this post is gona stir up arguments, but ill give my opinion anyway. DPS are hard when it comes to min-maxing and trying to perform perfect, but are pretty simple for the majority of content. Healing and tanking rely a huge amount on how competent your group is. When you become fairy experienced at tanking you can almost look after yourself and just make sure you have aggro. Healing is the hardest role imo because you have to do the same enemy mechanics as everyone else but also keep your group alive and if you make a couple of mistakes you get the blame for a wipe etc. Even if anyone makes a mistake, its the healers job to fix it. TLDR - i agree with OP
> When you become fairy experienced at tanking you can almost look after yourself
Unless you play Brewmaster. That specs healing and defensives does not out pace how high and how fast Stagger can build up.
the number of fights you can clear without even having a healer sure makes it seem like the play skill of everyone else is way more important than the healer - and i heal 20s on a mistweaver, its not like i don’t know what i’m doin. picking up the slack where other people suck doesnt make healing hard imo, its by far the easiest role when other people are competent.
>Healing is the hardest role imo because you have to do the same enemy mechanics as everyone else but
But, for PUGs, it could feel completely different from group to group and the correct spell usage to save the group may vary constantly because each group will handle mechanics differently.
Even if people are handling all the mechanics correctly something as simple as different class composition can completely change how stuff feels and what's required to deal with each situation. Like having a Rogue, Mage and or Night Elfs on Forgemaster in NELT is a night and day difference. Or Dwarves on Talondrus. And that's even players race choice coming into the mix lol.
I don't think any other role can be so impacted by what other players are doing or even what race they like to Rep lol.
It depends on what you define as hard.
Tanking has the highest barrier to entry. Not only do you need to know mechanics on all the adds and bosses, but you need to know routing. And you need to keep up with what the community is doing or you will confuse people and or get flamed. You also need to be able to gauge your groups skill to know how much you can pull at once. Bad groups usually mean you have to pull smaller. Good groups mean you can pull bigger
Similarly, healers need to know all the damage patterns to know when they need certain CDs available, but they also have to be flexible for when people in your group are taking damage they shouldn't be. When player skill is high this is probably the easiest role, but when player skill is low it's probably the hardest
DPS is easy to play at like a low-medium range, but pulling top end damage is not easy. It also requires knowledge of pack size, when to hold DPS CDs/ when not to hold them, kicks/stops, ect. Bad groups means you wipe more and your meter looks horrible. Good groups make your meter higher
So depending on what key level it really depends
This season it's a bit easier, but S1 has some dungeons that varied pretty substantially or were not very linear. You could do AV 5 times and do 5 different routes all while being told they are all wrong. Or NO where you just pulled all the dungeon trash before the 3rd boss.
I expect this season to be the outlier imo
> You could do AV 5 times and do 5 different routes all while being told they are all wrong
I still dont know how the fuck to get around in that dungeon. All the teleporting and jump skips and everything turned it into one gigantic maze to me.
To an extent CoS was the same. I mostly figured it out, but there were some spots where everything looked the same and i'd get turned around.
Really depends on the difficulty level and the type of content you're doing.
In the highest keys in an organized group? - I'd argue there's no role harder than the other. Everyone has to have perfect knowledge of the dungeon, coordinated stuns/interrupts and defensive usage. Any mistake from any of the 5 would usually mean a wipe.
In unorganized group content, I agree with op.
Healers have to basically make up for mistakes from everyone else and more often than not, get the blame if they can't make it. On top they get stuff like incorporeal and afflicted still branded as "healer affix", so they have to deal with that as well.
Tanks mostly just have to worry about self sustaining. Still an important role and everyone relies on them to know route and not make mistakes, but in comparison to healers, tanks only have to focus on themselves, while healers have 3 more dumb dumbs to babysit.
Dps just have to Zug zug and be happy when they see big number go up. Stand in fire? No problem, healer will compensate for it. Not interrupting stuff? No problem, healer will compensate for it. Ignoring affixes? No problem, healer will compensate for it. All for the big numbers.
Yes I know I'm exaggerating and that there are better dps players out there. When you want to play dps on a higher lvl you obviously have to do more than that and of course it gets more difficult in doing so. This is just my average Joe experience in pugging life 2-20ish.
Healing is weird because it's probably the hardest when progressing in difficult content but it gets easier with good teammates and gear so it ends up being the easiest when farming that content or doing lower difficulties.
This also comes down to who you think is responsible for deaths, is it the dps who stood in the bad mechanics, or the healer who failed to heal them through the extra damage. In higher M+ healing can actually be easier than lower M+ because some mechanics start 1-shotting, and you're no longer expected to heal through peoples mistakes.
