While I don't necessarily agree with Keen in my previous post about class consolidation necessarily decreasing combat depth, I do agree with him insofar as having support classes can be fun.
When folks talk about the Holy Trinity, it's basically a way of dealing with threat mechanics in a way that makes some sense to the players. Tanks deal with taking damage, Healers fix damage taken, and Damagers (or DPS in more common parlance) take out the baddies.
It wasn't always like this, though. In older MMOs like Everquest, you also had Buffers and Debuffers. While WoW has rolled those two class archetypes into tanks, healers, and DPS, I find I miss having that very specific role where your job couldn't necessarily be numerically evaluated quite so easily.
When you look at D&D 4th Edition, they don't have a trinity, they have a quartet: Leaders (healers/buffers), Defenders (tanks), Strikers (DPS), and Controllers (debuffers). I often find playing a controller or leader is actually a lot of fun. The ability to move people around combat, change the face of the battlefield, or give folks bonuses to their damage or to hit, is harder to measure than damage taken/healed/done, but is still an immense help to the party. To be honest, I prefer one of those roles over Strikers, because while big numbers can be fun, I find my combat options tend to be more limited as a Striker.
In Vanilla, WoW did effectively have buff classes in the form of early Paladin and Shaman. Though, I'll grant you that having to spend all your time buffing 40 players one-by-one with Kings, then starting over and buffing them again one-by-one because it would expire soon wasn't a good implementation of a buff class. However, with EQ-style Bards you could "twist" songs to provide up to two buffs at once to your party, and you had a number of different buffs to hand out based on the context of the situation.
Now, Blizzard did basically decide that buff classes as they were in Vanilla were not the way to go. Over time, every class was relegated to DPS, Heals, or Tank, and buffs and debuffs got distributed across all classes. Bring the player, not the class, right? Though you still need to bring a specific role.
It makes me wonder if rolling up buffs and debuffs into the Holy Trinity was required, or if there's room for classes specifically devoted to helping other people? Or was it perhaps a side-effect of a very numbers-driven sub-culture, where Recount was king, and if you weren't pulling numbers, you weren't effective? In WoW, damage meters of some sort existed as far back as late Vanilla at least.
The ability to measure your output is interesting and mildly contentious. It's very difficult to improve if you don't know how much damage or healing you're outputting or taking. On the other hand, if there was no ability to measure that number, people wouldn't focus on it either. RIFT tried this for a while, but the developers eventually reneged based on player feedback, so I'm not sure that particular genie can be stuffed back in the bottle.
But as per my point earlier about D&D 4th Edition Strikers, perhaps that's the more important point. Strikers I find dull because they exist to do damage and nothing else. Perhaps rolling up buffing and debuffing into DPS doesn't have to be about buffs and debuffs being dull. Perhaps it could be that just plain old DPS is dull, and giving them buffs and debuffs to handle as well as DPS makes the role more interesting?
While I don't think we'll ever be able to see a buff/debuff class in WoW--it just doesn't fit in the playstyle anymore with the distribution across classes and rolls having already occurred--I think perhaps we might be able to see something like that in other games that don't quite have the Trinity so entrenched.
#GameDesign, #HolyTrinity
I think one of the roles needed to disappear, but the wrong one was chosen. The Damage role should have disappeared, and been reallocated to the other roles of Tank, Healer, Debuffer.
ReplyDeleteThe reason for this is that optimization seeks to minimize those three roles, and maximize damage. You want to bring the minimum number of tanks, healers and debuffers, and then fill out the rest of the raid with damage. I think that produces an unfortunate tension. If instead all three roles did comparable damage, group comp becomes very flexible after the minimums are filled.
+1. If Tanks, Healers, Buffers, and Debuffers all did similar amounts of damage, no DPS role existed, and you reduced overlap between roles (ie: Tanks have little to no self-healing, healers have few to no buffs, so and and so forth), I think you could manage to build a system that would work mathematically.
DeleteThe question then becomes is it still fun? The one thing consolidation gives you is more things to do--healers in WoW today can buff, heal, and in some cases DPS. DPS can damage, debuff, and in some cases heal. Having that many things you could possibly do is attractive from a gameplay perspective.
I agree. I think an important balancing factor of a role is whether it's offensive or defensive - and of the well-known ones, only damage dealers are offensive. (Buffers/supporters are a bit mixed but all others are defensive - even controllers are designed to neutralize damage taken.) Such a system would also scale down better, as no matter how few players there are, both offense and defense would be covered.
