I am not very active in blogging these 2 months since everyone is just waiting for Legion while WOD slowly rest in peace. For the sake of keeping this blog alive, today I’ll just rant about random stuffs =)
Time really fly, we have already play this game for 12 years. That’s a decade! I remember starting WOW as a tank for 1 year, switch to healing for the next 8 years, and finally a DPS for the most recent 3 years. Although I still off-spec heal and tank once in a while, my main focus is DPS nowadays.
Tank Role (2004)
nah, there is nothing relevant to talk about here. i am just a noob, doing 5-man dungeons and having fun :)
Healer Role (2005 to 2013)
I started raiding as a healer because back then it is very easy to join a guild if im raiding as a healer. At that time, all healers wear cloth (it is quite funny that many players don’t understand why my paladin is still a tailor today) back in classic wow because the best healing stats are usually found in cloth.
Healer role is quite stressful because we have to look at the HP bars of everybody and also respond to boss mechanics and re-positioning, etc. In addition, I often find myself at the mercy of other players too. What I mean is the stress of healing is greatly affected by the performance of the DPSer and the tanks. Many things will make a healer job tougher. For example:
- when the tank is not using proper gears
- when players make mistakes / stand in fire
- when DPSer/Tanks are not using their own defensive CD to ease damage-taken
- when everyone is under-geared and boss takes longer to kill
- when players did not research / min-max their class potential
Naturally, most of these usually happen during progression when everybody is not ready to tackle the challenge. Due to all these difficulties, it can be very rewarding for a healer when the boss is finally down the first time.
I specifically mention (the first time) because on subsequence kills, the job of a healer will be significantly easier as compared to the first time it is down. And then it became relax for the healer once the bosses are on farm mode (assuming it is still the same team of players/characters). This will also become the ceiling heal cap for the healer because in most encounters, once you managed to out-heal the damage, there is only so much to heal and the next efficient way is to reduce the number of healers in the raid, which is kind-of weird.
DPS Role (2013 to 2016)
My guild took a long time to accept the reality that I finally decided to switch to a DPS role. Well, I did heal for 8 years after all. Eventually, everyone will get used to me as a DPS.
At first, I thought DPS role would be easy because I only need to take care of our own position, and then I just focus on my DPS rotation, like a solo job. I was wrong of course, as the more I played, the more I realized how dynamic DPS role can be.
Blizzard principle of “easy to learn, hard to master” really shines in a DPS role.
For example, 2 players with the same gears can have very different DPS result. The one with a better DPS rotation is the main factor why he is better. Talking about our own class, Ret paladins have single-target rotation, 2-target rotation, 3-target rotation and the AOE rotation. In addition, our rotation changes again during the uptime of a major CD or talents (AW / HA / DP). And once we acquire tier set bonus, our rotation will change again.
Even when 2 players are equally geared and equally skilful in our DPS rotation, the player who spends more time to research is still capable of pulling quite a margin ahead. There are many creative ways to do higher DPS. For example, if you know the timing of events in the fight, such as the timing when a wave of Adds appear for you to AOE, or a timing period when you will receive a buff to double your DPS, or when the boss is weaken for you to max DPS, etc.
Unlike a healer role, there is no ceiling healing cap. As a DPS, we always strive for more DPS. We will min-max every possible advantage to deal more DPS.
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