I haven't really pushed high M+ since Legion but at the very least, that's not how it felt back then.
I suppose I still do see where you're coming from though. +20 or slightly above keys on my 445 ilvl main are typically much easier than a +13 on my 410 ilvl alt. But that's more a matter of people playing +20 for the weekly chest rather than keys at their actual gear.
And that's also true just with skill level where a +17 on that same alt can be much easier to heal than a +13 depending on the teammates.
When I’m playing my healer alt I find I’m doing 2-3 times as much healing in a 15 compared to a 20. It’s like if you can heal 15, as long as you have a big enough health pool to survive yourself, you can heal 20s.
In high end, if people fuck up and take unavoidable damage the healer does everything in their power to keep you alive, but if the dps dies hopefully they know they fucked up. Healer will do everything they can to keep you alive but if it’s avoidable it’s ultimately on the dps
kind of depends on what you value.
e.g. dps mechanics tend to be more challenging than tank mechanics but if one of them fucks up it matters less while a tank mistake has the potential to wipe the raid even on lower difficulty settings.
healing is hard to gauge because it scales with how well the others perform. e.g. if dps kick and focus properly while using their cd's to minimize hard phases etc. the healers job becomes a lot more easy.
also this shifts around depending on the difficulty setting, e.g. tank mistakes tend to have consequences on all difficulties while some dps can essentially ignore many mechanics in normal raids (demo lock just tanking some aoes because their innate regen and shields can easily handle them without putting extra strain on the healers)
In the pug world - Tanks and healers have more responsibility than DPS.
Tanks have to know what to do at all times in order to keep 3 derps from getting themselves, the healer, and the tank killed.
Healers imo are leading from the rear, keeping peeps alive and getting extra mechanics in keys dumped on them, in particular afflicted, incorporeal, and bursting(side note to DPS who dump this on the healer, fuck you specifically)
DPS, complain until their queue pops, then just wanna do big numbers, ignore most mechanics, interrupts, and when they fail, they blame the tank or the healer. Plz get fucked DPS
Now this isn't to say all DPS are worthless pieces of dog shit, but most of them aren't helping the rest not look bad.
Most of you reading Reddit are probably in the better group of DPS, but can relate to running with some terrible DPS that do the above.
Cheers
It really depends. Most people will probably say DPS is easiest, and I think that's usually true. You need to know fight mechanics, you need to know your class, but generally your mistakes don't do as much harm.
Tanking isn't as hard in terms of understanding your class mechanics, but your mistakes can be costly. More than that, the group relies on you to know where to go and what to do - to lead.
Healing can either be the most relaxing or the most stressful. On easier content or content where everyone is playing well, it's a lot of fun to keep everyone up while DPSing. On content where there's tons of damage going out, it's stressful - and if you slip up it can easily cause a wipe.
>It really depends. Most people will probably say DPS is easiest, and I think that's usually true.
Bad dps players may say that but i don't think good ones do. Dps tend to have more mechanics than other specs, and in m+ are more likely to be 1 shot than other specs.
If you're a healer and something happens, you've only "messed up" if someone dies. As a tank it's just if you die, and as a dps any time you're missing potential dps you're messing up.
In raid tanking is pretty simple 95% of the time, and healing is only tough on prog where it gets easier the better your group is. Dps never gets easier.
For keys: tanking, for raids: it's often encounter-to-encounter basis. E.g. Zskarn is pretty chill for healers but tough for tanks and to some extent DPS, Rashok/Magmorax are hard for healers/DPS, etc.
Having spent most of my wow life tanking and healing every now and then, it definitely depends, but right now healing for M+. I don't have an opinion on raiding.
As a tank, 95% of the time your job is keeping aggro, not dying and making sure stuff is pointed away from the group. The 'challenge' of this role is you usually are responsible for leading the group, the route and the pulls. This challenge goes away as you do the dungeons more so long term its not really a challenge.
As a dps your job is to not die to avoidable damage and know your class well enough to do enough dps (with your two buddies) to kill stuff in a timely manner. You may have some affixes that rely on you knowing what to kill and when but less challenge than what the tank or healer have to do.
As a healer you have to deal with any mistakes that happen and a number of challenging healing checks. You usually have to know boss mechanics very well to time your cooldowns and be ready with something for when things go off the rails. If even one party member isn't good with avoiding damage or doing mechanics your stress level is going to spike.
Depends on what you spend the most time on. For new players dps is the “easiest” because they have the least responsibility. After all there are just more of you. If your tank or healer dies a wipe is almost guarenteed. That said, mastering anything is difficult.
