Some years back I wrote a series of posts that I called GroupCraft and dug into my greater unified theory of group creation. The problem with the Classic era is that I see a lot of people doing a lot of things that just are not effective, and then being frustrated when groups don’t happen. Coming back to Classic I am seeing the same behavior so I thought it might be time to break these posts out again or at least create a streamlined version of them. The original posts however are still largely valid so if you are so inclined the three part series is as follows:
If You Don’t have a Healer and a Tank You Don’t Have a Group
I realize this is a blunt statement, but it is one you need to get used to. During the course of this post I will give you some advise to mitigate this, but if you don’t have a stock of pocket tanks and or pocket healers then you are going to struggle to make groups happen. That is the cold hard fact and there is no reason to sugar coat it. DPS you are a commodity in the Vanilla/Classic era because you are WAY easier to level than a Tank or a Healer. Hybrids to some extent have an easier lot in life but they are also in many ways less effective at the chosen role, at least until properly specced and geared.
I commented about the above snipped of general chat on twitter last night. That is not a group looking for more that is two very hopeful dps thinking that shouting into the void is going to fix their dilemma. Shortly after I took that screenshot and snipped it down, it was a group of three dps looking for a tank and healer, and continued to do so until I logged for the night and hour and a half later.
Public Channels Rarely Provide Results
When you look for a group in either General or Trade you are effectively shouting into the void hoping that someone else happens to be sitting there doing nothing looking for a group as well. Most players are engaged in the world and not actively watching chat channels. We are still knee deep in the leveling phase of the game and few people are just hanging out in Org or Stormwind trying to make a group happen. While I have General and Trade still turned on, I have also made a tab that complete filters them out so that I don’t miss Guild Chat. Basically when you are shouting into the void of a public channel you are talking to a very small group of players that are actively watching that channel.
Lock Down a Tank and a Healer
If you want to be successful in forming groups you have to take a very systematic approach to it or be very lucky. As a Warrior Tank I can shout into any channel and probably get a bunch of nibbles because I am a class that is in demand. Most players are not going to have this benefit so when it comes to building a group, you have to lock down the core. If you are DPS this means you need to find both a Tank and a Healer. If you are one of those roles you just have to find the other. In theory you should have been friending every Healer or Tank you come across in grouping up randomly to complete quests. If you didn’t do this however you have to utilize the dark art of the /who command.
When you type /who in game you get the first panel. Yours may not look exactly like mine because I have an ElvUI skin applied but the contents should generally be the same. The who command accepts a large number of arguments and by default it it queries the specific zone you are in with the z=”ZoneName” argument and +/- 3 levels from your current level. This might be useful if you are looking for a specific group within your zone. However I find filtering by class a way more powerful option because it will search all players actively logged into the game when you use the c-“ClassName” argument.
Getting to Know the Classes
So now that you have access to the full potential of the who command, you are going to need to know what you are looking for. The truth is for Classic the class options are pretty limited so I am going to go down each of the Tank and Healer options and talk a little bit about my own personal perspective.
The Tanks
- Warrior – The OG Tank, the only one that is universally raid viable at end games. I’ve know a lot of people that worked really freaking hard on their hybrid of choice to be almost as effective as a warrior completely half-assing it. The bigger challenge is the fact that most people have no clue at all how to tank in the classic era, and it took me a couple of instances to reach a point where I was comfortable with it.
- Druid – Bear has some excellent threat and a lot of health to mitigate damage. The biggest challenge to bear tanks is the fact that the gearing options for “tanking leather” suck badly for the entirety of Vanilla. If a Druid wants to do this role well, they are going to have to go to some extreme lengths of grinding to reach peak efficiency. That said since dungeons are mostly about holding threat then Druids make a perfectly cromulent choice.
- Paladins – Just don’t. My original intended main was a Paladin Tank, and eventually after running up the Hunter I returned to it and attempted in vain to make it work. Paladins have the benefit being able to wear all of the same gear that Warriors can, which is a pretty good start on the mitigation front. The real problem with Paladins is they have really poor threat generation tools. You are going to have to work very hard to make a Paladin Tank viable.
