Something Drug mentioned here (an excellent post) got me rolling on actually writing this post – I’d been mulling over it for a while and, whilst it’s mostly spurious personal speculation about class differences I do want to also address an important point. Simple does not always mean easy.  Hell, it needs bolding and bright colours:

Simple does not always mean Easy

I’ma go ahead and quote the direct bit from Drug’s post which is the base on which I want to build.

There is a very common mis-perception: shamans are easy to play. Most of the time, those people point at the few healing tools shamans have and then at the great variety of spells of a holy priest or a tree. This is wrong.

He’s talking about healing, specifically shaman healing, but I think it applies in a broader context and is something which is particularly keenly felt by the non-strongly-thematic part of some hybrid classes – mainly Druids and Paladins but also to some extent Shamans.

Whoa, back up there, what the hell are you on about Aurik!?

The easiest example would be druids.  Druids are, thematically, healers, casters then tertially feral.  Their healing repertoire is decently large and they are strong healers.  Sum durid is make strong hot, if you will.  Some durids, however, can B 4 tank. Tanking druids… don’t have so many buttons.  In fact, tanking druids have a ridiculously small number of actual go-to buttons for tanking to the point where ‘lol swipe spam’ has become a comment I’ve heard from other tanks.  It’s, in my experience, a lot harder to get up-front threat on a druid compared to the other classes, unless you rely on a 3 minute cooldown every pull…

How about Paladins?

Paladins have a decent number of tanking buttons – not out of the box, to be sure (as I’m sure Honor’s has attested though I cannot find the post I was looking for, annoyingly) and even though their rotations can be simplified down, there’s a complexity there that outstrips faery fire, lacerate, mangle, swipe, swipe…  not only that, but they have the, I won’t say benefit, but quirk of having mana-based threat which can be front-loaded.  Whilst ret and prot have clear thematic ‘protectzor and smiter of teh bad guyz’, holy… doesn’t so much.

Holy  is often looked at as the red-headed-step-child of the healing classes – the stereotype of a moronic paladin who sits, slack-jawed, pressing one or two buttons over and over is unhealthily prevalent and is a very unfair one, in my opinion (though, I admit, I have encountered the stereotype often enough to wonder… A few good players keep me disabused of this notion!).  Whilst holy certainly has a lot more tricks up its sleeve than it used to, it cannot match the arsenal of priests or druids.  I’d say they were on par, tricks wise, with shamans, but with less of a range to let them shine.

and Shamans?

Healing as a shammy is fun, they have a decent but more limited set of spells than a druid or priest and no defensive cooldowns anywhere near that of a holydin.  They are niche and often misused (as Drug mentions) and fall prey to being in a dip at the moment between Blizzard deciding to buff one side or other of their healing.

Ok, now you’ve stated the obvious can we have a point, please?

Right, point, yes.

I’m getting there.

As I stated at the beginning – simple doesn’t mean easy.

Caveat Lector - this is mainly from my current five-man perspective and raids can be different, but you can take out ‘makes it harder’ and mostly turn it into ‘makes it harder to do as well as’ and it oft hits the raiding perspective.  To summarise the above:

• Tanking as my druid is harder than my prot warrior – I have less skills to use, thus less ways to pull aggro back when I lose it.  Against a boss I lose any advantage of my healing abilities (bar frenzied regen, but warriors have enraged regen) so it’s not like being a hybrid is making up for me having a lack of buttons for one particular spec by allowing me to utilise ones from other specs.  On that point, despite the fact warriors can now charge in-combat and gain rage, bears still have to expend rage to charge.  Hmm.
• Tanking as my druid is harder than my death knight – rage is harder to manage than runes and bear spec doesn’t afford the dps a death knight can put out to contribute to aggro – especially at lower gear levels.
• Healing as my shaman is harder than my druid – despite my druid being undergeared, she can ramp up healing when it’s needed and has more variety in the spells she can cast to cover small or large incoming damage as well as far better mana regen.
• Healing as my paladin is harder than any other class I’ve healed with – I only have a few buttons and I have to use all my class can give me to play well and not lose some DPS on AoE.

Contextual Bias

To be honest, half of this post came out of my annoyance that my low-level warrior can easily hold aggro versus people 4-5 levels above her – my druid just couldn’t.  I’d almost forsworn tanking again because it had become an exercise in frustration wherein I couldn’t generate enough rage to hold mobs, they’d turn to dps, further reducing my rage, I’d maybe get them back on me and then had exhausted my methods of returning mobs to myself  when the next would invariably tear off.  Waiting on a taunt cooldown feels like forever…

On my warrior?  If someone does manage to tear a mob off me I have two stuns, three ‘taunts’, a couple high threat moves and all the while I can spam heroic strike or cleave like it’s going out of fashion because I have so much rage.  More complex, more buttons, hellishly easier to play.

This isn’t the first time I’ve had this feeling – it was very much the same healing through some heroics (say Halls of Lightning) which I’d had trouble with at first on my shaman and yet my not-amazingly-geared druid did in a beat-the-quest-reset speed run with ease.  I had more buttons, more niche spells, better ability to ramp up or down healing.  Again – more complex, but easier.

I don’t know, in retrospect, whether this post is a rant at certain aspects of classes which I just happen to feel particularly frustrated with, but it’s a topic which I figured the rest of you might have some feeling on (and not necessarily the same feelings I have) and I wanted to get down on e-paper exactly what was irking me.  I feel better now.  I love my blog.

<3

On a completely different note, I had an interesting comment in a pug, when someone referred to me as ’she’ (was playing my trollette warrior) after a BoE had dropped and someone had offered it to me.  I refused, saying I’d replace it in a level with a crafted one which was better so they might as well sell it:  “Nah, if he was a girl, she’d have totally taken the shield to sell for herself,  lol’.  Nice to see stereotypes are alive and well in WoW!  Oddly, Sporeggar seems more gender-biased behaviour-wise than Bloodhoof ever did – but I may just have been insulated by the wonderful peoples there.