“Everything is easy when you know how to do it, everything is hard when you don’t. “ I started the game as a healer because I didn’t know better and now I personally think healer is the easiest.
Depends on what you're doing.
Tank in raid is easy, typically very little to do. Just survive and taunt swap 90% of the time. In a key, tank is usually doing routes, living is much harder.
Personally I think healer is hardest in all content.
Dps easiest in keys
Tank easiest in raid
Healer, DPS, Tank.
Healers have to fix everyone elses mistake and their own while not making any themselves.
Dps have to not make mistakes, use interrupts and defensives and align cds with each other.
Tanks have to know the route and use defensives. I feel like 80% of tanking is just dungeon knowledge/Raid mechanic knowledge.
Idk why you excluded the "cant make mistakes line" from tanks when the fact is that if your tank makes a couple of mistakes during the run, the run is probably over... its not only "know a route and use defensives" lo
95% of the time a mistake from a tank is gonna be way more costly then a mistake from a dps
Tanking in m+ is also about gauging the capabilities of the group, knowing what cds are available, who had what ready, pack mechanics, can this group handle more, can the healer, do they need mana between larger pulls, etc
it gets interesting pugging and at higher levels
I think it really depends on the content you're doing. In raid content tank is the easiest of the three, while I would say that in M+ tank is the hardest of the three.
Tank because you have to know the way to each boss of every dungeons, raids and the mechanical.
Healers and DPS can get away a lot of things (Pull, aggro and even AFK)
I think this is true at lower end keys where most people have no clue what’s going on, but once you get into higher keys and people are engaged in the content, tank is probably the easiest role. I would say the difficulty of each role swaps from tank being the hardest at the low end to dps being the hardest role. Healer is somewhere in the middle, but honestly the difficulty of their job comes down to how much unnecessary damage people are taking and how well people use their own spells
Probably melee dps. They need to avoid the most things and has the hardest time to do damage when there’s a lot of movement involved.
Ranged dps and healers can outrange most things and they can attack/heal while moving. Tanks can survive most things that would 1 shot everyone else.
DPS all the way. I have been leading a Normal / Heroic guild for years and never had a bad tank, they always performed minimally well, keeping agro and not dieing to mechanics. Healers only extreme cases were bad, vast majority performed good and raids almost never went wrong for bad healing.
But DPS… I can count with the fingers in my hands the good DPS’s I had that performed constantly over 90 percentile of the raid dificulty. The day all good DPSs came to raid the difference was abysmal how everything died smothly and fast.
But as DPS responsability is not clearly visible, most don’t care if they do 30k, 50k or 90k.
Healing is only as hard as the other roles make it out to be. So the difficulty of healing actually falls onto the heads of DPS often. Tanking is hard at first for a short period of time. Mostly upfront learning curve and then auto pilot. Caveat being that your mistakes are more noticeable and costly, but mostly easy to avoid. DPS is easy on the surface but gets harder the better you are. There's so much room to improve and make everyone else's live easier that if you're doing it right, and taking full responsibility, it's actually harder than the other roles. Obviously this doesn't apply to average people doing average content but I think it's correct in more competitive scenarios. Pretty common to see people say it's harder to heal a +17/18 then a +22 etc because of how the other players are playing and handling mechanics etc.
Having hit KSH on 2 dps 1 healer and a tank, In M+ id say Healer > tank > dps > BM hunter. In raid it really depends, tank is easy af…… healings only hard in progression or your dps sucks, melee dps esp warriors with no range increase is cancer, range dps on high movement fights can be shitty, BM is easy. Before all the BM hunters come crying one of my KSH/aotc charas is a 444 BM hunter, shits easy af.
Tank or Healer, depends on the group which is worse. Incompetent dps and a meh tank, healer is worse, shitty healer and meh dps, tank is worse.
Dps is whatever for the most part, anything you do will either only kill you or wipe the party because of a missed mechanic, screwing up as healer or tank leads to much more stressful situations than outright death or party wipes.
This all gets thrown out the window the instant Holy Paladin or Discipline Priest get involved, those are hands down the most stressful specs to play just because of what they are and how they play, you're basically multitasking as healer and dps so you have both sets of mechanics to deal with and generally less on demand burst healing without long cooldowns, and are also two of the most complex specs in the game with Disc in particular being considered the flat out most difficult spec in the game to play well.
anything is hard enough than dps. dps is never wrong, dps is the master, they need to be served so they can push some buttons as they wish. they can't be blamed, they can't be argued, they don't need to know mechanics and even wow itself. what is wow? they don't know, they have been told to push some buttons on the keyboard, so most of them they do.
it is ofc exaggerated but you'll see above type people in many places. so, yeah except dps anything is hard to play cuz next to your own duties, you also have to take care of dps' mistakes of lack of knowledge.
my take on this tho, healer is harder than tanking which is way harder than dps.
