Part 1: Introduction, and a call for comments
Part 2: Solo Difficulty vs Group Difficulty
Part 3: PvE vs PvP
Part 4: Variety vs Specialization
Part 5: Solo Performer vs Group Utility
Conclusion: Your role in a PvE group

If your class can do many things, don’t expect to be unqualified best at any of them.

There are three roles: tank, healer, damage (dps). But really, every class can do damage–you have to be able to put out some kind of damage in order to play the solo game. So it’s really two specialized roles, plus the common role that everyone has. Some classes specialize completely in that common role: hunters, rogues, mages, warlocks. The rest can do multiple things, and this article concerns them.

Now, every class can’t do everything in the game (except druids). That’s part of what makes groups fun. With the correct mix of characters, you can accomplish goals that a group of identical characters couldn’t do alone.

That variety in gameplay that you enjoy in the solo game, the ability to kill mobs and heal and be tough… that entire skill set doesn’t directly translate to your endgame experience. Generally, each of those roles opens up to various niches for you in raids.

Three examples:

• Paladins can heal, tank, and dps. They’ve got all the bases covered! However, each role is not complete and universal coverage of that role. Pallies heal single targets extremely well, but struggle with being stunned and group damage. Pallies tank large groups of mobs extremely well, but struggle at times with raid bosses and caster bosses. Pallies dps well in PvP, but struggle with the continuous high level of damage needed for PvE.
• Rogues do one thing: damage. When built correctly, they can damage in any situation in the game, caster or melee, PvP or PvE. They damage well. They have to, because they don’t tank or heal.
• Priests can heal or damage. Priests are great healers. However, even when they choose to spec and play a damage role, their damage rarely compares with pure damage classes, either in PvP or PvE.

While the best guilds will value a good hybrid player (the druid who can tank or dps, the pally who can tank or offheal), there simply aren’t that many hybrid positions available in raids. Most of the time, you have to excel at one thing, which means largely sacrificing that versatility and embracing your class’s niche. You have to learn to kick butt as much as possible in the one thing you choose to be excellent at.

Here’s where I lift a toast to every restoration druid who has ever received the raid or instance direction:

“The tank’s dead! Tree-man! Go bear form and pick up that boss!”

Tree-man is sitting there thinking,

“I’m wearing a mix of leather and cloth healing gear. The warlock has more health than I do, and I have a pally salvation buff. I do have a tanking set of gear, but it’s trapped in my bag because we’re in combat.

“Bear form is not a Superman cape!”

But Treeman switches anyway, because he’s built for restoration and hardly ever gets to rawr in groups. It’s a more fun way to die.

Part 1: Introduction, and a call for comments
Part 2: Solo Difficulty vs Group Difficulty
Part 3: PvE vs PvP
Part 4: Variety vs Specialization
Part 5: Solo Performer vs Group Utility
Conclusion: Your role in a PvE group

No class is globally better at PvP than every other class. WoW PvP is a huge rock-paper-scissor game, where there’s an answer for every move, or in WoW’s case, Class A always feels overpowered to an opponent of Class B, Class B over Class C, and Class C over Class A. (except expanded out to an 11-way graph) While no class is universally dominant in PvP, some builds are universally better than other builds in that environment.

For example, protection warriors are a PvE tanking spec. They don’t provide a heck of a lot of control or damage, and no healing, to a PvP group. (They do get to annoy casters and melee dps though. Also, reflecting pyroblast back at mage is joy.)

Likewise, a character that is heavily invested in pvp is specialized in abilities that don’t matter in pve, like extreme survivability or crowd control. The extreme survivability doesn’t matter because of the basic nature of PvE: you have an absurd amount of damage coming into points of the raid whose job is not to be instantly killed by it (the tanks), you have people’s whose job it is to keep those people alive (the healers), and then everyone else has to remove the source of that absurd damage (the dps). If your raid’s system breaks down and the boss starts running around the raid and killing non-tanks, your priest or warlock’s improved fear won’t help, your rogue’s cheat death won’t help, your arms warrior’s and paladin’s plate won’t help. Various class’s ability to recover from critical hits doesn’t matter when the boss hits you for four times your maximum health. All those PvP tricks don’t matter.

