Does it really matter what role you play?

[Deleted]

I was thinking recently that tanks (and often healers) are often considered more 'responsible' jobs. But then it downed on me that that may be true up to a point that mainly a casual or social is concerned: i.e. if you reach the hardest heroic bosses, the tanks won't save it, the healers won't save it, all must do their job. There is no boss that a world first guild wiped for a while that can say "melee? who cares! we got healers", "ranged? fuck it, I got tanks!". Even in some earlier bosses it seems likely to have a shuffling of roles (even though rarely all must be perfect and the tanks and healers seem to get the weight on their shoulders for most early bosses, in normal and heroic).

Then again one could argue that this is enough reason. i.e. it is 80% of the life of a common raider (especially one that is more casual) to do the easier bosses, or at least up to first few heroics. They will rarely be on situations the whole raid is demanded to be perfect. Hence for them is enough to simplify the world (of warcraft) like that.

[danpaladin]

I think all the roles are important. As a raid leader (and a tank) I see first hand how much simpler it is to progress when the dps are doing their job properly. We are a pretty casual guild (2-times a week, 2 hours a day), but we 3-shot Spine when we first did it. The reason was not great tanking or healing, since the encounter really does not ask for it. It was a dps that got on the fiery grip immediately and made it a non-issue, and a group of dps that beat the living crap out of that burning tendon, each of the 3 times it was up. There are definitely certain fights where dps make or break guild progression or trivialize otherwise difficult parts of the encounter.

Why I think dps is sometimes considered not that important is two-fold:
1) There are more dps than healers or tanks. This means that there are more people able to pick up the slack of someone who is not doing as well as they should.
2) Few raid encounters will punish poor dps nearly as much as poor healing or especially poor tanking. Sure if you have really bad dps you can hit the enrage timer, but that is usually 6 or 10 minutes into a fight and it doesn't feel quite as fail as having a tank totally blow picking up adds on Ryolith and having those adds kill 2 people before they are picked up, or having a tank fail positioning Morchok on heroic so that there is a wipe 30-seconds into the fight. Futher, dps usually have simpler roles than tanks. Look at heroic ultraxion, where Tanks have to react to every single Fading light, while DPS might get one fading light every 3. There are plenty of examples of this.

Tanks usually have more on their plate during an encounter, and their mistakes are felt immediately and with a bigger feeling of fail
Healers failing is not quite as obvious, but will nonetheless severely limit progression to a higher degree than poor dps.

Hope this answers your question a bit

[Deleted]

The thing is, most of the Healers and Tanks with God complexes do nothing more than dungeons. I found that it's generally the Healers that are like this.

With LFR being introduced, I've seen a lot less people like this, which I think is largely down to Healing in LFR being horribly easy. You only have to Heal if people are hugely messing up.

In proper Raiding, it's a lot more even. DPS checks are harder, Healing's harder, Tanks have to pay more attention to their own damage and occasional CD usage. DPS are given a lot more responsibility. Take Spine of Deathwing for example, if the Burning Tendon doesn't go down quick enough, it's a wipe that no amount of Healing can save. With Searing Plasma, the Healers are solely responsible for it. More DPS doesn't affect that. Then the Tanks are responsible for making sure that the Amalgamation gets 9 stacks at the right time.

I think the whole reason for this Healer/Tank god complex is that their job is made a lot harder by other players mistakes. If someone else pulls extra mobs, the Tank has to work harder on collecting them all, since they don't have that initial threat from the pull. If someone's standing in something, it's the Healer who has to work harder on keeping them alive (or some egotistical Healers just let them die anyway). If someone pulls extra mobs, the DPS's job doesn't really change, except they might want to cleave/AoE a little more. If someone stands in the fire, it doesn't make a difference to another DPSer, just that the fight will go on for longer if that person dies, but that's something that affects everyone.

[Zeglo]

Dps is needed 3x as much most of the time, so it really does not matter.

Tank and healer are the responsible roles because you can never go afk; however, learning fights and such is required of all players. The only reason dps has it easier is because if one dps messes up, there are more to continue the fight.

I always choose dps because I play on a lagging laptop, so I don't have to worry about disconnecting or having to go afk.

[Froggi]

Danpaladin hit it dead on. I am no raid leader but since I started tanking in late WotLK and through Cata, it became much easier to see where good DPS really makes a difference even in 5 mans. Before this I played DPS and it didn't really sink in that wipes can happen just as easily with bad dps as with bad tanks or bad healers, and honestly I felt pretty useless as dps. Even in the few raids I did before I started tanking I felt like just another button pusher that wasn't really helping, and it made me suck at it from laziness. Even tanking with a guild I felt like well the dps doesn't really matter that much the healer and I are just carrying them through, I didn't care then because I was running with guildies all the time.