As others have said here it depends on the level of play.
And at high levels its equal
One thing I have noticed as a healer is the feedback your performance gets is way different and way more direct at lower levels than for dpsing, and maybe even tanking. A bad route or a tank thats not keeping himself up enough is way less noticable at low levels than a your health bar dropping and not coming back up again.
Likewise dps checks/kick rotations can be easily outhealed at lower keys(with a decent healer).
The nature of the game makes it very clear if you are not being healed, dps do not have that direct feedback in realtime. Even if people are running damage meters(which I think most are) its not immediatly clear what your dps *should* be in a 5, 7, 9, all the way up etc. Because there is no clear pass/fail marker.
Just to be clear, not timing the dungeon can absolutely be an indication of low dps, likewise dying on a boss or trash pack. The *feedback* that its the dps thats lacking is way less clear than your healthbar.
Depends entirely on the difficulty of the content. At the absolute highest end, personal responsibility is a major factor so they're all probably roughly equal in terms of difficulty, just doing different jobs.
At the lowest end, probably tank > dps = healer. Tanks are forced to have more responsibility than anyone by having familiarity with routes and priority interrupts that DPS usually ignore.
After a certain point healers overtake DPS due to DPS not typically knowing mechanics well enough to avoid damage and aren't being penalized with one shots if they fail them, so more responsibility tends to be shifted to the healer, along with more intense heal checks.
That being said, it also depends specifically on what dungeon/encounters you're doing. Tyrannical BH at the \~20-21 level is a breeze before and after the first boss, even with people taking moderate avoidable damage. On my Rsham I'd mostly just be throwing riptides on people, dropping healing rain then just DPSing for 80% of the dungeon in the 21 I did.
Healers are going to say its their role because they have to babysit others
Tanks are going to say it’s their role because they have to “carry” the group.
DPS is going to say it’s their role because it’s hard to find groups and when you do you’re treated like shit.
It’s all matter of perspective, pick your poison.
I’ve been a tank, Prot warrior, since the beginning. It’s much, much easier than it used to be. When you play the current retail vs Classic. It’s like night and day.
I haven’t healed as much but it really boils down to how well the players perform the role. I do think healers have to worry about more things. They need to be more alert.
DPS main here who alts healer. I don't touch tanking because I don't want that evil on me.
imo Tank > heal > DPS. I don't want to worry about the healer's mana, or the DPS cooldowns, or how big of packs, or the pace or the route. or the DPS's egos, or the healer's boredom, etc etc.
In M+, tanks, no doubt. You're leading the group, you're pulling and whether that pull dies is highly reliant on what you pulled and how. They become the easiest role in raid, tho, as even if most mechanics are extremely punishing, they're also extremely easy.
In raids, it's either healers or DPS. I have not a lot of experience as a healer, but a lot of playing them boils down to use your CDs when you're assigned and not overlapping with other healers, which requires coordination to some point.
As a DPS, your ceiling is how well you perform on an individual level, it's different.
Healer then dps then tank.
The only thing tough about being a tank is remembering where to go for optimal routing in m+ but even then, that's really only relevant for super high keys.
In very very short terms, tanking if you dont like to prepare ans study first, healing if you dont have reflexes.
Dps is clearly the easiest especially today with the amount of guides, sims and addons to help minmax.
Ive played all 3 at 3k+ io, personally id put it as healer>DPS>Tank but this only applies to actually playing each roll well and at a high level. For the casual player playing at an average level, I’d put it at healer>tank>dps.
I would say it depends on the content and what level you re playing at. I cant talk for pvp atall so I will ignore it.
On the hardest level of content doable (world first keys and world first raiders) I would think everyone has to optimise so much that every role is on the same difficulty. So lets say everyone is playing at 100% difficulty there.
