I was amused to load up Dragon Age Legends last night and find a message urging me to recruit friends to the game and to urge them to play a tank. Given Blizzard’s new Call to Arms program, which rewards needed archetypes that queue for random dungeons with potions, loot and cosmetic items like mounts and pets, I was a little surprised to see this bleed into the world of social gaming.
Just to be clear, I enjoy playing with warrior friends on DAL, but mostly I need AE DPS and mana drainers — mages. My melee speced rogue can tank and assassinate, and I have a whole castle full of workers churning out potions to help.
Anyway. People who play high level tanks and healers are a purer form of humanity, free of the taint and blemish that marks those of us who tend to play DPS classes. We’d treasure our tanks back in EverQuest, carefully gear and equip them and wish them well when they left for better guilds.
I’m not denying tanks and to some extend, healers, have a position of responsibility in a group. But that’s only because game designers designed the classes to some have greater responsibility than the others. It’s not hard to think of group design based on preventing action taken by monsters — mezzing, permastunning, knockbacks and such. Or one based on crafting illusions to confuse and bedazzle critters. Or one that would turn the environment against the monsters.
There’s other choices. Blizzard dug its own hole, and bribing certain players to help make random dungeon groups form faster is just a bandaid on a cast covering a design that was broken to begin with.
Daily heroics in WoW are just queue + 30 minutes in the dungeon = the loot I want. You don’t grind dailies because you yearn for adventure. If Blizzard really wanted to streamline things, they could just pop five players into a room and after half an hour, a chest with loot would appear. There you go, problem solved to everyone’s satisfaction and nobody is waiting for a tank to queue.
7 thoughts on “Entitlement in Dragon Age Legends (and WoW)”
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I tanked yesterday with my newly levelled Warden and was excited that I managed to get and keep aggro. But I simply do not belong to the rare tank player species. I felt like performing variations of the same spectacle to “taunt” mobs into attacking me rather than the players that will kill them so much more easily. It was quite boring for me, will probably take a break till new content comes around and then continue playing my Champion who is a quite good substitute tank that feels much more natural to me when AoE tanking. Shing-shing.
The aggro/trinity system was always artificial, but these concept are present in the majority of contemporary MMOs. Apparently not even dual specs and other tricks worked to make more people enjoy this position of greater responsibility that in some cases and games can also be somewhat dull.
If daily heroics were really just queue+30 mins then there wouldn’t be an issue. A heroic can take up to a couple of hours if you have a few wipes — which is seen as being more likely in a totally random group than if you go with some friends. (ofc it’s possible that the random group will be great but those aren’t the runs people remember.)
I know the trinity has issues but the issue facing WoW is that people hate heroics.
This is where I repeat my oft-stated belief that if someone would make a full-blown, beautiful graphics, 3D version of ProgressQuest they would have issued themselves a licence to print money.
How is the design broken to begin with? I imagine anyone who does the heroics multiple times isn’t really yerning for adventure?
At a certain point, it’s not the design that’s broken, it’s human behaviour that’s broken – to gravitate toward something not liked, yet blame the design as if it’s at fault for that?
I have to (mostly) agree with Spinks. Bliz created the “heroic daily” concept in the middle of the Wrath expansion, when people were already geared to such a level that the old heroics were trivial. The purpose of the dailies were to get already geared players to be willing to run the old, obsolete content that had nothing for them so that newer players could run through them and gear up. It served this purpose well, but the general feeling with that they were “terribly boring” since they were trivial to do. Still, they were quick and easy, and let people gain tokens by putting in 20 – 35 minutes any day they wanted some tokens.
In Cataclysm they kept the heroic daily, and addressed the concern that the heroics are trivial by increasing the complexity and difficulty. The problem is that these two goals clash with each other, badly. Complex and challenging heroics are fine… if they are optional and you can run them with friends on your own schedule. Dailies that feel “required” to keep up with your gearing need to be quick so that they don’t eat up too much of your day.
Daily heroics in WotLK were, if you did them every single day, maybe 3 – 4 hours of your week. Do the same in Cataclysm and you are committing to 7 – 15 hours of your week. Is it any wonder that there is much resistance?
i kinda like the idea when i think about it; when i play rift its usually 35-65% rogues if not more; about 10% healers/tanks. Even with the very cool ability to change souls; most rogues don’t change to a tank or heal role even if their team was lacking it and then they complain about lack of heals
Haha, it’s always interesting to hear what things are like in other games!
In dungeons and dragons healers are pretty scarce on the ground too, but there seems to be no shortage of tanks! (To be honest they have recently added half orcs though, not many classes you can excell in as a half orc beside meat shield :P). The way they got round the lack of player playing classes that people actually need was adding computer controlled hirling, I kinda like this as a fix, because theres no way a computer NPC can compete with an actual player, but they will just about draw the agro or keep you from dying.
(DDO is hardly free from problems though, they tend to go over board, offering +1 loot events that completely ruin the internal economy for months afterwards)