Running a PvP spec toon in PvE raiding is pedaling uphilll while others are on even ground, and some are rolling downhill. If you’re a PvP spec and are awesome in raids, then congratulations: you are a great player! However, your guild also knows you’re a great player. There are many other people of your spec who are frustrated and confused as to why people pass them up for groups and instances. PvP specced people are even more reliant on having outstanding gear and greater skill than an equally-geared pve spec player in order to do the exact same job in a PvE raid.

This is fair. PvE spec people are less effective in battlegrounds and arena. (Unless by “effective” you mean “easier to kill”, in which case they are much more effective.)

Both ways, the average experience can be overcome with sufficient skill, but given two equal characters played by two equally skilled players, one built for pve and the other built for pvp, with no other variables a raid or group lead is going to take the pve build, because it’s designed to be successful in the content that they want to run.

Part 1: Introduction, and a call for comments
Part 2: Solo Difficulty vs Group Difficulty
Part 3: PvE vs PvP
Part 4: Variety vs Specialization
Part 5: Solo Performer vs Group Utility
Conclusion: Your role in a PvE group

Your ability to solo partially determines the experience you’ll have in groups. If you have an easy time in the leveling game, you are going to have a more difficult experience in the endgame/group game. The following list goes from easy-to-solo to hard-to-solo.

• Hunters are the easiest class to level while playing the solo leveling game, no matter what spec. Pet plus ranged damage is just simple.
• Warlocks are second. Again, a pet class. (I might be wrong on this. Someday I have to fill in my knowledge gap regarding warlocks)
• Rogues and mages are third. Lots of damage is easy grinding.
• Then shamans and druids, because of the damage/healing hybrid nature.
• Until finally you get down to classes that are harder to solo, like paladins, priests, and warriors.

Now, I’m not saying that paladins are hard to solo. All of WoW solo content is easy with every class. It’s just that leveling a pally is harder than leveling a hunter or a warlock. Of course, it’s possible to build a “hard to solo” class like a pally in such a way that when matched against a poorly-played warlock that the pally would come out ahead. Player skill counts for a lot, and that’s true of all the comparisons to come. But given two equal players, there’s no way to correctly spec and play a priest so that they’ll solo as fast or as easily as a correctly spec’ed and played mage.

So why does this matter? Well, classes that are easier to level have that balance come out somewhere. Somewhere inside their decision tree, and this is just an example, Blizzard said “hunters will not have an easy time in raids because they level so easily”.

Now, individual hunters can be great in raids, just as great and useful as other classes. But your typical fully-leveled hunter never had to build a good skill set that a player needs to be a good raider. Four parts pet attack button, four parts Autoshot, one part Mend Pet. Sprinkle Arcane Shot and Multishot to taste. Let simmer for /played. Voila, max level!

Blizzard decided that hunters would have to work harder (shot rotations based on hidden cast times, non-obvious math, and spreadsheet-only derivations regarding weapon choices and haste) to do comparable performance as other classes in their role (damage). If it were easy for a hunter to be competitive in raids, nobody would ever play anything but hunter! They would rule both inside and outside groups.

Now, the solo game doesn’t just come to a screeching halt when you hit L70. There are dailies, reputation grinds, crafting that requires plenty of hard-to-find materials… in fact, much of this is very helpful to generate the resources to give you an edge in performance while participating in the end game. However, the playstyle of all this content is exactly like the solo/levelling game. So for the purposes of this discussion, it’s the same.

When farming motes for primals, everyone groans when the hunter arrives. Nobody has it easier. You don’t find many RMT-farming priests, warriors, or paladins.

On the flip side, the frustration that pallies, priests, and warriors feel while leveling and playing the solo game is more than made up for in their group play. Tanking and healing shines in groups, and this is the big payout.

Part 1: Introduction, and a call for comments
Part 2: Solo Difficulty vs Group Difficulty
Part 3: PvE vs PvP
Part 4: Variety vs Specialization
Part 5: Solo Performer vs Group Utility
Conclusion: Your role in a PvE group

It occurred to me that people who haven’t been grouping or raiding a lot don’t know what role various classes have in a raid, or of class design in general. You can go read the page on the worldofwarcraft website, but they make every class sound equally great at everything. That’s just not the reality of it. So I can keep complaining about how many people get stuck between little knowledge and expanded knowledge, or I can take my shot at fixing it via explanation.