- Shaman – No. Yes technically at this point in life Shaman have a tanking tree. Enhancement has all sorts of threat generation abilities, and rockbiter weapon is damned mighty for holding threat. However you are going to kill your healer in the process. We had a guild run recently where the Shaman was running rockbiter and I forgot it was the threat stance… and the healer had a hell of a time each time something was ripped off my Warrior. Maybe viable if you are really desperate and you have a really great Shaman.
The Healers
- Priest – The OG Main Healer, and the one that has the most tools in their toolkit without really having to do much spec wise to augment them. In vanilla this is going to be your bread and butter most reliable healing experience.
- Druid – Healer really is the role that this class is born to play in Vanilla and as a result Classic. They have a lot of healer gearing options, with the ability to just wear “priest” gear and get by with it. It is a weird healing style to get used to but those who are good at it are godly.
- Paladin – A phenomenal healer if specced properly. If you are running with someone who is hybrid specced then they are going to constantly run into mana issues. If the paladin throws on some “priest” gear however they can do a great job of healing in a pinch regardless of talents. For them it is all about making sure they have enough mana.
- Shaman – Probably the weakest healing offering in Vanilla mostly because it requires a lot of talents to back it up. All of the Shaman I have run into that are trying to shift over and heal a bit are having serious mana issues. The Shaman that are geared and talented specifically for healing though are perfectly fine.
Be Direct and Be Specific
When you shout into a public channel you are talking to everyone and no one at all. It is very easy for me to completely ignore something that happens in public chat. Either I may not happen to be watching that channel at the moment, or I may read something and not think it really is addressed to me. As a result I find it way more viable to hunt for players directly. I am going to always at least respond to a tell, even if it is with a polite “no thank you”. If you ever get a response like that, move on and don’t pester the player.
So taking what you already know about the /Who command and the classes available to you… start reaching out directly to players and trying to fill your slots. Once you have locked down a Tank and a Healer you can then probably safely take things to public channels to fill the last couple of DPS slots. Right or wrong… right now in Classic as it was in Vanilla… DPS are a commodity. GOOD DPS however will eventually become something that is going to get you invited back to groups over and over, but we are too early into the life cycle of this game for it to have much of an effect.
It is also very important that you tell players exactly what you are wanting to do. If you need to run Blackfathom Deep, then say something like this “Excuse me, would you be interested in tanking a BFD run I am pulling together?”. It is polite, direct and friendly in tone. Sure you could get by with fewer words but just sending someone a message like “BFD?” comes off as totally random, somewhat rude and doesn’t exactly convey the full message of what you are expecting. Come up with a template in your head and mostly just swap out the pieces of what you are looking for and where you are planning on going.
Join Social Channels
One of the functionalities that players have more or less forgotten about is the inclusion of social channels. So /1 is always going to be General for players and /2 is always going to be Trade, however you have a bunch of channels that you can create yourself. I am sure if you do some searching you will find a full listing of the commands but here are some of the most basic options.
- /Number – a slash and the number of the channel will allow you to address a message towards that channel. Doing the command with no message will lock your chat pane to talk to that channel by default, which is handy if you are in a lengthy communication.
- /Join ChannelName – the /Join command followed by the name of a channel will join that channel. There really aren’t a lot of options here and all channels are effectively joinable by all players. There isn’t really an option for locking them down.
- /Leave Number – Similar to the join command you can type /Leave and then the number of the channel and it will remove that channel from your list effectively removing you from it.
- /ChatWho Number – ChatWho is a super useful command because it lists who is active in the channel at a given moment. Mostly useful if you are going to say something to the channel that is really meant for a couple of people that are in the channel, and want to make sure that they are actually in there.
Social channels used to be a great resource for grouping. Pretty much every raid group had one or more… or in the cases of Late Night Raiders we had one for each class team in addition to the main channel. Once you got invited to one they became a great way to pull together groups giving you several “slightly better than general” options to look for groups. I still stand by direct messages as the best way of finding groups however.
Friend Good Players
I cannot harp on this one enough. If you are out in the world friend players that you happen to group with that are both good-natured and competent. Direct messages work, but what works better is a direct message to someone on your friend list that you have already built up a rapport with. Also get to the point where you notice names of players you have been around before. I’ve friended up a few players that I have noticed consistently throw me a buff for example. That kind of open positive attitude towards the community means that the player is probably going to be team minded.
