Rants tag

Rants, ruminations, and rambling remarks from my mad, muddled, meandering mind.

Monday, September 10, 2012

QOTD: Why I Heal/Tank

As any experienced tank or healer will tell you, sometimes it’s stressful as HELL. But I do it anyway, because what I really love is helping others. As in having the ability to keep others, especially my friends, alive.
Guild Wars 2 sort of gets rid of tanks but still has healers, though they're nowhere near as powerful as some other games. Everyone is responsible for some amount of DPS, as well as their own safety. Luckily, there are incentives to help others, like XP for reviving downed characters, both players and NPCs. While it makes for interesting dynamics, as a healer for the better part the last six years, it's hard to break away from that role. Like GeeCee, I love keeping my friends alive.

4 comments:

  1. My first ever character was a warrior in WoW, and I created it before I even had heard of the trinity. It wasn't until I started playing, I learned of the value of being a tank, and I reveled in it. Then... it changed. Players still needed tanks, but the whole success/failure/pacing of a run was placed on them. Essentially, if it was a great run, everyone took credit. However, if the run went poorly, it was solely the tank's fault. This petty way to thinking, after a while, caused me to hate tanking and despise the trinity.

    I loved tanking because I got to be the "protector". I'll take the blows to preserve the team. Awesome. I still love it for that reason. But all the blame and despise when something went wrong... caused me to stop playing them.

    I love helping, but when the helper gets blamed for the entire groups failures... it just becomes too much of a burden to play.

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    Replies
    1. I know what you mean. I think blaming tanks for failure of the group reflects a serious ignorance of group mechanics. Yes sometimes it is their fault; sometimes it's the healer; and sometimes, quite honestly, it's a DPSer. Rescuing you from your own folly is not the tank's job, nor the healer.

      Now, as GeeCee pointed out in her post, GW2 has made DPS and Support roles more diffuse, and there are times when you will die. That is not the fault of any healer, and there is no tank to blame. As a healer, it stings to watch someone go down. It's just something we will have to get used to.

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  2. I'd played a Tank for forever it seem. When i started in WoW and read the class description the line that got me was "defending his/her allies", "with shield and sword". That more than anything spoke to me deep down at my core as to how I wanted to play with any friends I would eventually make in the game. I knew absolutely no one at that point in the game and knew next to nothing about WoW back when I started as a Tank. I had no idea what a tank was either, not till a long time later in level. Actually i played the game solo all the way in BC up to lvl 60 and I still didn't know what a Tank was. I just didn't understand the terminology. But I still enjoyed defending my friends, so much so I leveled from lvl 1 all the way to max level playing with Sword and Shield.

    So in a way I can understand MMOGC comment feeling a bit helpless so see friends fall in a Instance and can't do much about it as compared to other games when your clearly the healer or a tank. The way i see it is GW2 makes you adapt to life without either, to come up with more interesting ways to complete the task. Can you imagine what that would be like in a GW2 PUG?

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  3. Yeah, I think it will take a lot of getting used to for everyone before we're able to pug something like that. The best that can be said right now is that no one can legitimately try to blame another player for a wipe, unless they were pulling too many mobs or something.

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