DPS has more fun
There is a baleful chant over the World of Warcraft chat channels, all begging for the same thing, in caps. LF TANK or HEALER. Wide shortages of these two roles in every stage of the game persist. Why? There are many reasons including what I will call most obvious, big numbers, specialization, and scope. In short, it’s less rewarding for most to play these roles.
Some players are tanks and healers for no other reason than they love it. Tanks are center stage, control positioning, and set the pace. And healers continuously save people from death and various debuff maladies. But because of how difficult it is, it’s less interesting to people who do not naturally want to play them. So you have a number of people doing it because they love it. And the rest are doing it because it’s the only way to form a group or join a raid.
DPS isn’t necessarily easier, especially good dps. Good dps can be just as hard as tanking or healing. Maximizing your damage while not pulling aggro, crowd controlling targets, debuffing or interrupting, and not triggering some special enemy raid wiping ability all requires skill. Optimizing this when your group is at the limits of it’s abilities is hard. But because there is usually more room for making mistakes as well as some other reasons it’s more fun to dps for most players, than to tank or heal.
Let’s take a look at why.
Most Obvious
As a tank or a healer you are the first and most obvious point of failure. If you mess up, the group dies. Dps can be a point of failure by not doing enough damage, missing crowd control, or pulling aggro. The first is usually not blamed on any one person, the second can often be recovered from, and the last is easily avoided by doing nothing. Because mistakes made by tanks and healers are much more obvious, they either get blamed for them or feel worse about failing. There are other mistakes which are blindingly obvious on some boss fights but this is usually something everyone must not do. Don’t move while you are in the flame wreath! Tanking and healing put you center stage and your mistakes show.
Big Numbers
Everyone likes to be recognized for doing something well. But as a healer or a tank there isn’t a good measuring stick. Dps can point at their large critical hits and overall damage for a fight in a damage meter. But you don’t have numbers that are easily comparable. As a tank you rarely compete for aggro with another tank. You can’t compare threat on a different target. And as a healer your numbers are highly dependent on how much damage your target takes and what debuffing you do. This lack of recognition or competition can be especially bad when you are also the most obvious point of failure. Compare how many times someone asked you to see a damage meter versus any other meter.
Specialization
The first place you feel the pain of being a tank or healer is leveling up. With the sole exception of druid tanks, it’s exceptionally difficult to do. Most players don’t bother and spec for damage. This makes it difficult to find a low level tank or healer. This got bad enough that Blizzard increased how much damage healers do. However, it’s still slower leveling as a healer and even worse as a tank. You may also decide to stick with what you know after you level and not bother with tanking or healing.
After you level up specialization gives you trouble in other areas of the game. It’s difficult to do battlegrounds, arena, daily quests, or solo. The alternative is to constantly respec which is costly and raises the question of why you are paying that cost and other players aren’t. Dps can participate in most any activity without having to respec.
Scope
As a tank or a healer your scope of attention has to be wider. Your actions strongly depended on what other group members and targets do as well as unexpected events such as damage spikes or adds.
If you are a healer you will be clicking health bars and ability buttons madly. Dps and to a lesser extent tanks don’t look at these during a fight. You have to pay attention to every player that takes damage and gauge how much trouble they are in to decide which spells to use. And you have to watch other healers in the raid as well as your range between all of your healing targets. This is sometimes faster than you can keep track of.
As a tank you find yourself constantly moving your camera around to get a full view, marking targets which requires an understanding of everyone’s classes, repositioning mobs, managing threat on multiple targets, and being ready to pick up adds. There are exceptions to this, especially in some raid boss fights. For example, on a few boss fights the tank literally sits there and does nothing but click a couple buttons.
Dps on the other hand focuses more narowly. Generally your have a single target that changes when it dies, and sometimes a second target for crowd control. Personal positioning and staying out of the way of certain abilties while optimizing your dps cycles and not drawing aggro is the key.
Having to maintain a very broad focus and constantly react to what is happening during a fight is something all good players should do, but it’s a requirement for tanks and healers. This is one of the reasons healers and tanks often have their own raid chat channel to coordinate fights during a raid. It’s something dps can often ignore.
What to do
There are many things Blizzard might do to change the balance. For example, adding damage for healers was helpful. And who knows, they might make protection warriors useful to solo with. But the important thing to do if you are a tank or healer is to make fun of how easy it is to dps. And if you are dps tell tanks and healers is how much more fun it is to dps.