Then LFD came out.

When you are tanking one of these dungeon finder groups, getting 3 fail dps makes for a long, agonizing run where mobs (especially bosses) take forever to die. Then you get the, um, let's say not all there dps who thinks it's cool to pull 2 extra packs when the healer is close to OOM already and causes a wipe. Or in early Cata before the heroic nerfs you got the dps who could not control their urge to aoe everything and broke all CC, causing a wipe. Or you got a group that simply could not meet the output requirements to kill the boss before he enraged or damage got too far ahead of the healer.

I remember one specific Tol'vir run with three very fail dps, me tanking and a guildie healer. We trudged through with me (the tank) topping the meters by way too much of a margin. The group could not kill the last boss. I was pushing about 10k I think, the next highest was the hunter at 4k. Ended up leaving that run after two wipes on a very easy fight.

Then LFR came out. Hitting Ultraxions' enrage timer in Heroic is understandable, hitting it in LFR is unacceptable. Happened to me, just last week actually. Kicked some that were really bad, the replacements did their job much better and the boss went down no problem. Most of that group stayed and we got through the rest of it wipeless.

TLDR version; in some ways yes tanking and healing are more demanding and we share the brunt of the blame for most wipes (especially in 5 mans) but often enough the dps contingent is just as important, sometimes more so.

[Deleted]

Healers and Tanks with God complexes

While those might exist I think the notion exists mainly due to the first bosses in normal or heroic to be genuinely low on expectations from DPSes.

Besides if you go to God complexes(narcissism, egotism, etc.) you will find those in all roles.

[Deja Thoris]

Danpaladin explained it nicely for me.

Are roles are important. It's a team. However, mistakes or substandard performance by a tank / healer often have immediate bad consequences. If dps is rubbish, whether through standing in bad, switching slowly or just plain bad numbers then it kind of slips under the radar. Thats the difference.

[Deleted]

I have played tank& dps roles in raids also raid lead.

LFD and serious raiding are , as some before me said, two complete different worlds.

In LFD tanks and healers in 90% of times they carry (not saying bad tanks or healers arent there, just talking majority).
And have the harder job. Why? Because 90% of random bads are dps and use LFD ofc.
But usually people that raid use LFD very little thats why the two big category of voices on forums imo.

In guild raids all roles are the same. Personally i think on most encounters tanking is towards the easier part, personal opinion.
Dps and healers both have specific more or less challenging encounters for each.

[Nikkaszal]

I have played tank& dps roles in raids also raid lead.

LFD and serious raiding are , as some before me said, two complete different worlds.

In LFD tanks and healers in 90% of times they carry (not saying bad tanks or healers arent there, just talking majority).
And have the harder job. Why? Because 90% of random bads are dps and use LFD ofc.
But usually people that raid use LFD very little thats why the two big category of voices on forums imo.

In guild raids all roles are the same. Personally i think on most encounters tanking is towards the easier part, personal opinion.
Dps and healers both have specific more or less challenging encounters for each.

Not really true.

I have many 85's. I run LFD's with them often. Tanks, heals, melee, ranged, you name it and I've spammed LFD with it.

Bad players come in all shapes and sizes. I can safely say that I've seen as many terrible PuG tanks and healers on my DPS toons as I have seen crap DPS on my tank and healer toons.

[Kardone]

For me as a healer I get a bit of a God complex/Savior Complex (I AM a savior of Azeroth for what it's worth) since the theme for cata heroics has been "This is a tightly tuned DPS check. Let's see how many healers we can drop for DPS!" and so you feel like a BAMF healing the raid.

But as far as within the guild/raid team? Everyone is important and even though you're dropping healers that means every single DPS has to push huge numbers AND avoid all avoidable damage because you do not have the safety net of all those healers anymore. Same with tanks doing their best to mitigate damage and push DPS as well.

DPS checks seem to be really important these days to Blizz. Even in fights where it's a healing check there's most likely an inherent dps check as well with soft enrages. A lot of fights aren't about the hard enrage when executed properly but the faster you kill the source of damage the easier the healers can keep up. As a healer I'm completely dependent on my DPS in Black Phase of Zon'ozz to kill adds quickly or else I go from 100% to OOM in a minute. The direct link may not be as apparent but just as a healer makes a clutch save on a dps who got hit hard by whatever, the high dps player is making the healers' job easier/manageable.