DeleteOn the other hand, adding/keeping debuffers would require rethinking boss fights. Since most of them are one (boss) against many (players) and debuffs/CC usually are on/off spells, they are overpowered unless the boss has means to protect itself. It's possible to make something like a debuff shield (I believe Wildstar did so) but at the time, most developers probably took the easier way of making them immune - which reduced the role of debuffers in fights and may have helped their demise...
Or perhaps debuffs could stack and have rapid falloff times, or certain combos of debuffs spawn new debuffs (either your own or with someone else's, not unlike chain attacks in FFXI perhaps). Maybe while the boss is moving he gets a resistance to one kind of debuff, but another becomes more effective. Lots of ideas to make them more interesting!
DeleteBut yes, making things immune such as bosses is a time honored tradition since individual debuffs tended to be uber powerful. Instead, make them weaker and stackable.
DeleteI'd prefer something similar to City of Heroes where the difficulty of the mob determined how many time the effect had to be stacked in order to occur and then how long it would last.
DeleteThe thing about making buffs/debuffs work for modern audiences is returning them to their roots of creating windows of opportunity, not simple toggles that add zero additional gameplay. Imagine an ability like Sunder, but instead of always being maintained, a base level might always be up, but managing to stack it fully would be quite tricky and rare, creating smaller windows of opportunity. DPS then would take on a new role of being aware of what debuffs were active and adjusting rotations/dropping cooldowns reactively to them.
Buffs could work the same way. Imagine healing other player's resource mechanics or trying to maintain shields or stacking Bloodlust-like buffs on single targets.
Lots more opportunity for active gameplay beyond taunting, healing, and DPS rotations.
"Lots more opportunity for active gameplay beyond taunting, healing, and DPS rotations."
DeleteYou mean like...
Cooldown usage?
Mitigation?
Positioning?
Avoiding stuff?
Crowd control?
Priorities (who needs to be healed first, what needs to be DPSes first, AoE versus single target, etc)?
But no, sorry, apparently things boil down to "taunt/heal/DPS" unless we have threat and designated buffers/debuffers!
Are you forgetting BC where they had exactly this?
ReplyDeleteSpriests for mana regen. Elemental Shaman to boost spellcasters in their group. Enhancement Shaman to boost melee in their group. Boomkins to add a spell damage debuff. Arms warriors to add a physical damage taken debuff. Etc.
So what happened? Good raid leaders charted out the optimal group composition.
Always have exactly 1 Boomkin -- 2 is a waste, 0 means your raid has less DPS.
Always have exactly 1 Elemental Shaman -- 2 is a waste, 0 means your raid has less DPS.
Always have exactly 1 Enhancement Shaman -- 2 is a waste, 0 means your raid has less DPS.
Always have exactly 1 Arms Warrior -- 2 is a waste, 0 means your raid has less DPS.
Always have 2-3 shadow priests -- too many and you lose too much DPS, too few and you have to bring in extra healers and/or you mana dependent classes lose DPS.
There was *extremely* precise math to calculate benefits of these characters and thus "that very specific role where your job couldn't necessarily be numerically evaluated quite so easily" never existed.
Yes, but the problem with TBC was each class' job was still primarily DPS and they each happened to bring one buff/debuff. That isn't a buff/debuff class, that's the precursor to today's model where everyone has a little bit of everything.
DeleteUse Final Fantasy XIII as a different example--yes, the single player game. They had debuffers, chain-builders, chain-maintainers, tanks, buffers, and healers. The first 3 classes are capable of DPS, though the chain-builders and chain-maintainers far moreso once a chain had been built.
But there's also a mechanic that's no less contrived than threat (chains) that allowed for a completely new role. While buffs were relatively temporary, there were options for group buffs, and you could cycle through a plethora of them, rather than just 1. Debuffs were vital to being able to do damage in a lot of cases as well. The trick is to ensure your buff/debuffers are not one-trick ponies.
Take D&D 4th Edition, for example. Warlords can heal, but they're far more useful on the battlefield as a way to increase the to-hit and damage of players in physical proximity, as well as re-position characters (enemy and ally) around the battlefield. Yeah, they can do some healing, an can do a little damage, but that's not their primary focus, and it's incredibly handy having one in your party.
