Tank

An embarrassingly long time ago I wrote:

I've had good runs through difficult dungeons, where the team moved as one and nobody died, and the difference is largely due to the tank. A good tank makes a good run, and a bad tank makes a bad run, whoever else is on the team. It's that simple.

Well it's not quite that simple, but the basic point remains valid. Since writing that I have spent a lot of time as a tank, and am enjoying it enormously. I started with a warrior, but am now power-levelling a "tankadin" (paladin tank). She will probably be my first level 85 character — after nearly two years of playing WoW. This is possibly a record for slowness.

Paladins are a great class for naturally curious (or indecisive) people like myself, because they can fill every role in the game more or less well. They can heal and revive, deal damage, and take it in too; they can run up to a mob and beat the stuffing out of it with their hand weapons, or stand back and throw damage spells at it. I'm finding the combination of tanking plus being able to bless, heal and revive teammates to be great fun.

They do have deficits compared to more specialized classes (intentionally so, else everyone would just play a paladin and the game would become monotonous). Warrior tanks are much better at holding the attention of groups of mobs, and have instant long-range attacks in case they need to persuade a mob to leave their healer alone. I'm not sure whether I will stick with the tankadin; for now my plan is to level her up to my warrior tank and play both side-by-side for a while, to see which I prefer.

I think what I like about tanking — and this was true of healing as well — is the responsibility that it carries. The tank and the healer are responsible for the safety and success of the party, and bear all of the risk.To my mind there is no significantly less challenge in DPSing, because nothing bad can ever happen to the DPSer if the tank and the healer do their jobs well (assuming that the DPSers don't stand in the fire*). The only way that a DPSer can endanger the party is by getting carried away and pulling new mobs into an already complex fight, overpowering the tank and depleting the healer's mana. If they avoid that mistake, and it's easily avoided with a little common sense, the worst trouble they can cause is to slow the team down.

This is not to say that the DPSers are unnecessary! The role of the tank is not to kill mobs, but to make them hate him more than anyone else in the party. Without good damage-dealers even low-level fights would soon be lost, as the injury to the tank would slowly but surely drain the healer's mana dry. No DPS = healer OOM** = dead tank = wipe.

If I say so myself, I am a pretty good tank. In many of my runs, nobody dies — which is as big a boast for a tank as it is for doctors. Updated In the interests of truth and keeping my ego in check, I should mention that tonight's trip to Gnomeregan wiped once and lost two players in single incidents.

* WoW shorthand for "doing something incredibly stupid."
** Out Of Mana, unable to cast any healing spells.

More wiping

Spent an hour in a new (to me) dungeon in WoW this evening, and very frustrating it was too. The party wiped twice, and nearly wiped twice more. The mobs in Maraudon are cleverer than in lower levels: they know to try to take out the healer, and react sooner and more viciously to my presence. I died in every run. In the end, the team just withered away, dropping out one by one after the last wipe. I have the strong feeling that at least some blamed me for the wipes. "WTF healer!" from somebody who ran ahead of the group, got out of sight and was hammered.

I see that differently. If I (the healer) tell you I'm out of energy (unable to do any healing in the immediate future) and sit down to replenish energy, and if you (the tank or DPSer) then walk away from me and get into trouble: that's your own damned fault and it serves you right.

It's amazing to me how little some players know about the mechanics of WoW: it comes as a great surprise to them to discover that I cannot heal them at great distances, or with walls between us. Many tanks don't appreciate that their role is to prevent others from receiving damage (the healer, for example) and will ignore cries for help from the "squishies."

Healing is a fulfilling role in itself, but carries much frustration with it. On the positive side, tanks and healers can always get a place in a random group almost instantly: I've rarely had to wait more than two minutes after joining the queue, compared to up to a quarter-hour for my mage.

However, on the other hand, many players seem to view the healer as a silent reproach, a reminder of their imperfection and fallibility: like standing in view of a juggler while holding a broom and dustpan. When things go well, the healer is superfluous: just extra competition for the trinkets and money that should have been theirs — because they're doing all the work, amiright? But the second things start to go wrong, the cry goes up "Healer! where the fuck are you?" And if somebody dies, it's the healer's fault for not saving them.

I've been in maybe two dozen dungeon parties so far as healer, in addition to other roles, and have saved maybe a hundred people's bacon many times over. I have been thanked for that: once. Now, I'm not doing dungeons for compliments but because I enjoy the role and want to do it well; but a little recognition once in a while would be appreciated.

It's not always like that. I've had good runs through difficult dungeons, where the team moved as one and nobody died, and the difference is largely due to the tank. A good tank makes a good run, and a bad tank makes a bad run, whoever else is on the team. It's that simple. I have met three good tanks and an excellent one, and the difference between them and the bad'uns can be summed up in two words: awareness and generosity. More on tanking in another post.

Wiping

I've been playing a lot of World of Warcraft lately, I was inworld for most of last weekend and almost the whole of today (a midweek day off). I recently discovered dungeons, and what a barrel-of-monkeys of fun and stress they are!

A dungeon is a special challenge within WoW, a section of the world that is cordoned off for a team to fight its way through a set of quests culminating in at least one "boss" — a super-villain, particularly strong and difficult to kill, often with special abilities. The team consists of five people: the tank, a heavily armoured warrior who holds the mob's attention to keep it from hitting the weaker members; a healer to keep the tank alive; and three DPS'ers who try to kill the mob without attracting its attention. The healer is also responsible for reviving the DPS'ers if the mob manages to hit them.

