Most Deathknights Won’t Be Tanks

25 juillet 2008

Most Deathknights Won’t Be Tanks

"With the Wrath of the Lich King expansion pack looming on the horizon (some say Nov, some say Feb. ), I’m getting a bunch of toons ready and leveled up to work with the onslaught of Level 55 DeathKnights that will be running around the Outland in search of dungeon parties. I myself will not be rolling a DeathKnight for quite a while, figuring that there’ll be enough of them out there that the other classes and roles will be easier to get a party with - and I’m all for less competition and more personal fun. I’d like to say one thing about this whole DeathKnight situation, however: Being A Tank Is More Than Leading A Party I know that the introduction of the dual-wielding damage-dealing rune-using DeathKnight is meant to help address the “tank shortage” that is perceived in the game, but I personally don’t think it’s going to do a whit to help the “problem” that is perceived. You see, according to what I see, the “problem” is that the role and responsibilities of a Tank are not what most players expect it to be, and when most players realize what is expected of a Tank, they decide it’s not what they want to do, and viola, they’re “dps, not a tank”. This is not to say that someone who is DPS geared and spec’d cannot act as a Tank in an instance, of course. Players “can” do anything they want, but they may find it difficult to find quality DPS and Healers who want to party with them on an ongoing basis unless they’re way overgeared for the instance and essentially giving run-throughs. Role and Responsibilities Of A Good Tank Most of us are familiar with the basic role of a good tank - to lead the dungeon party’s direction, and to be the object of the enemy mob’s hate, taking damage and protecting the rest of the damage-dealers and healers in the party. But the responsibilities of a tank aren’t as clear (especially the more refined the tanking strategy gets), and there’s a vast difference between a bad tank and a good tank. Some tanking responsibilities include: Determining the quality of the group’s healer Setting the pace of the party excursion Marking and communicating kill order of grouped mobs Making Good Pulls Explaining Boss fights Reigning in or replacing excessively poor groupmates Quality Of The Group’s Healer.

It’s largely expected that for a group to be successful, the most important parts are that the Tank and Healer are solid. Having poor DPS can slow down a dungeon run in a severe way as well, of course, but having a poor Tank or poor Healer almost always spells doom for a party. But having said that, know that we’re all in a process of learning about how to play our classes as we’re levelling through to the level cap, so “excellent” healing or tanking is not required. What is required is that the Tank can judge the quality of the group’s healer, so the Tank knows how hard and fast the party can be pushed without having to spend time getting ready to go again after a wipe. Setting The Pace This is one of the toughest things for a new tank to learn - especially since World of Warcraft has been going for many years and it’s likely you’ll get at least one member of your PUG party who is high on knowledge about the particular instance, but low on patience for waiting for you to start the fight. In short, a good tank will know that a DPS who is deciding to start the pulls is using a passive-aggressive, non-verbal way to say “let’s go faster”. A good tank will always practice setting up the marks and starting the battle as quickly as possible. " "If you take 10 million random people and sort them by height, you'll get a bell curve called a Gauss curve, or ""normal distribution"": There are very few very tall people, some tall people, lots of average height people, some small people, and very few very small people. The reason this is called a normal distribution is because most natural distributions look like this. And although it is much harder to measure, if you sorted the 10 million World of Warcraft players by skill, you'd get the same distribution.

7ou'll get everything from low skill to extremely skilled, with the large majority being somewhere in the middle. Only the very low skill end of the curve is missing, because people who don't have enough skill to even do one quest won't play very long. And the same is true with every other game. People have different skills in video gaming. And if your skill isn't high enough for the minimum skill level needed to succeed, you don't play. I suck at first person shooters, so I don't play them. Which means my dollars are lost to the game companies making first person shooters. So Blizzard, clever as they are, made World of Warcraft very easy. Many people who have difficulties to succeed in the average video game still manage to kill monsters and do quests in World of Warcraft. And the learning curve for WoW isn't steep at all. You get new abilities every two levels, but most of them aren't any harder to use than the first two abilities you started the game with. If you managed to kill that wolf at level 1 to gain your very first experience point, chances are you'll also be able to kill that level 69 mob that makes you ding 70. But shooting for the lower end of the skill curve has one disadvantage: Soloing in World of Warcraft in most cases isn't very exciting if you are of average skill or above. If a game is too easy, it isn't challenging enough to be fun. That is why so many people rush through the leveling game and try to get to the level cap as quickly as possible, even paying other people for power-leveling them to there. At the level cap you can group, and you can raid, and while you still don't need to be a rocket scientist to successfully group or raid, you definitely need more skill for that than for soloing. wow gold You need to watch what the other players in your group or raid are doing, and the combats last longer, forcing you to think about concepts like mana efficiency or regeneration. Now if World of Warcraft was much harder, it probably wouldn't have gotten 10 million subscribers. wow gold Being accessible to everyone is a strength. But I wonder if WoW wasn't even better if it offered more challenge to players for who it is too easy. Sure, you can fight monsters of higher level than you are even now. wow gold But why would you. The fights last twice as long and don't give twice the xp, so in the end you'll level slower if you search the challenge. There is no solo content which would give better loot for higher challenge, like a group dungeon does. cheap wow gold And groups at lower level nowadays are hard to find, if your time schedule would allow you participation at all. I'd love to see solo instanced class quests, like Age of Conan has in the lower levels, introduced to World of Warcraft as well. mp3 players They could even be designed to teach you your various class skill, by having challenges you can only overcome by using your class-specific spells and abilities. Or of course the expansions that add levels to the game could have those levels be more difficult (and not just longer) than the previous levels. wow gold Unfortunately I don't think Blizzard is about to do that. I'm looking forward to Wrath of the Lich King for the exploration of the new content. But I doubt soloing up to 80 will challenge me, or most other WoW players. " .

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