It’s designed almost as if Blizz wanted to discourage exploration and variety of gameplay. Welcome to the theme park on rails, everyone.

But it’s worthless as the bugs in front of it were the hardest enemy in Slave pens heroic.

And you could reach the ramp where you leave the water without killing any enemy, even back at level 70 without stealth. We always did it that way.

…there are some people whom I will never go anywhere with.
…there are some people I will only go with if I am feeling inclined to ‘carry’ them.

I’m not sure if this is any fairer than an infinite spiral gear-stat based system. Mind you, I like GW much better, because it isn’t a gear-stat based system. But with regards to bringing, or not bringing someone, I’m not sure that bringing the player, not the gear, is any better.

At least, not for the person who doesn’t get brung!

Oh, and lest I sound like I discriminate purely by playing skill (when really I use any excuse to discriminate! moohahaha!), there’s also:
…players who can play really well, who are really unpleasant, that I avoid at all costs
…players who can play really well, who are really fun, that I squee up, and sometimes end up being friends with.

SQUEE!

Rotface is actually a good example of current issues. It’s not impossible for any tank to manage any role, but it’s a pain for a warrior to kite the slimes. The reason is that ranged tanking ability wasn’t considered to be one of the core tank pieces of functionality so there wasn’t any need to normalise it. But as soon as they design an encounter that requires that, it’s clear that some classes manage the role more easily.

The more similar the classes get, the more similar they need to be, and the blander the encounters will become. I agree that it’s a price worth paying so that people don’t feel second rate (although I’ll note that I don’t remember seeing any raid guilds on my server advertise for a warrior tank all expansion unless they were absolutely desperate for any tank at all), but it doesn’t come at no cost.

> best or second best raid tanks all expansion

That’s really irrelevant because every tank can tank every encounter these days. There is not a single encounter that’s impossible with any tank class. Sure, a warrior has a lot more trouble to tank the Rotface slime and a DK might not be your preferred tank for most fights.

But it can be done.

That wasn’t the case before WotLK.

You have two choices.

1. Give an ability mandatory for an encounter to every class in one form or another (shield wall, last stand)
2. Do not allow the encounter team to use an ability which only one class has (fear every 30s which requires a tank who can turn immune to fear)

Bring the player and not the class is here. And a huge success.

My main is a Warlock since back in Vanilla. Trust me, I know what it means if you play the inferior class. It sucks. It really does. It’s no fun if you get destroyed by mages in 4 out of 5 fight in ToC just because 4 out of 5 fights are mage-gimmick fights.

Both of our main tanks are warriors and we’ve cleared all the hard mode contents just fine.

I know Hatch is a good player. If he were to apply to the guild, I’d vouch for him and tell him to bring whichever of the six 80s he wants to play (FYI Hatch, we have EIGHT plate dps and they’re all lootwhores).

Which got me thinking – back when classes had unique buffs, there were often different strats accordingly … but now with all buffs generally being available regardless of group composition we see far less variety in buffs.

I’d like to see a game which encouraged exploration of options according to group strengths. Give us more ways to enjoy the game instead of simply following the tank like sheep.

The change has been a good one. I’ve even suggested that more buffs need to be shared (Blessing of Kings and Heroism), because we still saw raids insisting on not moving without them (much less Kings than Heroism, but it did happen).

“Individual players don’t feel as meaningful.”

I have an issue with this statement. In Classic WoW I played a Warlock. We provided no meaningful addition to a group in 90% of the content. We didn’t CC except in one fight in MC, and some trash in BWL. Our pets were next to useless (park the Imp next to the tank). I couldn’t even use many of my skills due to the debuff limit. Talk about not feeling meaningful! Yet I still had a blast and raided all the way into AQ40.

If someone really has the need to feel useful in a group, they should have long ago rerolled Tank or Healer. DPS – regardless of buffs – rarely get that feeling of “without me this boss wouldn’t have died”.

“When it doesn’t matter what you play, does it actually MATTER what you play?”

And the final statement:

It does matter what you play – it matters to YOU. I don’t have fun playing a Rogue, so I don’t play a Rogue. I don’t have fun playing a Feral Druid, so I don’t play a Feral Druid. I *do* have fun playing a Holy Paladin, Demonology Warlock, Frost Mage, Tree Druid, Tank DK, Tank or Fury Warrior… so that’s what I play.