Gaming Signal: WoW Play: Skill or Gear?

WoW Play: Skill or Gear?

I read an interesting article today over at Tobold's MMORPG blog about his feeling that skill isn't as important in World of Warcraft as gear is. He's responding intelligently to a common forum response of 'learn to play' or 'l2p' that comes up whenever somebody complains about how hard they found an encounter or instance. While that's a reasonable goal, I think discounting skill is a bit of overkill the other way.

Teamwork
For me, working together is a team is the major skill in the game. Lots and lots of players get stuck in the solo mentality and forget all the things they can and should be doing when in a group. For example, while I love shadow priests and what they bring to the table (that Vampiric Embrace is awesome) the players are often so used to soloing that they just open up 100% on a mob and pull from the tank. I'm not immune from this - I suddenly found myself in an instance with my Druid needing to do a battle-rez and realizing I had removed the spell from my bar. Yikes.

But when a team is working together, they can accomplish quite a bit. I'm sure you've all been through encounters that suddenly went horribly wrong (a wayward fear or runner that brought another 5 enemies, for example) and yet through everybody working together the group handled it all and was able to continue. That's an awesome feeling (one of the best in WoW, in my opinion.)

Gear
There is no doubting that gear matters. A tank with 10k armor is going to take more damage than one with 20k. The priest with 9000 mana can do more than one with 5000. After my guild ended up with several players having Tier 2 gear, it was certainly much easier to handle Upper Blackrock Spire. So yes, gear has a huge impact.

But I'm afraid I've seen plenty of players (and I mean plenty) who had nice gear, but couldn't play in a group. I'll never forget the Warlock that played in our guild and had a full set of tier 1 (Molten Core) gear. She had twice as good a gear as my Warlock - but yet consistently sat at the bottom of the damage charts and added very little to the group (bristling at being asked to Soul Stone, not giving out Healthstones, only using her Felhunter pet "because of the resists"). It isn't all about damage charts by any means - but a Warlock can't be on the bottom unless you are clueless. It was mighty frustrating and I considered her a liability (which reminds me of another of Tobold's observations that Molten Core didn't really take 40 people and thus folks like this could slip in and not really help or hurt - and that this is a totally different situation with the touch 5-man instances introduced in Burning Crusade.)

Learn2Play
I agree with Tobold that people saying "learn 2 play" is hardly productive and misses the point many times. If you're group is constantly wiping on an instance (like the Opening the Dark Portal event) you probably ought to take a break, get some better gear, and then make another attempt. But don't forget the power of teamwork and ability to utilize all the tools at your disposal. Very few players in my experience are able to do that on a consistent basis.

I have to agree with you Scott. WOW is far less gear dependent than Everquest was, and I think that was part of the design mentality for Blizzard. The biggest draw for a given encounter should not be the gear you get (which is nice mind you), but the fact that you were able to complete it successfully. Honestly, that is why I play many of these games. I want to see what is possible, and I am a big fan of less than optimal groups. I was happy to read that some guilds run instances with druids tanking and paladins healing - it really means that there are other options out there than the standard trinity of warrior, priest, random DPS folks.

Posted by Tim on Thursday March 15, 2007 at 2:06 PM