Party Strategy Guide

[kandrathe]

One example from recent experience,

I'm not understanding you here. I believe overly specific jobs increases the effectiveness of a party as described in "The Reason for Roles". I also don't understand how your assignment of healers is any different than mine. Could you expand a bit?

A warrior, priest, druid, hunter, and warlock go on a DM Tribute run. One pull had two ogre melee and two ogre mages. One ogre mage was MC'd (and died quickly), a Freeze trap was at the priests feet, one ogre was being seduced, the tank had one, but the druid decided to go into bear form and off tank the third ogre. The result was that the warlock ended up dead due to the priest being unavailable to heal both tanks after the MC was completed. It is valid for some classes, like rogue, paladin, druid, hunter/pet, warlock/pet to offtank a mob as the situation demands, or heal -- but they need to choose correctly. The druid might have left the tanking to the warrior (who was more than capable of tanking two ogres), and instead aided in healing the warlock. It wasn't a wipe, but without the additional CC and damage, the remainder of that fight was dicey when it really didn't need to be.

Basically, the smaller the group, the more roles one needs to adopt and know when to adopt without every group pull being analyzed in detail. In 15+ person raids, you could have tank, MA, healer, back up healer, puller, etc. In 10 person or less groups, you sometimes need to rely on people intelligently grabbing deep into their bag of tricks.