If you don’t know how a particular character or spec of a character fits into the group game that follows the leveling game, this is for you.

It’s possible to find out everything I’m about to write from various places online, but as far as I know, there’s not one place where it’s all connected. Most articles are written from the point of view of one class or another; every guide is written by that class, for that class.

This is going to be the top level view, how raid leaders (and possibly Blizzard designers) look at classes and their role in the game.

I write here simply to relay what I’ve come to understand as the game of WoW as it relates to the PvE endgame. If you disagree with something I’m about to say, that’s fine, but please remember that I’m not thinking of any one player, especially you, when I’m writing this. I’ve read as many internets as I could, led many raids, played too many classes, and this is what I know.

Now, I’ve raided with a number of classes at high level, but not all of them. I’ve lead many raids of various sizes, but not all the way through the endgame in either version of WoW. Some of what I’m about to say might be incorrect. Therefore:

Please comment to educate me, and I’ll update the articles as necessary.

Hope you enjoy it.

(Someone else can write a “The Secret Design of WoW: PvP” guide or series. I’ll be glad to link from it here.)

(Related post: Raiding does not mean Skilled)

World of Warcraft, and every game like it, is really two different games. I first read this thought at Penny Arcade (can’t find where because their search function is weak). Basically, you have the levelling game where you start at L1 and then play until max level (currently L70), and then the game that happens after the levelling game, which is filled with group activities of all sorts as you improve your max level character.

Which brings me to another iconic player, Lisa. I’m sure that all of you have met her before:

“I’m max level! I couldn’t have gotten here unless I knew something about my class. Let me tell you about why…”

“…my retribution paladin has a lot of defense.”

“…my hunter has a lot of spell damage.”

“…my holy priest only uses flash heal.”

“…my warrior tanks with a two-handed weapon.” (Note: reroll deathknight in a few months)

“…my mage loves to wand.”

Lisa feels like she knows what’s what, because all these super-raiding-types she sees in the common cities? They’re the same level as she is. Aside from their zomgepics, there’s no visual indicator that what they’ve done is any different than what she’s done… in her mind. And frankly, since anyone can get zomgepics in battlegrounds, even that is less of a clue than it once was.

The problem is that hitting maximum level in one of these grinding-type games has absolutely no relation to knowing anything about the game and how to play it. All it means is that you have been dedicated and persistent, and hopefully had fun along the way. Especially in World of Warcraft, the game is extremely forgiving and easy to solo play.

There’s no smooth transition between the first game (levelling/solo play) and the second game (endgame/group play). I’ve read a lot of intelligent suggestions on how to bridge that gap, but the reality is that as long as Blizzard sticks with their design choice of letting anyone get to maximum level, with no intermediate checks along the way relating to their skill of play, then the vast majority of players are going to go the easiest way possible, because people are fond of success. Also, Blizzard is fond of money, and this super-casual crowd is a decent chunk of their base.

When a hunter can level to max level by using only melee weapons and never once firing a ranged weapon… don’t get me wrong, I think that what Gweryc did is cool. He deliberately made the game challenging in the levelling process, which is an interesting turnabout for a hunter. What makes Gweryc notable is not that that he did it, it’s that he did it on purpose.

There are thousands of people making those same against-the-grain choices but not understanding that they’re doing so. I usually find them waiting for a battleground to begin, wondering aloud if their 20-game losing streak is ever going to end, and silently weeping for the 15-45 minutes I’m about to waste in the upcoming losing effort.

What makes Lisa so annoying isn’t that she’s max level, it’s that she doesn’t understand the difference between the levelling game and the endgame. She doesn’t understand that there’s more knowledge to be attained, so she dismisses any advice or criticism out of hand. After all, she’s been to the zones, done the quests and gotten the quest rewards, same as you. She doesn’t care or even really think about the fact she skipped every group quest and every instance.

You: “Hey Lisa the pally, what’s the cooldown on Divine Intervention?”

Lisa: “Divine Intervention?”

You: “Yeah, it’s a spell I heard about that you have.”

Lisa: “O rly? Let me check my spellbook.”

(time passes)

Lisa: “Pssh, I’ve never seen this spell before.”