The mobs are stronger than usual outside the dungeon, most of them need the concentrated attention of two or more people to kill them. (By way of comparison: although a discipline priest, just about the weakest role in the game, my healer can often take on two mobs at once outside of dungeons. And by way of a boast: my arcane mage, one of the stronger offensive roles in the game, once soloed a mob that had had the team sweating, when it respawned and attacked her while the others were taking a break. The tank woke up near the end and came running over, but then just stood behind her watching and laughing.)

Healer is my favourite role in WoW, as I mentioned some time back; and dungeons bring healing to a fine art. I was healer today in five dungeon runs, and mostly I did very well if I do say so myself. But on one run, I wiped out the party. Entirely preventable, and largely my fault. I let the tank get out of sight, he ran into a crowd of mobs and got killed; with him gone, they made short work of the rest of us.

Still here

But still tired. Absolutely drained this evening, I came home earlyish from work with the best of intentions, wanting to write something sensible and meaningful, but after thirty minutes of staring at the screen I have to admit that it isn't going to happen. Sorry.

Thought for the day

Just a quickie to prove that I am still alive:

[13:51] Bau Ur: I have confronted, in the last couple of years, how much of what I had thought was "me" was simply youth, and is now gone.
[13:51] Bau Ur: There is, however, a hell of a lot of me left to go around.

First steps

I had a new experience last night: I accompanied someone during her first steps in Second Life. Sidi is now a resident of SL: the first person whom I've told about it face-to-face in my RL who actually made the leap. We sat side-by-side in her RL office as she created an account and took her first steps in-world.

Sidi started on the new birthing place (I've forgotten the name already, perhaps they are again called Orientation Islands) and quickly moved on to a shopping district, one of the four starting destinations for people leaving the OI. She was rightly disappointed by the poor quality of the goods on display, so I gave her L$1000 and a landmark to Eshi Otawara's new store, where we met. She was delighted by Eshi's clothes, as I expected, and immediately bought and wore a nice red-and-black checked dress (one that I didn't own, it was important to her that we not look alike).

It was fascinating to see how she felt her way into the world — and in particular I was surprised and pleased to see that she understood right away that it was a world not a game, a society not an entertainment. In fairness, it has to be said that she was primed to see it in this way: she and I have been talking about identity and character and interpersonal dynamics for decades (literally) and I've been telling her about SL since I joined it over three years ago.

While her av was in conversation with others, she kept leaning over to ask me "How do I respond to that? What should I say?" Not because she was lost for words, she is an artist after all, but that she couldn't judge the context. "Do I trust this person whom I've just met for the first time? Do I greet him formally or informally? Should I be warm and friendly or keep him at a distance?" All very astute questions.

She's hooked. She described how the feeling of embodiment in her avatar grew as we improved Sidi's appearance in easy stages. Right from the beginning she referred to her avatar as "me," rather than "her" (or even "it") as many newborns do.

I was shocked to see how difficult she found her first hour in-world. There is so much to learn, and so little in the way of assistance with the learning. Sidi had trouble with many of the concepts of virtuality, in particular movement and camera controls. She said several times that she would have given up if I weren't there giving advice and encouragement.

When I joined SL there was a long, intricate and carefully orchestrated tutorial that took at least an hour to work through, but which gave newborns a thorough grounding in the basics of SL. People apparently complained that it took too long, they just wanted to get the cybersex already, so it was scrapped in favour of a small four-screen tutorial dialog that many newborns never even noticed. That too has been scrapped in favour of six freestanding posters (easier to notice) which tell the newbs things that they won't need for several days or at least hours. Every change that the Lindens make to the newborn experience makes it less useful and more confusing. IMHO YMMV.

The advertising for SL apparently gives the impression that anyone can just rez into SL and immediately start having huge balls of fun with no training or preparation. This is simply not true, and people who come in-world expecting that are disappointed and angry. I think we (and by that I mean the Lindens) must face the fact that SL is big and complex, like every MMORPG-like world is, and that new users need to spend time learning its interface, as they do in every MMORPG-like world. And indeed in reality, RL is full of learning curves too. Every city's bus service has its own ticketing machines, for example. Nobody complains that RL is too hard, though. I wonder why not?

My third life

I've been slaughtering my way through World of Warcraft for a forthnight now, and have finally arrived at what feels like a character and a mode of being that I can enjoy. (I wrote about the differences and similarities between WoW and SL on my workshop blog.)

I've made a total of three characters so far, searching for a role that I felt comfortable playing. My first was basically my Dragon Age: Origins character recreated in WoW, a human female rogue. (All my characters are Alliance, amusingly enough, the Horde somehow just doesn't fit me at all.) She got up to level 11 before becoming distressed by the relentless killing. I then created a Night Elf huntress, but found her fey gestures and slowness to attack really annoying. (Yes, thank you, I am aware of and amused by the contrast between my statements about these characters.)

I went back to the rogue for a while, to see whether I might get across the hump of moral unease about killing if I just kept at it long enough. As I was lying around dead one day (at the lower levels of experience and ability, one spends a fair amount of time dead), a stranger came running past, a priest. He stopped and without saying a word revived me, healed me and blessed me, and then just ran on about his business before I'd realized what was happening. I couldn't even say a quick "ty" before he was gone.

I had an epiphany in that moment. "That is something that I could do, that I could enjoy doing," I said to myself, and immediately went back to create a priestess. She has been having a wonderful time, running about WoW blessing and healing random strangers. She's joined a few questing groups as a Healer, which basically means standing well back and ensuring that the fighters don't die; the group system in WoW means that all who take part in a quest get the experience benefits of it — so she doesn't even have any disbenefit in moving up the level hierarchy.

As I said at the beginning, I think I've found a role that I can be comfortable playing. After the free trial ran out, I signed up for a three month subscription; we'll see at the end of that time whether I am still interested in continuing.