This Takes Work
It takes an awful lot of work to make any of this happen, but then again once you start building ties it leads to other things. Back in Vanilla I got invited to so many raids as a result of random encounters that I happened to have out in the wilds. There are a lot of people that I am still friends with today that came from a random occurrence. Hell we would not have 80 some characters in the guild right now were it not for the fact that I have been applying this sort of logic and “collecting awesome people” over the last two decades of gaming.
It isn’t that I am doing anything terribly special. I am just being mindful of my surroundings and taking opportunities to make connections with the good people I happen to find along the way. You too can do all of these things.
Very good post!
Due to some vacations our group has been moving up slowly, so those of around have been working on alts rather than getting too far ahead. But we always have an eye on group composition, and it always starts with who is the tank and who is the healer. One of my characters is a druid that I am raising up just to heal. Druid healing is always more fun than priest healing for me, not to mention that leveling up a resto druid is easier than a holy priest.
Ah, but my pally. I always have these delusions of having him tank.
Not that I’m disagreeing with anything you said, but I think you describe the mid- and endgame of vanilla/maybe classic.
Right now the servers are so flooded and everyone’s doing instances all the times, the public channels absolutely work and people even fill missing tanks OR healers very quickly.
But yeah, I had to chuckle on your “LFM tank and healer”, that is usually silly 😛
And re: Twitter, no I think you’re mostly spot on (later), tanks will have it hard to level solo and easy to find a group. No harm stating that, as a tank you can usually choose.
It occurred to me reading this that I see what the big hurdle is for me. I am trying to play a Priest as a DPS, because that is what I have always loved and wanted to be. But I guess the perception, at least in lower level content is that Priest = Healer. This could be an issue for me going forward because I absolutely, vehemently, to the core of my playing ability and desires, refuse to be the healer. I see that once I get around the level 40ish range I get Shadow abilities that will heal the entire party for 20% of the damage I am doing, and that seems really cool. But it seems like I have a huge hurdle to overcome to get to that point. I can certainly see why people were not only turning me down, but not even acknowledging me when I was asking about DPS roles as a Priest.
Yeah Shadow during classic/vanilla was a bit of a niche that very few people acknowledged. We had one or two in our raid, just like we had on or two off-role paladins or druids… but they all donned the healing gear and healed when needed on specific fights that required more of one thing than another thing. Shadow since then has become more of a recognized option, so maybe at end game it will be more appreciated. However yeah I can see the point of rejection because in most players minds “Priest is heals” but to the same token “Druid is heals” and “Paladin is heals” 🙂
I wonder how many like me that started at the tail end of Wrath or later are realizing the class we love, may not work the way we hoped. And more importantly, will they stay in Classic and re-roll, or make due with how the class is designed.
We ran for ages during Vanilla with a shadow priest as our only healer… but they were throwing heals along with the dps. “Vampire” healing wasn’t enough to keep up with boss fights for example.
Well, being able to cast Vamp every 10 seconds, and having 20% of damage heal everyone in the party is a fair way to take pressure off a main healer. My mind is a bit foggy but was it only the 5 in your particular group, or was it the entire raid. If it’s the whole raid then in a 40 group that’s some huge healing numbers.
Grrr…. “…heyday of my grouping days in EverQuest” that should read.
That’s a great overview of how to do it. I don’t have any experience of putting groups together in WoW but in the heyday of my grouping days in Wow I did just about everything on that list. I wasn’t great at it and I didn’r especially enjoy it but I learned to do it. It beats spamming /lfg for 90 minutes then logging off in a snit, that’s for sure.
Some people are much better at pulling groups together than others, though. The one bit of advice I’d add is, when you happen across one of those people, treat them like a Tank or Healer and add them to your friends list. Then send them a tell first when you’re looking to make a group, asking them if they’re up for it. If they say yes, tell them you just started and there’s just the two of you so far and with luck they’ll take over and fill your group in a fraction of the time you’d do it yourself.
I had several of those on my call list and it worked like a dream most days 😛