WoW is far too entrenched for any of that today, and I would never argue to change WoW's model. It just made for a great historical note in the conversation. And I realize both examples I gave were for small parties of 3 - 5 people. Ramping that up to 10 or even 25 might be a bit of an issue.
On the other hand, as Rohan said, if everyone can do reasonably the same DPS, you'll want say, 2 tanks, 4 - 5 healers, 2 - 3 buffers, 2 - 3 debuffers, and then everyone else can be whatever they want. Maybe to offset healer ability, reduce the amount of damage healers can output so you still maintain that tension. I'm just spitballing at this point.
But my point is WoW is an absolutely terrible example of buff/debuff classes, and the only thing it had that came close to the actual concept was ye olde Paladins in Vanilla. And that was an awful implementation still.
And? I see this pointed out all the time, but that doesn't mean every guild ran with a perfect lineup.
DeleteThey may have recruited along lines similar to this, but I don't know many raiders who always had perfect teams ready to go.
Heck, our raiding guild was in the top 150 in the US and best on the server for most of TBC, and we ran Warlock heavy for the entire expansion because we had some really awesome warlocks.
WoW's problem is that a large subset of its most hardcore players decided to play the game like accountants running a business, rather than people interacting with people. We tried to eek out the most damage from the best group of players we could field on any given night, and that quite often meant forsaking the perfect layout to get in the best players possible.
After all, playing any game often boils down to proper execution, not just hitting enter after you've plugged in everything on the spreadsheet.
@Murf
DeleteAt the same time, when most of your raiders are capable at executing at a high enough level, it really just does boil down to accounting. To be fair, that's probably easier to attain in a 10-man group rather than 25 or 40.
You're right, sir, but we were exclusively running 25's at the time. 10's were off nights. With such a small server, even as the only prominent raiding guild around, maintaining a perfect roster was next to impossible.
DeleteNot to mention individual fights favoring different layouts as well, plus not everyone having equal time on every fight changing up how we might switch some in and out.
Lots of moving parts!
Though, there is an interesting argument to be made about the high-levels of play trickling down to the lower levels of play. You see it all the time where a World First guild stacks some class, and then a bunch of folks in Normal mode raiding start saying "Woe is me, my class sucks because Paragon didn't use it" when really all the classes play more than fine at that level of skill.
DeleteExecution is truly the problem for most players, but perception is powerful, unfortunately.
"Yes, but the problem with TBC was each class' job was still primarily DPS and they each happened to bring one buff/debuff."
DeleteNo, they were worth bringing as long as they could manage to pull like 40% of the DPS of an actual DPS. Their primary purpose was to bring the buffs/debuffs, anyone with a pulse who played that class was worth taking. You could be completely terrible at actually playing the class.
But let's even say you're correct: how is that any different from your paladin/shaman example whose primary purpose was to heal and they also brought powerful buffs?
"Take D&D 4th Edition, for example. Warlords can heal, but they're far more useful on the battlefield as a way to increase the to-hit and damage of players in physical proximity, as well as re-position characters (enemy and ally) around the battlefield. Yeah, they can do some healing, an can do a little damage, but that's not their primary focus, and it's incredibly handy having one in your party."
Take D&D 3rd edition, for example. Mages can nuke targets, but they're far more useful on the battlefield as a way to provide Haste for the party. Yeah, they can do some damage, and can do a little long term buffing, but that's not their primary focus, and it's incredibly handy having one in your party.
Better prep all your 3rd level slots with Haste, 4th with Extended Haste, 6th with Mass Haste, and 7th with Extended Mass Haste! Because that's a fun gameplay model, right?
And yet in NWN that's the optimal way to play a mage (or very close to it, technically replacing a few Hastes with long term buffs would be better but likely 40-50% of your spells will be Haste -- and even a higher proportion assuming you don't have access to level 8 or 9 spells.
"WoW is far too entrenched for any of that today, and I would never argue to change WoW's model. It just made for a great historical note in the conversation. And I realize both examples I gave were for small parties of 3 - 5 people. Ramping that up to 10 or even 25 might be a bit of an issue."
It's not just WoW, though -- can easily look at things like casters in DnD as well who basically exist to buff their party and then attempt (lousily) to hit enemies with a crossbow during actual battle. Because a Bull's Strength is better than a Melf's Acid Arrow 95%+ of the time.
