Another shout out to Daily Kos' Wreck List guild. My death knight reached level 68 last night.
I've decided that I'd like to unofficially name this diary "Politics in Plate Mail." If there is a way to officially change it on the page, I hope someone will let me know.
For a couple of years now, my favorite activity in World of Warcraft has been tanking. I want people who don't play WoW to get something out of this diary also, so let me explain what I mean. A tank is that idiot in a group battle who runs up to monsters and yells "booga booga booga" at them, inducing them to punch him in the face repeatedly.
Needless to say, this isn't for everyone. Every group needs a tank, but most players aren't enthusiastic about doing the job, which has led to a noticeable shortage of tanks in the game. That is precisely why I, liberal minded fellow that I am, decided to dedicate much of my game time to tanking.
Continued below the fold.
There are two main activities that most people participate in while playing the game. One is going out on your own and getting in relatively easy adventures by yourself. The other is joining up with other players to accomplish a more difficult and time consuming goal. The simplest way to do this is to get in a group of five players and enter a dungeon.
Here's how a team of five adventurers typically looks. You have the tank -- that's me -- who leads the group, initiates the battles, gets punched in the face, and hopes to keep the group alive by being a human shield, hopefully remaining standing by virtue of superior armor and a (literal) shield. You have the healer -- a role frequently filled by my fiancee -- who casts healing magic to make sure the tank and other party members do not die. The other three players are damage dealers, known in game as DPS (named for the important "damage per second" metric that these players live by). These include your fireball slinging mages, your poison dagger stabby rogues, and your frothing at the mouth berserking warrior with a giant two handed axe. They want to kill the enemies quickly, before the enemies manage to kill the tank, then the healer, then them.
A five-person team that works together effectively will fight several bosses over a period of time that ranges from 30 minutes to a couple of hours, depending on dungeon difficulty and skill level. I've listed the roles in reverse order of popularity. Every class can be a DPS dealer assuming they specialize the right way, and the vast majority of players want to fill that role of attacking stuff. For the most part, those players rarely have to worry about anyone but themselves. The other two roles are, by necessity, team players. The tank and the healer take on the most demanding tasks, and the group relies on them for survival.
Even though damage dealers are three fifths of any group, they account for far more than three fifths of the player base. Tanking is a tough job, and as a result it's been common in the past to hear "We can start our dungeon just as soon as we find someone to tank (or heal)"... and continue to hear the same thing for the next half hour.
The secret of life
In a short story called "The Hitchhiker," Roald Dahl once used a character as a mouthpiece to say: "The secret of life, is to become very, very good at something that's very, very hard to do." My dad (who is a computational nuclear physicist, no joke) used to tell me something similar. So in most games, instead of trying to play the easiest class, I spend some time observing the makeup of a typical team so I can see what supporting roles are most required and least available.
For the first few years of playing Warcraft, I settled on a priest as my main character. (Yes, I was at all times fully aware of the irony of an atheist playing a priest.) This is not common. Most players learn to play as a DPS. Maybe if you don't play games you're not aware of the allure of the DPS role. See, DPS players blow stuff up. Period. I'm not saying this is easy; there's a fair amount of skill in learning your skill set and doing as much damage as possible. But if you die or disconnect as a DPS, the rest of the party can usually struggle on without you, because there are two backup dancers. The healing role is crucial to everyone's survival.
Though it is a critical role, healing is regarded by many as either too stressful or too boring, or in other ways not satisfying. DPS is easy to understand. You hit something. A number appears showing how much your hit hurt. Big numbers are good. That about covers it. Many DPS players get in dick-measuring competitions by flaunting who is doing the most damage. It's all very visceral.
Healing doesn't offer that opportunity, but here is what it does offer: the chance to be a make-or-break member of the team. Ensuring that your tank survives can be very rewarding, and it's not that uncommon to hear "Great heals!" at the end of a particularly harrowing fight. That feels nice, and competent healers are popular. Healing is a self-sacrificing role: you don't get to experience that immediate feedback of getting huge critical hits, but do everything for the benefit of the group as a whole. And if you think about it, that's an extremely liberal thing to do.
Then, a couple months into Wrath of the Lich King, I finally discovered:
The Joy of Tanking
In my view tanking has the same issues as healing (low damage output, greater emphasis on group survival), but it's also significantly harder. Don't get me wrong, healing is not easy, but it does not require the same type of situational awareness as tanking. As a healer, you spend a lot of time following the party, and during the fights all you have to watch is their health bar. There is little time or incentive to look closely at the scenery, other than checking the bosses to make sure you know what they do.
When you tank, you have to watch everything. You have to jump from target to target to make sure that you have elevated threat from every enemy. You have to watch the periphery of the battle to make sure there are no ranged enemies who are taking potshots at the healer. You have to watch your allies to make sure that no adds have snuck up and started beating on them. And finally, since you are the first one into every battle, you are usually expected to walk in the front of the party and show everyone else which way to go, which is a lot of responsibility.
So I understand exactly why good tanks are so rare. People don't like tanking. It adds a lot of extra challenge (aka "stress") to the game, requires more attention, and you incur much of the blame if the group wipes.
But here's why I love tanking. First, I'm a liberal. If it's difficult to find a tank, I want to be your tank. I see players who are struggling, and I am ready to put my virtual body between them and the bad guys so that they can survive, thrive, and learn to have more fun. It's challenging, sure, but I believe in stepping up to the challenge.
And I don't do it out of pure altruism either. Tanking is its own reward, because when you click on the "join random dungeon now" button, you are in a group within five seconds or less. DPS don't get that; they have to wait for a long time before being brought into a group. It's supply and demand in action. More players want to be DPS, and the need for DPS is simply not enough to match that supply. Hence, the value is less than it would be otherwise.
From a gameplay perspective, tanking is cool because it forces you to thoroughly understand what's happening in every battle. In essence, it makes the game more like a satisfying single player RPG. In a game like Mass Effect, or Might and Magic, or Knights of the Old Republic, your AI teammates are following you around and there's never any doubt that you are the decider, so to speak. They are all your pets. They have different roles that make them valuable but they are basically there to do your bidding.
To me, tanking brings an MMO close to replicating that single player experience, except that your teammates can still give you advice or chat with you. Not only is it fun, but it provides a service to others, even if it's only the service of having a more fun experience for people pretending to be heroes in a fake world on their computer screen. It's a harder game to play but ultimately pretty rewarding.
In my next diary, as I mentioned before, I'm going to talk about Libertarians with a different perspective on the game.