Actually, she did. Lisa just instantly dismissed it when she saw that it killed her to cast it… which is opposite of the whole point of the game when you’re solo’ing. What possible use could it have?

Max level isn’t even a hint.

As Blizzard announced last week, every WotLK raid will have a small-raid (10-man) option.

So if there are (guessing) four endgame raids at launch, each will have a 10 and 25 man version, creating a completely parallel path to the current 25-man raiding standard. Every subsequent patched-in raid will follow the same design. No more of this “two raids for small group raiding, eight raids for big group raiding”. All 10-man raids will be able to physically visit every raid instance, see every boss, gear up and progress along a similar path, and ultimately see the entire expansion.

This is like ice cream in digital form. Strike that, this is like a pack of ice cream wolves wearing ice cream shoulder-cannons running through the streets, shooting ice cream fireworks everywhere. This is simply the best news since the game was released.

This raid design change is a much, much larger change than shrinking large-group raids from 40-man to 25-man. This is huge. This is an attempt to change everything about endgame raiding, not just the encounter size. And although I know that my little essays are read by beautiful and intelligent people, and I know that Blizzard didn’t read my post on raid sizes, but… It’s just absurdly freakish that they’re doing exactly what I wished for, even though I didn’t think they would until WoW2. (That alone made me feel weird while writing this. If you’re reading, I love you too, Blizzard.)

I strongly suspect that this will create interesting (and for my guild, extremely welcome) social repercussions throughout endgame raiding culture. Mainly because the loot still won’t be the same. The 25-man versions will probably be a half-tier or full-tier higher than the 10-man versions. Oh no!

But really, who cares? This is good news for everyone involved, both large-group and small-group raiders. For my guild, if you’re the kind of person who absolutely needs the best loot, then neither of us is going to get what we want by you being a member of my guild. Yay! We’re filtering each other out! What difference does it make that my EndgameA loot isn’t as good as a parallel EndgameA loot? They both allow access to our next EndgameB. That’s it. That’s the whole game. Small-group raids can basically ignore 25-man raiding now, as they only have better loot, and not more encounters, more story, or more of anything except people.

But what about the “10-man is normal mode, 25-man is heroic mode” stigma? We’ll encourage it. Please, fictional-Mike, go swim through the constant churn and drama that is the hardcore raiding guild experience and leave my happy small-group guild and all those like it alone. We’re not hardcore enough for you, and we wish you luck and good fortune.

My guild will just continue on in our own little raiding utopia, recruiting friendly people and continuing to have fun. Except this time, we’ll be running all the content in the game. We don’t have to choose between social and exploration any more. We’ll see the final boss of WotLK. We’ll see the conclusion of every story thread.

Great days are ahead!

I’ve been reading Tobold and Potshot lately. They’re talking about loot and game design as it relates to endgame guilds, specifically guild hopping and progression problems due to it. I haven’t seen a decent explanation of the problem, but as a guild officer/leader I’ve seen it in action twice now, once with the original WoW endgame and now with the TBC endgame. I don’t have a solution, but I can frame the problem.

For me, the most fun time in WoW is right after an expansion hits, when there’s limited collective endgame exploration. All the content is new and fresh, then I find myself grouping with not just my long-term guild friends, but also my friends who left to get on the progression roller coaster. It’s glorious! This is what the first two months of TBC was like.

Then, endgame progress starts to happen, and a tiered system begins to form.

Some guilds progress quickly while others progress slowly. Before long, you have some small percentage of guilds at the top level, a larger percentage slightly below them, and ultimately many at the bottom. Now let’s follow a person, Mike, through his ascent to the endgame.

First, Mike belongs to a leveling guild. He groups with and rides that guild up to the maximum level, but the guild doesn’t have the wherewithal to group up for the endgame content, for whatever reason. Ultimately, Mike decides that he wants to see some of this content, so he joins pick-up groups, and he finds that it’s fun. He does a little research and applies to an entry-level endgame guild. Mike is accepted! Wait, why is this endgame guild recruiting?

Entropy is constant in all guilds. A personal dispute can’t be resolved, or someone can’t afford to fix their computer, or they get divorced, or die, or become parents, or get sent to jail, or change jobs, or any number of other real-life reasons. Or they simply get bored with the game and never log in again. Regardless, even good people with no other issues leave the game. Every guild’s membership is never constant, and therefore every guild must constantly recruit.