And I'm not sure it's even small versus large parties, though that could be a factor. I think it's more difficulty -- with things meant to be easy, whether the group is 5% more powerful with the fifth person as a buffer versus 5% weaker doesn't matter. But that 5% would be insanely important in a heroic raid.
"we ran Warlock heavy for the entire expansion because we had some really awesome warlocks."
Warlocks were brokenly powerful, I don't see how this is relevant at all.
"We tried to eek out the most damage from the best group of players we could field on any given night, and that quite often meant forsaking the perfect layout to get in the best players possible."
How far into Sunwell did you get?
"Execution is truly the problem for most players, but perception is powerful, unfortunately."
It's also "why handicap youself?" I mean, every normal raid COULD go perfectly fine without flasks or food if everyone was competent...but why make things harder by being sub-optimal?
“But let's even say you're correct: how is that any different from your paladin/shaman example whose primary purpose was to heal and they also brought powerful buffs?”
Delete~ Implementation. Any such buffer would likely have no heals at all, or very few. And have a lot more buffs than just the one or two. And build actual game systems around it. An actual class that buffs people in an interesting way rather than the very 1-dimensional aspect that Vanilla buff classes had.
“Better prep all your 3rd level slots with Haste, 4th with Extended Haste, 6th with Mass Haste, and 7th with Extended Mass Haste! Because that's a fun gameplay model, right?”
~For many folks on this thread, the answer to that question is yes, it is a fun gameplay model. There’s a balance to be had between mathematical purity and the more nebulous concept of “fun”. I get that you don’t think it would be fun, that’s okay. I’m not trying to claim that this model would be better or more fun than WoW for everyone, but I am claiming that I or some folks may find it more fun.
“It's also "why handicap youself?" I mean, every normal raid COULD go perfectly fine without flasks or food if everyone was competent...but why make things harder by being sub-optimal?”
~Because at the level that the grand majority of players actually are capable of playing at, class balance means squat. Plenty of cases where classes that do well at lower levels of skill don’t actual do that great at high levels of skill. See: Frost Mages in Cata PvP. The blues were on record multiple times saying that Frost Mages were struggling in the upper echelons, but dominated lower because the class was easier to play. But that certainly wasn’t reflected by the folks who were in the top brackets, because it’s basically a different game when you’re talking that level of skill.
So basically, what does “handicap” even mean in this context? The people stuck in Normal mode raids, myself included, literally do not have the ability to use the full potential of their class, so that full potential that so many people base their decisions off of is actually meaningless in those people’s contexts.
"An actual class that buffs people in an interesting way rather than the very 1-dimensional aspect that Vanilla buff classes had."
DeleteAll I can say is that every time I've seen a game try to do support classes it's been terrible. Maybe some game could pull it off but I think it's especially difficult in large scale group content.
"I’m not trying to claim that this model would be better or more fun than WoW for everyone, but I am claiming that I or some folks may find it more fun."
Just to make sure we're on the same page: you think casting one Mass Haste spell every 2 minutes and otherwise AFKing is fun?
Or are you saying you think the IDEA of being support is fun even the example I just gave is awful?
"But that certainly wasn’t reflected by the folks who were in the top brackets, because it’s basically a different game when you’re talking that level of skill."
True enough. But bringing along an arms warrior in BC was worth it as long as he could play his spec at like 50% competency. Ditto for many/most other cases. You could be a pretty awful player and well below the average skill level of the raid and still be brought for your debuff/buff.
"So basically, what does “handicap” even mean in this context?"
It means the buff/debuff they provided was so strong the player could be much worse than your group but still worth taking. A player that gave a buff that increased everyone's damage by 20% would be worth taking even if they were AFK in a 10 man raid. Your group would still be better off despite your group not being at the full potential of your classes.
Argh, broswer glitch ate my comment.
Delete"Just to make sure we're on the same page: you think casting one Mass Haste spell every 2 minutes and otherwise AFKing is fun?
Or are you saying you think the IDEA of being support is fun even the example I just gave is awful?"
~ The idea is fun, despite your example being less than compelling gameplay-wise :)
Some games have managed support classes pretty well. City of Heroes is one that's brought up fairly often.