Some ramblings, as I’m too tired to put together a coherent essay:
Though it’s a staple of the RPG genre, I’ve more-or-less come to the conclusion that the whole healer mechanic is broken. Your standard fight in most of the RPGs I’ve played goes like this:
1. Party prepares battlefield (or arranges themselves to best effect).
2. Big beefy guy runs in with a big sign saying “hit me”
3. Less beefy, more dangerous guys run in behind with small signs saying “don’t hit me”
4. Least beefy stand back and waggle their fingers, doing all the vital support work.
Any fight that doesn’t play out like this (think of the Magister’s Terrace “arena” match) is considered an abberation at best.
So, you’re a game designer. What do you do to make this fight more interesting to your players? The most straightforward thing to do is make the opponent spit out gobs of damage. EverQuest was wonderful at this — from the release of Velious, and probably as far back as Kunark, end game fights practically always required a group of 3-10 clerics casting “Complete Healing” in rotation. Who does this stress? The tank (usually equipment more than gear), and the healers.
Ok, so let’s try something different. We want to do something which makes those hapless DPSers have to think some… so we add some fun obstacle for them. Now, if there’s not a penalty to the obstacle, it’s no obstacle. So, let’s review our options for penalties. (1) Disable the player (instadeath, paralysis, mind control, fear, silence, etc) (2) Damage the player. Now, #1 has to be handled very carefully, as a game in which a player is constantly finding him/herself incapable of acting isn’t a game, it’s a movie. So generally, we opt for #2. While this does require skill of the DPS (”Flame wreath means don’t move!”), inevitably (especially in larger fights), someone’s going to fail their skill check. And the load for this failure falls back to the healers.
Also, a tank + spank, even with obstacles, has a glaring fault: whereas some portion of your player base play tanks, the classic tank and spank requires only 1 tank. Here’s a definite disparity needing address. So events are designed to require multiple tanks, either sequentially or in parallel. In the first case, we deal with the tank handoff. Vaelestraz in BWL comes to mind, or Moroes, or practically any long fight in EverQuest (oh darn, /disc defensive is down… next tank!). This, not surprisingly, puts more load on the healers, as they have to at some point deal with damage spikes on 2 players, plus any hapless DPS along the way. Oh the other hand, parallel tanks take parallel healing.
Now, naively, it quickly becomes evident that you can solve any game designer challenge by throwing more healing at it. This is the Achilles’ heal of the tank-healer system, in my view. Sure, designers have developed solutions to it, but they’re all the same: put a timer on the event (explicit timer, enrage timer, up-ramping damage, down-ramping healing effectiveness).
The healer role needs to be abolished. If we must keep to the hit-point-based game, make damage enduring. Create fights/strategies that depend on abilities to mitigate damage, not simply replenish health once it’s been lost. Decoys, simulacra, remote control, anything.
But then, maybe what I’m really thinking of is a game of StarCraft.
“equipment more than gear” -> “equipment more than skill”
Joram, that’s an interesting idea of getting rid of healing. And I think something dramatic like that needs to be done to fix what appears to be a broken dynamic. It may stem from the game origin where everything is based around damage.
You win when you do enough damage. It’s ultimately the only number that matters. Healing is just the reverse of it. You can play around with this with damage types and how damage is applied but ultimately its all the same. A solution would be encounters that must be won in a different way, something that would be on par with damage.
I think removing healing would cut down on the variety of things you can do and possibly make the game less interesting. However, you could still remove the healer role, like you said, and push healing onto every class. For example, every class could be responsible for their own healing. LIkewise you could do the same thing with threat. But the classes might all start feeling the same again.
Another problem which I didn’t focus on in the article is that the teamwork required between roles is slanted towards tanks and healers. For the most part damage dealers do not benefit from coordinating. Healers and tanks coordiante almost every action they take. This isn’t true in every game, for example Everquest 2 classes coordinate with heroic actions. You used certain abilities types in sequence to get bonuses. Warcraft does it in a limited sense. Sometimes it’s helpful for a damage class to debuff a mob to enable another damage class to be more effective. But it’s rare. If there was more of this types of damage teamwork DPS would be just as ‘hard’ as tanking or healing. This might make the game more fun. The other option is to make tanking and healing not require as much teamwork. For example the removal of cc breaking with some abilities on the PTR was probably a way by Blizzard to either address this or make tanking easier. Likewise you could reduce the required teamwork between healers by doing something as simple as not counting mana spent on overhealing.
DPS has more fun…I have to agree with this statement, but of course it is subjective to the player and what they enjoy doing. For myself, I switch it up to keep the game interesting as well as challenging myself. For example, my two “main” characters are both healing hybrids, but both are specced for DPS…why? Because I enjoy dealing damage more than being a healer. On the other hand I also have other characters who are “pure” DPS or “pure” healing…a hunter and a priest. To me, variety is what makes the game so enjoyable, the ability to fill a different role depending on the mood I am in keeps me coming back for more.