At Mike’s first endgame guild, he learns to group, and the guild is sweeping through EndgameA content and is trying to get through EndgameB content. Mike is getting loot upgrades at a decent rate in EndgameA, because the guild has that under control. The goals of Mike and the guild are in perfect alignment for this time. Let’s define these goals. Endgame guilds are easy:

• The goal of an endgame guild is to raise the total level of gear of its members so that they can explore the next level of content. The ability to run endgame content is dependent on both the size of the group and the collective loot level of that group. This means that taking a slightly-underequipped person is acceptable, because it’s better than the empty spot you have that threatens to kill your guild’s basic ability to raid.

Players are harder. Each endgame player is a combination of the following three goals:

1. A loot-driven player wants loot upgrades. Zomgepics.
2. A socially-driven player wants to play with their friends.
3. An exploration-driven player wants to see all the content available.

(There are obviously more goals, but bear with me for the purposes of this article.)

Mike participates and gets all the gear available at EndgameA content. After some variable amount of time (due to the randomness of loot drops), Mike has nothing left to gain from EndgameA. He finds that his guild’s progression on EndgameB–where progression is not easy and where the guild is currently stuck–is simply painful and too slow. Unfortunately for Mike’s guild, Mike would rather see new content or get loot sooner without the struggle of doing it the hard way. His goal ranking is: loot/exploration first and social last. The people in his guild don’t matter as much.

Luckily for Mike, there is another guild on the server which is exactly one step up in progression; they have EndgameB conquered and are working on EndgameC. The minimum requirement for gear to be successful in EndgameB content is EndgameA gear. Thanks to the random loot system, most of this new guild is still gearing up in EndgameB, so it’s fine for a new applicant to simply be in EndgameA gear. Thanks to the effort of his current guild, Mike has EndgameA gear! The door to his second endgame guild is open.

After some amount of sweating, Mike leaves EndgameA guild to join the more-progressed one. The new guild gladly looks the other way at how the player came to them. Who can be certain what happened? The new guild is hoping for the best, so they welcome Mike with open arms and a big cheer. After all, this new guild is trying to get through EndgameC and needs active participants, because they keep getting poached by EndgameD guilds, who are getting poached to EndgameE guilds. And so on.

The problem is that the best situation for people who are loot driven is to be in a guild where the average level of gear of its members is higher than his own. This grants access to higher level content without the difficult part of sweating through it the hard way. Loot-driven people like coasting easily through content. They like getting rewards for minimal effort.

As you can see, this leads directly to guild-hopping. And endgame guilds, in their state of constant recruitment, make the problem worse with their constant poaching of each other. If they don’t recruit this player, then some other guild will, and increase their chances of progression, which is just another guild to poach from them.

Thus, soon after endgame is explored by some, a guild stratification system sets in. A clear path through guilds emerges. Start in guild 1, jump to guild 2, then guild 3, and so on. This continues until the ladder is reset at the next expansion.

Blizzard has taken steps to combat this: reputation levels with instances; attunements; badges of justice; tier set tokens; exchanges for pve to pvp gear. Each has helped, but the problem is still there. The individual gets all the rewards, regardless of the relative efforts involved.

So while people say that Tobold’s “loot belongs to the guild” idea is crap, that’s not the point. There has to be a better way. Any suggestion is better than no suggestion.

In the meantime, the system churns on and the socially driven players who are close friends in an endgame guild–like mine–end up bitter that they’ve helped so many people up and along their own personal ladder, while the guild progresses very slowly because they hang on to a fraction of the people who pass through. Remember, we socially-driven people aren’t purely social, we want to get upgrades for our characters and see the next endgame, and the one after that. But we won’t give up friends just for loot or to visit another part of the game. Our only options are: 1) continue to hope that we can find enough like-minded people to get momentum to clear our current hurdle and experience the joy as a group; 2) give up on the endgame altogether. Giving up isn’t a good solution because raiding is fun. Seeing new content is fun. Clearing obstacles with your friends is fun.