Re: Handicaps
~ Good points, thanks! And I agree with you that TBC buff design was awful. But as I mentioned, I think that's the wrong way to go about it. I think there's design room for a role who's sole purpose is to help other players do their jobs, but I think they'd have to be active about it (no passive buffs just for participating), and despite my protestations about measurement, I think it would have to be measurable so they could understand HOW they're helping people.
Just thinking out loud, now, but perhaps the bigger point here is folks like the idea of having more interdependency with their team besides choreography and the basics of the trinity roles. Choreography is difficult; executing on a strategy within the bounds of error, especifally in heroic/mythic/hard mode/whatever raiding takes a lot of skill, patience, and frankly mental AND physical endurance.
But when you look at a game like FFXI, with attack chains, they were quite popular. Anybody could contribute, and yeah, it required some knowledge of what the chains were, but it significantly increased the party's DPS when you pulled it off. Basically, your "rotation" spanned multiple players, and it felt good being in sync enough to manage it and the encounter mechanics (which frankly weren't quite as complex as other MMOs today, certainly). That's the sort of feeling I think people want when they say they want support classes.
On the other hand, I'm a big fan of unique boss choreography, because dealing with boss abilities, etc. gets old quick when you've fought literally 100 raid bosses. Class mechanics are second nature. Despite having an addon that tells me what button to press next for my Enhancement Shaman, I rarely look at it (unless I see I need to refresh a totem out of the corner of my eye), because the rotation is muscle memory. But you get folks who complain about "the dance" and want all the complexity within their characters, which clearly gets old once you've mastered your character and found that rhythm among your team, assuming you ever get there; not every player does or can. Boss mechanics as external impetus to change up your experience is important though because of that factor.
"Some games have managed support classes pretty well. City of Heroes is one that's brought up fairly often."
DeleteNever played it so can't comment.
"I think there's design room for a role who's sole purpose is to help other players do their jobs, but I think they'd have to be active about it (no passive buffs just for participating), and despite my protestations about measurement, I think it would have to be measurable so they could understand HOW they're helping people."
It also definitely raises the issue of scaling -- can't have them buff the whole group at once or it'll be much more valuable in a large group. To use a WoW analogy it'd have to do something like be able to buff a tank, a healer, and 2 DPS simultaneously but not more than that (and not able to only buff DPS).
"But you get folks who complain about "the dance" and want all the complexity within their characters, which clearly gets old once you've mastered your character and found that rhythm among your team, assuming you ever get there; not every player does or can. Boss mechanics as external impetus to change up your experience is important though because of that factor."
Exactly. Another problem is let's say you have a "controller" on the team whose job it is to CC mobs. Now every boss fight HAS to have adds or the controller is worthless. But it can't have too many adds or you need more controllers -- fights would have to adhere to a strict formula to avoid making people useless or making groups bring in extra of a particular role.
As a career Support player, I'm all over this post. New MMOs feel far too simplified for me, even as their combat gameplay has gotten far more advanced, simply because the roles have become far too cut and dry.
ReplyDeleteAnd it's not like Support classes cannot be fun. So many people bemoan tanking and healing already, citing how much more exciting DPS is, and they seem less likely to accept yet another 'intagible' role. But look at Kinetics in City of Heroes. You literally sucked the power and speed of enemies and gave it temporarily to your party. It was a blast and EVERYONE felt the difference!
Even beyond debuffs and buffs, there used to be a time where you brought people in for off-roles. A second tank in DPS gear, but with just enough staying power to hold down an add or two in a fight. A second healer to throw out damage, but keep people topped off in a pinch. Even those roles, as available as they still are to many classes across many games, have been largely ignored for the sake of ALL DPS or ALL DPS + a heal or taunt here and there.
As a Rogue in World of Warcraft, I was always excited when my incredible utility came into play within a group. An add jumps in? BLIND or GOUGE! Tank down? EVASION! That sort of gameplay challenges me as a master of a class and gives me a chance to experience a game far more dynamic than 'do x role perfectly'.
My dream is to go back to the group-centric of older MMOs with classes built to do specific roles that don't guarantee soloability. I want a Holy Quadrinity with four mother roles and then a ton of smaller sub-roles available. I want abilities that make doing your role active, always, rather than a couple of tanking cooldowns, a taunt, and then some crappy DPS filler.
Give me a Support and I'll give you support!
