An Informative Attempt: The Fellowship of the DPS

People want an informative blog? FINE. I’ll make this blog more informative…with my own twist…and not really informative, because IT’S ALL BEEN SAID! Minus my unique perspective of only playing characters that can’t be tanks or healers…unless we’re 3 man-ing Crypts…with my hunter and 2 casters…*shifty eyes*…

Alright, let’s start this off strong. As you may or may not know, my three main characters are a Hunter, a Rogue, and a Warlock. Levels 70, 70, and 45 respectively. Their names are Vantox, Dramthar and Thamlack, all of which are fairly unique, I haven’t found anyone else in WoW with those names (aside from one shaman that’s apparently no longer being played) and I’ve been looking.

But this also means that I don’t truly know anything about healing or tanking. Sure I know tanks and healers and the like, but I’ve never tried my hand at it. So to put it simply, I’m purely DPS. And as such, I’m pretty sure I’ve got a pretty unique take on things compared to all those other people that have tanks and healers, or tank healers, or healing DPS or whatever.

People have recently been talking about the relationship between Tanks and Healers, or Tanks and DPS, or Healers and DPS, and I know about that stuff too. But I’m gonna talk about the DPS relationship. Sure there’s usually way more DPS than there are tanks and healers, but that doesn’t mean we don’t feed off each other and jack up the team’s overall damage output.

When playing on my hunter and I’m invited into a heroic takedown of some random place, I normally run with my mage friend Marcy (who will be an author on this blog soon), and another DPS, who lately has been a warlock. The tanks and healers have been there too, but that’s not what I’m talking about with this post. So the DPS has been BM hunter, Fire Mage, and probably an affliction warlock. Now, I didn’t really know the warlock, but he was doing rather grandly and not getting us all dead like, so I was all Zen with him.

The last heroic we did that I took part in was Ramparts, warrior tank, pally healer, and the 3 DPS mentioned above. Due to the nature of ramparts Marcy and I were the CC, on small pulls it was just sheepage, on anything larger I was chain trapping along with the sheepin’ action. This is one of our stronger co-op workings. She took care of the casters while I trapped the melee mobs; it was a beautiful thing…especially since the tank was very cooperative with the marking. Not to mention the fact that every time Vengeance crit, everyone’s damage got the Ferocious Inspiration buff of a 3% increase. All forms of DPS love it, tanks love it, healers couldn’t care less about it.

Now, CC is very touchy business, no AoE or multiple enemy strikes allowed, nothing explosive, and make sure to keep them well away from the focus. This also means that any other form of DPS has to know the kill order so as to not cause a wipe via CC breakage. This demands a trust and unspoken knowledge of who is doing what. That’s where the bond comes into play. If you know the other DPS well then you don’t have to say anything and you’ll know exactly what’s going to happen in every pull. This can go a LONG way to keep the group going strong and no one freaking out at any CC breaking and/or poor targeting by the DPS.

I don’t think the healers or tanks really get the DPS bond, and it’s not really easy to explain, but it’s there and it’s just as strong as any of the other ones…it’s just different. We don’t really rely on each other to keep ourselves healed or from stealing aggro off the tank, we’ve all got our own means of reducing aggro, but we do have the innate understanding to keep ourselves and the group from being killed through carefully timed and placed CC. Plus we all just thoroughly enjoy pumping out the damage, it’s something we all do and specialize in, so we’ve got that going for our unspoken understanding jazz.

Well, that’s all I’ve got for that topic currently, if you’ve got anything to add feel free to comment or whatever, you're call.

Belan shi karkun.

Good Hunting,

Tox