So we loyal ones stick together and keep recruiting, hoping to find the rare person who values camaraderie over loot, while we quietly look forward to the next reset (the next expansion). The ladder won’t exist for a little while, and we can play in ideal environment, briefly.

I’m cheering all of you on, Tobold and Potshot and the rest.

(edited on May 2 for some grammar flubs)

If you like to group in these big social MMORPG games, then choose the hard but essential role, whatever that role may be.

In World of Warcraft, my primary character is a healing priest. My close runner-up is a protection warrior. Say what you want about inability to solo, but every single time I log on, I’m asked to group. Every single time.

My dps friends tell me how hard it is to get a group, or how many groups get four players but never get that last person because they need either a tank or a healer and never end up finding one. I can imagine how they feel, but I do not understand these people. Once you have seen that groups always stall on tanks and healers, then why not just solve the problem? That’s how I started tanking, and I grew to enjoy it nearly as much as healing, and certainly more than dps’ing. Instancing is one of the most fun parts of the game, and when you’re a needed role, you have the ability to write your own ticket for grouping and raiding forevermore. But more than that, I enjoy the fact that I make groups any time I want.

Let me try an analogy. If you’re of legal age of consent and enjoy having sex, then when you go to an engineering college (typically around 6:1 male-to-female ratio), would you rather be a guy or a girl?

This analogy didn’t really pan out like I hoped. Let me try again.

Picture a loosely-organized football league where there are fifteen teams and only five quarterbacks. How do you think those five quarterbacks are treated when they show up at the field? That’s right, they get to have hot engineer sex as often as they want and they get to be choosy about what jersey they wear.

Just like tanks and healers do. This is your guild and your server.

The downside is that you solo at 30-80% the speed of a pure dps class. This isn’t as bad as you’ve heard, unless you’re absolutely in love with grinding. Even on my little protection warrior who’s dual-wielding, I can go fast enough if not fast. Just be sure that in all those instances you’re running that you grab unwanted dps gear that’s appropriate for your character. And honestly, if you’re not a complete social misfit, you’ll probably have game friends who will group with you for dailies or other solo content because you group with them. If you do love grinding (or you are a social misfit), then just have a dps alt. Who doesn’t have a hunter in their pocket nowadays?

I’m not saying that dps isn’t fun. It is, and it’s very relaxing as well. I have a hunter who I battleground with, and it’s a great time. But if grouping is what you like best, then why would you want to compete with the millions of other hunters/rogues/warlocks/mages/hybrid-dps spec people for the large number of damage spots in a raid/instance, when you can just walk into the big-leagues by being a role where demand is far greater than supply? My guild is perpetually short on tanks, we’ll take anyone with 9k base life and the ability to fog a mirror. I’m exaggerating, but dip into the Guild Recruitment channel and you’ll see this message in the first ten minutes:

X of Y is raiding Z content and is looking for a offtank/maintank/healer to join and “raid casually”/”raid five nights a week”/”oh god please join us, I don’t care if you’re an alt of another toon in another guild, just give some backup to drop cross-eyed-Joey the holy pally alt who still looks for his Mend Pet button”.

Heck, even my dps wife loves that I’m a tank/healer combo, because our group is already half-made whenever we want to run together. Her primary alt is a druid healer. And while she’s still warming up to healing, she loves the ease at which she can find a group.

So make your next alt project a tank or a healer, and get to the hot engineer sex.

A rogue in my guild is working on making a competent healing priest alt. He asked me where the priest spreadsheet is. Like how you actually know for certain, the way a rogue can just say “Well, this sword is just flat-out better than that one because I put them both in the rogue dps spreadsheet and the answer is: the new one yields +10 dps.” I answered, “Ha ha.”

Healing is much harder to diagnose than tanking or dps is. I mean, trivially the question for healing is: Did we wipe? If yes, the problem might be healing, or it might be lack of execution or understanding of the event. If no, then you did fine. That’s it. Bonus points for nobody dying.

When you’re a dps’er, every choice regarding gear and talents and so on can be boiled down to one question (two if you’re advanced):

• Simple: Am I personally doing more damage?
• Advanced: Am I making the group/raid’s total damage output higher?