Back when I played FFXI one of my favorite classes to play was the Bard, a pure support class. It may have changed since, but back then the Bard was definitely well behind other classes in DPS, but its songs could make the other two DPS in your group twice as potent, improved your healer's efficiency, and made your tank tougher. It was a lot of fun to turn the rest of your group into rock stars.
ReplyDeleteAnother thing I liked from that game and wish I could see more of was how FFXI's skill-chain system made it possible for even the tank and healer to participate in the damage dealing. I had this idea of a game similar to what Rohan suggested where the main roles were tank/healer/buff-debuffer and the main damage came from the three of them executing some form of combo together. It's no less contrived than the trinity, but at least involves the entire group in the excitement of damage dealing.
Hmm my comment vanished, so to make a short story shorter, I love support, I wish there were more of them, to many pure classes. I love aiding people, and being needed in a group.
ReplyDeleteUgh, Blogger strikes again! I don't have your comment anywhere in my comment logs :(
DeleteBut yeah, I love support classes myself :) Sometimes what makes sense mathematically isn't necessarily the most fun design, and I think support classes were a casualty of that.
I hate that it all comes down to numbers these days, which is one of the reasons I love ffxiv, no addons for people to spam in my face. Don't get me wrong, I'm usually very high up on the meters but I still dislike it because it takes so much focus, which should be put into having fun and looking at the fights and your surroundings.
DeleteAnd I had these issues with blogger too -.- people complained to me about that.
I think this illustrates the difference between people looking for a challenge and those who are not.
DeleteLotRO has the Loremaster, which at the game's launch was a buffer/debuffer/controller with a limited off-heal and some damage dealing options. I played in a few groups early on with people fresh from WoW who were dismissive of the class because it wasn't a healer, wasn't a tank and was mediocre DPS. Generally, by the end of a run, the same people were trying to figure out why everything had gone so smoothly :) Loremasters were a tricky class because you had no end of different things you could be doing at any time, and the art lay in identifying which was the most useful one to do based on the current situation.
ReplyDeleteThe problem in WoW is that the game has evolved to the point that tanks are so good at tanking (can glue all mobs to themselves, can take way more damage than anyone else) and DPS can lay down so much AoE damage on the targets the tank has rounded up, that there's no need for more elegant (and less time-efficient) tactics. There's little need to think if your job is either to tank everything, keep the tank alive or lay down the maximum DPS, and nothing else.
"There's little need to think if your job is either to tank everything, keep the tank alive or lay down the maximum DPS, and nothing else."
DeleteIf you seriously think that's what WoW boils down to then you haven't been doing anything remotely difficult.
I like the sounds of the Loremaster, that does sound pretty cool.
DeleteHowever, with respect to WoW I'm going to have to agree with Balkoth on this one. Cata and Mists certainly hasn't played the way you describe it in your comment, Tremayneslaw. Even in normal-mode raids, we have decently intricate strategies for many fights. Add priorities, staying out of the bad, don't tank too much or you die (hello Dark Shaman!), cooldown usage, and much more.
Even Immerseus goes way beyond what he said there.
DeleteI can't speak for WoW, having only played that solo and not for very long. But in EQ2 at least support classes were still en vogue at least up until a few years ago (can't comment on current endgame). The mezzing classes (Illusionist and Coercer) along with Bards (Dirge and Troubador) were all required in raids and preferred in high end group content as well.
ReplyDeleteI also feel like adding that I played quite a bit of Support last season in LoL. I was by no means at the top of the leaderboards, but I love being the support who gets a couple random kills, but rarely dies and feeds the shit out of my carry. The trinity does seem to exist in LoL, and I like the fact that support plays an integral role.
Let me be clear, I'm not claiming WoW is too simple. It is not. Refer to my first paragraph of my blog post:
ReplyDelete"While I don't necessarily agree with Keen in my previous post about class consolidation necessarily decreasing combat depth, I do agree with him insofar as having support classes can be fun."
If you're referring to me, I didn't think you were claiming WoW is too simply.
DeleteBut it seems a lot of other people either think you are and/or think WoW is in fact too simple. It's depressing that people don't have a clue about what actually goes on in raids...it's like because they're used to fights being nothing but a tank and spam with a trinity that they can't imagine fight mechanics adding a lot of other things in.
Not really referring to you specifically. More just a reminder to folks, because I absolutely do agree that a number of people seem to write off WoW's mechanics because they're often less tied to a single class' abilities and more tied to roles/encounter mechanics.
Delete