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Players of massively multiplayer online roleplaying games (MMORPGS) tend to select the types of characters they play based on a variety of factors. For those new to the genre, it often requires a degree of experimentation before one settles on one character type (class). In World of Warcraft (WoW), the number of people new to the genre practically defines the player base, and perhaps for this reason, WoW has more uninformed players regarding group roles than most other MMORPGs, whose player-base is chiefly composed of MMORPG veterans.

The trap these uninformed players fall into is complacency with talent-spec decisions and a general disinterest in even the fundamental levels of theorycrafting. In other words, they put practically no time into researching their class and what makes it tick, resulting in poorly geared, poorly specced characters that are often played poorly. While play-style is as much as decision as one’s choice to roll a character of a particular class, play-style is still detrimental to the success of a group, and oftentimes, the optimal play-style and associated talent spec will be contrary to a given player’s preference.

One of the core design problems behind WoW is the lack of focus on group roles for classes early on a character’s leveling. That is to say, players new to traditional MMORPG concepts don’t fully understand that one needs a tank, a healer, and balanced damage dealers to complete a basic group challenge. Nevermind advanced techniques such as crowd control.

A simple solution would be to incorporate solo quests with NPC allies to “simulate” group roles and force the player to comprehend his character’s role in a group. Such solo instances would not only give the player an opportunity to use skills they otherwise might not until they find a real group to run a real instance with, but it will ensure they don’t enter their first group instance without a clue as to what they’re supposed to do. Adding “tutorial” missions for solo-able instances will only emphasize the group role characters need to fulfill, which is often drastically different from the solo roles most characters play until end-game.

My whole foray into this topic was reignited because of a recent post at WoW Insider concerning classes who are simple to play at the offset, but require a much deeper insight into class mechanics to play well. The post itself is a report of a discussion at the WoW forums with the usual banter that includes a number of biased/ignorant posts strewn among well-meaning, and well thought-out posts. (Hey, at least the European WoW forums aren’t as bad as the North American ones.) Overall, however, the consensus matches my own opinion on the matter, which is that the class most difficult to master are the Shaman, the Druid, and the Hunter.

The Shaman is difficult because he has an enormous number of abilities, in part because of the myriad of totems at his disposal. This not only makes the Shaman’s abilities very situation-specific, but as a core support class, the Shaman player needs to adjust their play-style significantly when adjusting from solo play to group play.

The Druid is complicated because in order to be most efficient, she needs to know when to switch forms seamlessly, and adjust their role in a group accordingly. Feral druids have it easier in this regard, because they learn from the get-go when best to use a given form, and so adjusting to group dynamics is easy for them once they’ve mastered the solo game.

As for Hunters, the difficulty is in moving from a strict DPS focus to choosing targets based on group necessity, and escaping the DPS mindset in order to become a crowd control machine. This is really the main difference between a Hunter and Warlock, and why the Hunter is not as straightforward compared to his demonic counterpart.

The number of Warlock and Hunter characters in WoW is highly indicative of the ease in soloing with these classes. Moreso, with the exception of the Survival tree for Hunters, the other trees for these classes are very forgiving. An important distinction between these classes is that a Warlock is a DPS class first, whose versatility in dealing with a given situation is primarily a function of their choice of pet. This is contrary to the role of the Hunter, who is a hybrid DPS/crowd control machine whose non-DPS roll is not a function of NPC type, in that a Hunter’s crowd control abilities work regardless of whether the enemy is living, undead, a demon, et al. A Hunter’s pet, therefore, is a merely an extension of this crowd control function, which is illustrated in the fact that practically every pet a Hunter has is trained with the basic Growl ability. In other words, while a Warlock becomes a crowd controller on occasion, he is a DPS machine 99% of the time, whereas a Hunter is always expected to crowd control when the options presents itself, and DPS in-between.

Unfortunately, the Hunter is almost as misunderstood as the Shaman, and so finding a good Hunter player is often difficult. This used to be true of Druids, but adjustments to the Feral tree forced many Druids to adapt a hybrid role, which is a much “truer” spec for Druid characters than any mana-dependent Moonkin/Restoration spec.

As many classes have singular or finely focused roles, the ease their players have with adjusting to group dynamics is greatly increased, which is something we don’t see with non-Paladin hybrids and Hunters.

As a final note, regarding Hunters and Warlocks, the fact that their pets can act as a tank makes soloing these classes very easy, which means that practically any moron can level them to 70 without a problem, despite talents selected. This is predominantly why we see an overpopulation of Hunters out there, and why the majority of them have no understanding of trapping, kiting, et al. Since Hunters and Warlocks are both effective against solo targets without the concern for taking direct damage (thanks to their pets tanking), these classes are very forgiving, resulting in poor talent specs (including the rather outdated Marksmanship Hunter spec). Once again, for these classes, interactive tutorials available at class trainers would help get players comfortable maximizing the potential of respective class skills. Perhaps Blizzard doesn’t want to level the playing field that much, however. After all, as long as there are poor players out there, there’s more honourable kills to go around for the rest of us.

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