The Role of Role

Greg Street, aka Ghostcrawler, posted yesterday an interesting essay on roles. He emphasizes that it’s just for the sake of discussion and that no choice has been made as of today.

It sparked a great deal of discussion on the many community sites, as well as in my mind. So, naturally, I wanted to write about it.

As you may know, I’ve been playing my rogue for years. I’ve also played a druid, a priest, a death knight, a warlock, a shaman, a paladin, a hunter; all at the highest level possible at the time. While my specific area of expertise is the rogue’s, I feel I can speak about the other classes too.

To sum Greg’s up, here’s the breakdown of our options:

1. all the classes are at the same level, i.e. same dps and hps, same utility
2. every spec has a fight specialty, e.g. aoe, burst, single target
3. every spec has a specific utility, e.g. damage mitigation, adds control
4. two specs, i.e. PvE and PvP
5. every class has three specs, i.e. dps, heal and tank

Now, 1) makes the game boring as hell and complex to balance¹, but it’s probably the easiest way to attract new, unexperimented players; 2) is pretty much what I feel we currently have in game, that is specs that work well for certain encounters, and not so well for others; 3) is also kinda what we have today, but oriented more towards utility; 4) is basically what we experienced back in vanilla and Burning Crusade; finally, 5) is a complete rewrite of the classes.

Having played since vanilla, I’d more gladly root for proposition 4 than most current players would. I remember back in the Burning Crusade, we rogues had the Assassination and Subtlety specs for PvP, and Combat for PvE. Then Assassination gradually switched over to be a PvE spec; at one time even Combat was great in PvP too². You have to remember that point allocation was not forced onto us and we could easily build so-called hybrid specs.

But I feel like 2012’s Blizzard will never go down this road again. They have to bring in new customers. So that rules out proposition 4, and 5 since it’s too late to overhaul all ten classes³. Since propositions 2 and 3 are almost what we have today, it leaves us, or should I say Blizzard, proposition 1.⁴ While this would ask for a great deal of work from the developers, it would also be the most dumb-proof solution: if all the classes and specs pull the exact same numbers and have the exact same utility, then all that’s left is merely a cosmetic choice. Someone would choose a paladin over a warlock because it feels AWEEEEEEEEESOOOOME to be a baddass, plate-wearing motherfucker instead of a sadistic, dress-wearing necrophile…⁵ Well, that, and it’s best for a noob not to be reminded how her lack of research, involvement and optimization makes her such a bad player.

But, hey, looking at what Blizzard brought us last patch, I’m pretty sure that’s the way the game will go. Favoring the unexperimented players, and letting the dedicated ones rot and moan about how great the game once was.