For each event, the raid has X time to do Y damage with Z constraints, now get to it. You can run Recount or Recap or any number of other tools to diagnose damage. It’s trivial. You put on a new piece of gear, go raid, and then say,

“Well, I thought bonus crit rating this would help, but my miss rate went up by 2% and I did less overall damage. Guess I’m back to this weaker looking +hit rating blue.”

As far as research, a class’s dps is broken down into a format similar to this: If you are build A, stack stat/rating B until Bmax, then stack C stat/rating infinitely. For frost mages it’s “stack spell hit until the spell cap, then spell haste and spell damage infinitely”.

Tanking is harder than that. You’re trying to both keep aggro and not die. Keeping aggro is about generating threat, which also has particular gear choices, but more or less works like doing damage (stack hit rating, expertise, spell hit, shield block, attack power, and shield block value in various amounts depending on which kind of tank you are). Not dying involves a few variables like stamina and avoidance, as well as preventing as much of the spike damage as you can. There are tradeoffs to be made, but you have a maximum health total that’s easy to see, an avoidance rate that’s easy to compute. You know you’re doing the right amount of threat if your raid doesn’t have to hold back on damage. You balance accordingly.

Healing? Like tanking, the suite of stats changes between classes–some mix of healing, mp5, spirit, intellect, and spell crit. But the act of healing depends entirely on each particular event. Your tank might get crushed, get hit normally, block, or dodge. Everyone in your raid might take steady, constant damage. Your tank might never drink potions or use healthstones. Your dps might get cleaved by the boss for standing in the wrong place. Your job is not just to heal the tank, it’s to patch the mistakes in mid-event.

Also, two different attempts on the same boss with the same raid can go completely differently just due to the inherent randomness of some events. Think of Ilhoof in Kara. If a healer gets sacrificed, it’s extremely tough on the remaining healers for those ten seconds. If not, that’s nine minutes of (healing) pleasure! Switching one piece of gear in that event, and most others… you can’t actually tell if it matters. You just know that a higher value in your key stats is better.

On top of all of that, in raids you also must instantly and silently adjust to the healing style of the people around you so that you’re not wasting group efforts. That ability to adjust is the whole essence of raid healing–it can’t be quantified and it doesn’t show up on your character sheet. If I was going to land a slow, mana-efficient heal for 5000 and someone else throws in a mana-inefficient 2000 heal, causing me to overheal by 2000 and waste that time and mana, who’s fault is it? (Trick question, it doesn’t matter. That’s wasted mana on someone’s part, and if you don’t work it out, the raid will wipe at some point due to your collective waste of mana.)

So given how nebulous and random and instinctive healing is, how can you tell that you’re doing better by swapping one item for another? You can’t tell, because you can’t run tests outside of combat. Your heals might hit for a tiny bit less or more, but the actual trade off between 6 mp5 and 22 healing? Can’t tell. Your playstyle influences your gear selection more than other roles. Damage dealers just do damage, and every piece of gear they have is about doing more damage. There’s no opinion as to whether 900 damage is more than 800 damage. Tanks want to survive and generate threat, that’s their balance.

A healer who loves mana regeneration is going to cast weaker heals continuously, and make it work. A healer who loves larger heals is going to try to time their larger heals correctly so they aren’t wasting mana, and make it work. The final grade is: Did we win? Yes. Great, your gear and spec is correct for that event!

Most of us just learn the stats that are necessary for our build (for example, spell crit plus healing plus mp5 for a holy paladin), and try to get decent levels of all of them.

So unfortunately, there is no healing spreadsheet. This leads to the huge learning curve in learning to heal (and tank), but that’s another article.

When I was raid lead in vanilla wow, I arranged and lead many many runs on Molten Core, a few on Blackwing Lair, and many in Zul’Gurub and AQ20. When news of The Burning Crusade’s reduction in raid size came out, that the new raids would be 25 and 10, I cheered. My guild thought I was being sarcastic (a reasonable guess), but honestly I was thrilled. I still am. Larger raids are for masochists.

Imagine the game as a series of eight 10-man instances instead of this strange mix of 25/10.

