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.