Question time: What role—tank, healer, or DPS—do you actually play in MMORPGS, and why?

Terminally Online

This is Terminally Online: PC Gamer’s very own MMO column. Every other week, I’ll be sharing my thoughts on the genre, interviewing fellow MMO-heads like me, taking a deep-dive into mechanics we’ve all taken for granted, and, occasionally, bringing in guest writers to talk about their MMO of choice.

Ah, the Holy Trinity. An institution that has stood for time immemorial. That is, since MMORPGs have existed. So more like roughly 25-30 years.

The healer, providing succour to the whole party, and also the first to be blamed when someone dies; The tank, shielding their allies, and the second to be blamed when someone dies; Lastly, the DPS, who get to cosily hide until someone looks at the meter.

The Holy Trinity is something seemingly inescapable unless you’re Guild Wars 2, and even then, there are still support builds backing everybody up, or tankier builds to help smooth things over. You have some variants on it—MMORPGs like City of Heroes slap on ‘controller’ to that number, FF14 has the Dancer, which gets a huge chunk of its damage from buffing others, and WoW has the Augmentation Evoker with the same gimmick.

But for the most part, someone’s gonna be hitting hard, someone’s gonna be taking the damage, and someone is gonna be standing between the party and an untimely death.

I myself have history with all three—and in my current MMO of choice, FF14, I play just about everything in casual content because hey, I might as well mix things up. But I’ll always come back to my damage dealers, mostly because I’m inescapably drawn to rogues and ninjas. I like to stab things and be agile, what can I say?

Most MMORPG player bases are the same. Take a look at WoW or FF14, and you’ll find the lion’s share of classes dedicated to DPS, both because you only generally need one tank and healer for a dungeon (more for a raid, but the ratio’s still skewed in favour of damage dealers), and because let’s face it: Who’s playing an MMO to accept personal responsibility? Not me.

But you are not the general gaming public, you’re readers of PC Gamer. You’re the cream of the crop, the tip of the top, the belle of the ball. You are good at videogames. And no matter what anybody tells you, I am not buttering you up so you’ll respond to this questionnaire block. I am, however, curious to see if our readership leans one way or the other.

Sick to death of the holy trinity? Got some tank-related gripes to get out of your system? Exhausted by the weight of carrying a whole raid on your healer’s shoulders? Feel free to hop into the comments below to share your woes.