Feb 10

I alluded to the fact that tanks and healers often share a different bond than most people in a prior post, but as I began to think about this some more I decided to post my thoughts.

The Role of the Tank and the Healer

I’m sure you all know what a tank does and what a healer does, but bear with me.

Tank: A tank’s job, at it’s most basic, is to keep aggro on mobs. There are secondary responsibilities, like not dying, which inlcudes gearing up, etc., but at it’s most basic, the tank is there to make things angry so they don’t get angry at the people that would die if the angry things hit them.

Healer: A healer’s job, at it’s most basic, is to make sure people stay alive, primarily the tank. Ideally (and barring AoE damage, which now days is unavoidable), only the tank should be taking damage, because the tank should be keeping the attention of all the mobs.

Connections to Real Life

This reminds me a bit of a traditional family. The man of the house is generally a protector, running interference between all the things that need to be taken care of–providing money for the family, taking care of the yard work, etc.–and the rest of the family. The woman is traditionally more nurturing, caring for the home and the rest of the family. When I realize that I couldn’t successfully tank without the support of a healer, it reminds me of the fact that I could never take care of everything that needed to be done at home without the support of my wife.

The Instant Bond

As a tank, you’ve got your mind on several things at once, especially if you’re tanking several mobs at once. As a death knight tank, I open with Death and Decay, then make sure my diseases get spread around, then make sure I nab the adds or any mobs the DPS may have pulled, and in it all, I might have a moment to take a look at my health pool and go “Holy cow, that’s low.” But then I notice all the green text flying up the right side of my screen–numbers followed by a name. “Oh, it’s okay,” I say to myself, “so-and-so’s got my back.”

I don’t know how it feels from a healer’s perspective, but for me it’s like an instant bond, knowing that someone’s focusing as much on keeping me alive as I am on keeping them from getting eaten by Erekem and his adds. Perhaps the parallel to a real-life relationship is what makes the feeling so strong and so sudden, particularly, as Phaelia points out, when the tank is a male and the healer is a female.

This “bond” (or whatever you’d like to call it) is very interesting to me. Especially when I know the healer (see the next sections), I feel a lot less at edge, to the point that I feel more secure when the healer has me as their target (my mind almost equates this to catching someone’s eye).

“That Healer”

I’d be willing to bet that most tanks have a “that healer.” “That healer” is the healer that healed you in that one instance things went so swimmingly in. “That healer” is the person a tank asks “do you want to run X” before he asks anyone else, because he knows that “that healer” is good at what they do and knows they’ll do their best to keep them up. A relationship between a tank and “that healer” can extend beyond that, in time, as experienced by Jessika.

As someone who spends their time in WoW taking hits for the team, there’s nothing better than not only knowing intellectually that the person keeping you alive is a good healer and will do their darndest to make sure you don’t bite the dust, but also that they’re a friend and that the relationship extends beyond just “I get hit in the face and you make it feel better.” That’s the kind of person that brings out the “Hey, I was gonna run an instance, but only if you’d like to heal!”

Types of Healers

This is a subject that I was thinking about last night when a friend of mine was healing me for The Amphitheater of Anguish in Zul’Drak. Each type of healer–priest, paladin, shaman, and druid–heal quite differently (a druid with HoTs, a shaman with lots of Brain Heal, etc). It struck me that it feels different, psychologically, to be healed by these different classes. The joke I made to my friend (a priest) was “Ah, familiar heals. Not those strange, unfeeling paladin crits.”

This particular friend has a pattern I’ve noticed near the beginning of every pull: a self bubble and a cast of Prayer of Mending for me. Waiting for the mob to run down the stairs, watching the little buff icon above my character frame show up, is when I realized that each class’ heals really do feel different. For example, the priest’s shields, “preventative” heals, and HoTs (and especially the way this priest friend tends to use them) makes me feel secure (”I notice you’re about to pull and tank for us–here, take this, it’ll help ”), while being healed by a paladin, which is much more reactive and critty, feels more like heals are being thrown at you at a hundred miles an hour (”FEEL BETTER NOW DAMMIT!”).

Conclusion

I’ve rambled on long enough. Now it’s your turn. I’m very interested in what others of you have to say. Tanks, do you notice this relationship at all? Have you formed a stronger relationship with “that healer?” Does the relationship extend beyond tanking and healing? Healers, do you notice it to? What about the relationships with your tanks? You folks that play DPS, do you form bonds like this, or is it all about the meters, like it was for Elad?

Related posts:

1. Decisions
2. A Day of (Mostly) Good PuGs
3. Why Can’t I Decide?
4. Chill of the Throne: Sunwell Radiance 2.0
5. I, Death Knight