Dynamic Duos

One of the great joys of WoW is how couple-friendly it is. My wife and I are suck­ers for some coop­er­a­tive mul­ti­player, and we haven’t looked back since we set up her account. We play together all the time, doing dailies, farm­ing mobs, instanc­ing and raid­ing (although we’re learn­ing that being new par­ents isn’t really con­ducive to raid­ing, so that’s trail­ing off). Also, lev­el­ing alts.

We have some expe­ri­ence lev­el­ing a num­ber of duos.

Druid and Rogue

You want to see two great tastes that taste great together!

The pri­mary bear druid move to gen­er­ate threat puts an effect on that increases bleed dam­age. (Hey, rogues have bleed dam­age!) One of the rogue’s pri­mary abil­i­ties is to stealth. (Hey, druids can stealth too!). If you don’t feel like killing through to a named mob to fin­ish a quest, you just stealth by them. Van­ish plus travel form means that you can both eas­ily escape a fight that goes south. Druids can dps, tank, or heal, so you can change the makeup of your tan­dem at will. You can even go and duo instances by skip­ping mobs. This is the strongest tan­dem I’ve seen in the game, it’s really fun to play.

Pal­adin and Mage/Warlock

Aoe tank­ing, meet aoe damage.

Pally runs in and intro­duces him­self to fifty peo­ple, starts shak­ing hands and smil­ing. Mage/Warlock takes all their infor­ma­tion down and rakes in the cam­paign con­tri­bu­tions. Both are elected to max level soon after.

“Go kill X crit­ters” quests takes on a whole new mean­ing with this combo. “Whee! Let’s go find X critters!”

Melee and Healer

In my case, this was Rogue and Holy Priest.

Rogues can kill pretty fast. Heal­ers, well, enable rogues not have to stop killing… ever. One of the sub­lime joys is enabling my rogue wife to just go on a tear through what­ever con­tent or mobs she wants with­out slow­ing down. Obvi­ously, one of you has to get joy from heal­ing for this to work. Luck­ily, I have an incur­able fas­ci­na­tion with heal­ing, so we’re golden.

(Melee works bet­ter than nuk­ers because melee dam­age doesn’t suf­fer from spell push­back. Nuk­ers have to fin­ish fights before they start get­ting hit, for the most part. And in that case, why do you need a healer?)

Hunter/Warlock and Pet

Kid­ding!

Hon­estly though, it is kind of weird when peo­ple start talk­ing about their in-game pet by name, with obvi­ous emo­tion in their words. I under­stand that your pet was with you through thick and thin as you lev­eled up, but that doesn’t make it a toon of its own.

Raid Lead: “Hey every­one, wel­come to our guild’s first Karazhan.”

Mage: “Woo!”

War­rior: “Yay!”

Hunter: “Me and Fluffy the rap­tor like Karazhan so far!”

(uncom­fort­able silence)

More Words!

• Secret Design of WoW PvE: Solo Per­former vs Group Utility
• WoW Wrath Class Redesign and Reit­em­iza­tion Explained
• Secret Design of WoW PvE: Your role in a PvE raid
• WoW Item­iza­tion Dreams
• Secret Design of WoW PvE: Vari­ety vs Specialization