My wife and I were running Magister’s Terrace for the first time a couple weeks ago, and part of that instance is a preview of the Sunwell Plateau 25-man raid instance. It’s beautiful. Stunning! Epic! And so on! It made us both really want to go there. Then we remembered that we’re not in a guild that’s capable of 25-man content. We’ve stepped into Gruul’s lair once, a toe in the water for our guild. Unless something remarkable happens, I’ll never see Gruul’s Lair, Magtheridon, SSC, Mount Hyjal, or Black Temple, never mind the new hardest-of-the-hard, Sunwell Plateau. So another 25-man raid instance doesn’t do anything for me except make me wish that the game were designed differently: namely that raiding wasn’t trying to coordinate a guild of between 25-32 dedicated people or 25-50 casual people. There are six 25-man instances, and two 10-man ones. Many, many more people go to the 10-man ones, just like many more people went to Zul’Gurub and AQ20 than ever went to Naxx. And yet, look at that ratio in total content!

I have friends in 25-man raiding guilds. My guild, being a small-sized casual/raiding guild, is somewhat stuck with the stepping-stone problem. People come here, learn to raid, and either stick around or move on to 25-man raiding guilds. My friends in 25-man raiding guilds say that managing larger groups is more work, and less fun. I raided Molten Core, and you could have so much dead weight during a run that it was painful. In all but the most driven raiding guilds, you still have this problem.

If Blizzard wants to look at its game like a sport (still a terrible idea), then let’s take a quick look at sports. Ok, step one: get 39 of your friends and have everyone playing on the field, on the same team, at the same time. Wait, I’m not aware of any sports like that. Ok, let’s bump that down to 25 people playing on the field, at the same time, on the same team. Again, nothing remotely like that comes to mind. Could we shoehorn a 25-man team into any popular sport? You could play football (soccer), just stack the extra 14 in the goal. Never mind.

The reality is that most team sports have 11 or fewer people playing at the same time. Why? Because more than that is unnecessary and unwieldy. At that size, everyone matters. I mean, part of what makes football (american) so incredible is that you have a large group of specialized people working toward the same goal, with frequent substitutions based on the play of the game. Actually, this part is similar to progressing through new raid content. But not the size part.

So why does Blizzard have these huge raids?

Before WoW was a game called Everquest (EQ), which I have never played but that won’t stop me from talking about it. EQ had these monstrously large, funless endgame experiences where you stacked 5000 people side by side and about the best thing you could say about that is that ‘you were there’, one of a zillion pissants providing a tiny fraction of the group’s utility, and that’s if the person actually plays. When I think of my days leading 40-man raid content, the biggest thing I remember (aside from “can’t we just go to ZG again? it’s fun!”) is that one-third or more of the raid was absolute crap at playing this game. I raided with someone who methodically cast fire spells at a boss immune to fire, blithely ignoring the “immune” “immune” “immune” text flashing on his screen with every spell landing. He was a nice guy and a SPHO. Every raid guild has people like this to different degrees, and every raid leader can tell stories like this. Larger raids mean that more of a percentage of people can suck, go afk or just in general be lame and yet the group will still find success, which means that more people will be inclined to invite their 95-year old great-grandparent to raid with the guild because he has nothing else to do and he will always be there.

Back to the original thought. Blizzard came along and didn’t want their game to be derided as the mini-everquest. Never mind hiring one of the elite endgame raiders from EQ to design their raid content. So, when it came time to design their endgame, they went big-group too, although not quite as big. Remember, Blizzard actually thought there was a chance of failure in their WoW experiment. Their design reflected current trends at that moment, which was EQ. Of course, then they did destroy every other MMORPG, as then went cookie monster all over the rest of computer gaming, and basically print money now. People who learned to play WoW came to think of endgame as this huge-group thing.

So why not change? The answer is risk. Yes, the developers spend an inordinate amount of time designing content that less than 10% of the playerbase will ever see. But regardless of whether you agree with my opinion that small raiding is a better game experience than large-group play, there’s limited financial incentive to make such a large change. Blizzard is making piles of dollars with the current model, with no gaming contender in sight. A change to endgame raiding isn’t going to get more people to sign on, but it might cause some percentage of the base to leave. What does the company have to gain from such a move? Higher satisfaction from the people already playing isn’t worth a risk in decrease to revenue stream.

So even though large-group play is not any more fun than small or mid-group play, that’s what we’ve got. Inertia wins.

In other news, I’m looking forward to World of Warcraft 2. Maybe they’ll ditch the whole huge-group play altogether on the reset.