt with keep­ing the crip­pled guild afloat after that. It’s ugly, and amaz­ing to see how quickly you can go from healthy and win­ning to despon­dent and bleed­ing members.

“We haven’t raided in for­ever (one week)!” “What about my zomgepics!” “I don’t wanna run the pre­vi­ous endgame just to gear the new tank up, I wanna raid just like we were again! AND I WANT IT NOW!” (It’s really funny to hear grownups speak in these tones. That’s the only upside to guild discomfort.)

Any­one can do dam­age. Extra tanks can do dam­age, extra heal­ers can do dam­age. Maybe not progression-content-role dam­age, but enough to get the group through farm con­tent. Con­versely, extra dam­age deal­ers can only rarely heal, and nearly never tank… at least with­out a unwanted respec.

Offi­cers: roll a healer or tank.

More Words!

3 Comments
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3 Responses

  1. kikidas says:
    May 31, 2008 at 8:28 am

    Or bet­ter yet, roll a healer, a tank and a DPS. This way, you can be ulti­mately flex­i­ble (just call your­self Gumby) and fit any role your group needs.

    It helps if you have altisms dis­ease (or altitis). :)

    Reply
  2. gowwriter says:
    May 31, 2008 at 1:18 pm

    That’s what I do! But I fig­ured that for the offi­cer who doesn’t know to cov­er­ing the group roles for their guild, we’ll start them off easy with just one group-friendly alt.
    Alti­tis is won­der­ful by the way, both the syn­drome and the blog.

    Reply
  3. Frijona says:
    May 31, 2008 at 4:22 pm

    My guild must be rather unusual, because we are often at a loss for DPS. I’ll often log on with tells of, “Fri!! Can you DPS x instance?” I know my GM is lev­el­ing a resto shaman and a prot pally for this rea­son. I also started a Druid that will hope­fully be a viable bear tank at some point (we are at a loss for tanks on occa­sion, which is why I’ve been known to VW tank eas­ier instances–we seem to have a plethora of heal­ers, though). But I’m a slow, slow leveler!

    Our guild has had a pat­tern of 1) a tank shows com­mit­ment and lead­er­ship abil­i­ties 2) we give the tank a lead­er­ship role, and 3) the tank gets frus­trated with our slower pro­gres­sion and goes to a heav­ier raid­ing guild. So, I under­stand hav­ing back­ups, but I’d rather the back­ups be other guild mem­bers who are cur­rently tak­ing an off-tank posi­tion. We have one feral Druid who does quite well with instances, so at this point we’d like to send him on raids as an off-tank and get him geared up so he could take on the MT role if needed. We want to get as many peo­ple who want to raid a chance to raid, which makes us dif­fer­ent from other, heav­ier raid­ing guilds I suppose.

    I’m not sure what the point of my com­ment is!

    Reply

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