The best single role in older content

[Deleted]

Purely a hypothetical and curious question about other people's thoughts on this.

If we zoom back into the first tier of content in any expansion and have one player who is from the last tier of content in that expansion, which role would be the best to have to make that older content so much easier due to their inflated gear and stats?

An example would be -

In Cataclysm, we had Bastion of Twilight, Throne of the Four Winds and Blackwing Descent, now in a 10m raid for example, 9/10 people are just heroic dungeon geared about to set foot into these new instances for the first time. Another player, be it a tank, healer or dps, is geared in heroic DS gear from 'time-travelling' I suppose (As I said, purely a hypothetical question.) would be the most powerful role to make going through the content easiest?

Tanks would take far less damage and be able to hold aggro with ease with their better gear making it easier on the healers.

Healers would have much less trouble with mana regen, be able to focus more on some off-dps and most damaging mechanics of a fight could simply be botched due to the healer overpowering that with their gear.

Dps would speed up the fight immensely, meeting the enrage would be less trouble, adds would die quickly making it easier on the healers.

I realise the previous tiers had 25m as the top tier and vanilla being 40m, so to make it 'fair' use 2 players of one role in 25m and 4 players from the future content in 40m.

Personally, I would find this question quite tough to answer, but in the end, I would probably guess healers, because good healers can usually mean that as long as everyone understands the mechanics, the bosses will fall with general ease.

I hope I made that as clear as I could, as I said, just a totally hypothetical and curious question for discussion.

[Sock]

Isn't even a question, really. The overgeared DPS.

More DPS means less time in combat, which is less tank damage/raid damage and less of a strain on healer mana.

[Thelxi]

Healers easily. One healer can easily solo heal what he used to 3heal 2 tiers back. Spirit was very tight in t11 also, while in full DS gear a healer could spam aoe heals all day long with way way more mana than they had in t11.

[ThePants999]

DPS fo'sho. For most guilds, the main problems when the team as a whole are undergeared are healer mana and enrage timers. Having an OP tank fixes neither, and having an OP healer fixes one of them, but having an OP DPSer fixes both in one go.

[Keoren]

I would almost exclusively pick the dpser(s). Better dps generally makes the healing easier and can help with the tanking as a result of factors such as shorter fight durations, and the dps simply makes many mechanics easier or even non-issues.

[Aerna]

DPS

There is a reason most guilds gear their dps first. It's because every fight gets a lot easier with more dps.

[Deleted]

Death Knights. Raegwynn.

[MuricaIsDead]

An awesome healer can carry anyone. And this is coming from someone that plays dps 99% of the time.

[-Ethos-]

My guild used to essentially have this argument (or a very similar one) every time a new tier came out and the tanks thought they deserved new gear first, the healers though themselves, and the dps thought themselves.

[Yodawinfrey]

DPS, most certainly. More DPS means less time in combat, which in turn means less healing and less tanking that has to be done. Each tier that comes out, gear is basically prioritized to DPS first.

[Deleted]

DPS without question.

[Brightstar of Korgath]

I said heals because I play a Disc Priest and its because of the DPS I can do that make it fun to go back to first raid of an expac.

[Alltat]

Definitely DPS. Tank gear hasn't been a serious issue for ages, and tank damage is pretty minor compared to the AoE damage flying around. Overgeared healers are useful on farm content as it lets you cheese certain mechanics, but that usually relies on everyone also having more health than the fights are tuned for. Having one overgeared healer will make things a little bit more forgiving, but most progression deaths are instagibs from avoidable mechanics anyway. The best use of an overgeared healer is to replace two undergeared healers, but then you might as well get an overgeared DPS instead.

Having an overgeared DPS will shorten every fight and can make certain mechanics trivial. Adds go down before you have to interrupt them, every DPS check is trivial, any task that you assign one or two DPS to becomes far easier, soft enrages become a non-issue, etc.

[FobManX]

We actually had a similar situation back in the day in BC when we were running Kara. We pugged a Hunter who was in full T6, while the rest of us were basically Kara/badge epic caliber gear. The Hunter just crushed the meters and everything went by faster.

One drastically overgeared DPS is a lot more impactful than a healer or tank.

[MuricaIsDead]

my argument is that, a bad healer will cause the group to fail. whereas bad dps and to a lesser extent bad tanking, will just make the run take longer.

i mean, without good heals, everyone is dead. without good dps and tanking the only thing you have to worry about is enrage timers. and other than really difficult heroic modes, when do enrage timers ever really come in to play?