The Group Trifecta

I haven't posted much lately... At work it's mostly reports and boring garbage. In WOW it's be a few drab KZ runs and maybe a heroic.

But I was thinking this morning about the delicate balance in WoW groups and raids. Healers, DPS, Tanking. The other night in KZ really emphasized how much each depends on the other two. When we called it, I showed me doing 27% of the damage in there. When you do over 1/4 the work of 6 people, that's significant. But I had to scale back my DPS a lot in parts so to not pull aggro. Against Attumen, half way through the fight, I feigned death, burned my cooldowns, and still pulled aggro off the tank in 14 seconds, and I dropped like a prom dress turning him around again. The warlock was dying every other pull. I don't know what he was doing and I suspect he didn't know either. Anyway, the run sort of sucked.

If DPS is low, the fights will go on longer and healing will run out of mana, tank will die and you wipe. If tanking is low, DPS will have to scale back and healing will have to pick up, healing will run out of mana and you wipe. If healing is low, the tank will die and you wipe. It's like the sum of the three need to be a certain level to take an instance.

I've been in heroic runs where I end with 45% of the damage. That's with Aspect of the Viper, 37 DPS arrows, a mid-60s pet that I'm bringing up, and me scaling back to stay under the tank's threat. My gear's nice, but I've seen far better. One of the downsides of Blizzard reducing the requirement to get into heroic dungeons from "revered" to "honored", very undergeared people now have access to heroic instances.

So I'd recommend running a comparison at http://be.imba.hu/ before any PUG run. If you see everyone else sucks, you can feign a network outage and play an alt.

Well that was 3-4 posts all mashed into one. Hmm.