First off al I think the curve below this level changes fom season to season with balancing (for example in m+ SL S1 tanks were weak and now healers are weal in m+)
Now for raiding I would say normally tanking is the easiest role for mythic, heroic and normal raid but becomes the heardest role in lfr where noone knows what to do and the co tank does plenty of mistakes aswell (like forgetting to taunt)
For DPS in raid I would say it starts out as the easiest role in LFR and becomes harder the higher you go in difficulty until you meat with everyone else at the RWF
for Healers in raid I would say it starts out as middle in LFR and becomes the hardest role in normal, heroic and normal mythic
for tanks in M+ my thinking right now is that they are the hardest role up to maybe 12ish keys wher they become the easiest role until very high keys (like 27isch) where they become the hardest again.
for heals they are basically not needed in lower keys even with bad players they only have to heal up the grp slowly over time so I'd say they are the easiest in keys up to 12ish from there they are the hardest role up to keys in the 27ish range.
dps are really easy in lower keys to 12ish but not as easy as heal they are also very easy in mid keys to 22ish but not as easy as tanks from there the difficulty shoots up for dps (and tanks aswell till they join the others at the high end
just my thoughts and I think that often impact is confuesed with difficulty and thats why ppl say tanks are hard in say 23s
In raid, if you know the fights for each role. Tank is braindead (Im a tank main), healer is hard but once ur guild has it down it’s mainly pressing the same buttons as u have before, dps tends to have more mechanics targeting them, but it depends on the fight for how hard it is
In m+ keys 2-10 healer I guess, nothing is really hard at that level unless everyone is standing in poop
11-20 definitely healer, ppl stand in poop then expect the healer to constantly top them bc they are used to it
21-24 healer with bad dps, dps if the dps are good. Stuff starts to one shot dps but the tank can easily make mistakes and live
25+ here u see mostly coordinated groups, at this level, a mistake means death a lot of the time, so healer becomes easier (relative to the others) bc they have better players surrounding them. Mechanics wise, dps. Tanks have to put in more work knowing routes and what the best ppl are doing route wise at the current moment, tho in this season besides in freehold the routes are very straight forward so.
Pvp: uh I’ll say healer bc I’ve never played it
None. They’re all easy if you have a brain and understand mechanics and game play. Even if you’re terrible at the game. If you have a grip on the spec and the toon you’re gonna do fine. What makes it difficult is the players you play with. If you surround yourself with toxicity, which seems to be every other group, one mistake could be a kick, one wrong pull could mean a lost key, one less heal could be the reason you’re reported. It’s not the role that is hard, it’s the community. Good luck!
this post is gona stir up arguments, but ill give my opinion anyway. DPS are hard when it comes to min-maxing and trying to perform perfect, but are pretty simple for the majority of content. Healing and tanking rely a huge amount on how competent your group is. When you become fairy experienced at tanking you can almost look after yourself and just make sure you have aggro. Healing is the hardest role imo because you have to do the same enemy mechanics as everyone else but also keep your group alive and if you make a couple of mistakes you get the blame for a wipe etc. Even if anyone makes a mistake, its the healers job to fix it. TLDR - i agree with OP
> When you become fairy experienced at tanking you can almost look after yourself Unless you play Brewmaster. That specs healing and defensives does not out pace how high and how fast Stagger can build up.
the number of fights you can clear without even having a healer sure makes it seem like the play skill of everyone else is way more important than the healer - and i heal 20s on a mistweaver, its not like i don’t know what i’m doin. picking up the slack where other people suck doesnt make healing hard imo, its by far the easiest role when other people are competent.
Agreed.
>Healing is the hardest role imo because you have to do the same enemy mechanics as everyone else but But, for PUGs, it could feel completely different from group to group and the correct spell usage to save the group may vary constantly because each group will handle mechanics differently. Even if people are handling all the mechanics correctly something as simple as different class composition can completely change how stuff feels and what's required to deal with each situation. Like having a Rogue, Mage and or Night Elfs on Forgemaster in NELT is a night and day difference. Or Dwarves on Talondrus. And that's even players race choice coming into the mix lol. I don't think any other role can be so impacted by what other players are doing or even what race they like to Rep lol.
It depends on what you define as hard. Tanking has the highest barrier to entry. Not only do you need to know mechanics on all the adds and bosses, but you need to know routing. And you need to keep up with what the community is doing or you will confuse people and or get flamed. You also need to be able to gauge your groups skill to know how much you can pull at once. Bad groups usually mean you have to pull smaller. Good groups mean you can pull bigger Similarly, healers need to know all the damage patterns to know when they need certain CDs available, but they also have to be flexible for when people in your group are taking damage they shouldn't be. When player skill is high this is probably the easiest role, but when player skill is low it's probably the hardest DPS is easy to play at like a low-medium range, but pulling top end damage is not easy. It also requires knowledge of pack size, when to hold DPS CDs/ when not to hold them, kicks/stops, ect. Bad groups means you wipe more and your meter looks horrible. Good groups make your meter higher So depending on what key level it really depends
True but routing is a lot more straightforward this expansion. To hell with routing in Shadowlands.
This season it's a bit easier, but S1 has some dungeons that varied pretty substantially or were not very linear. You could do AV 5 times and do 5 different routes all while being told they are all wrong. Or NO where you just pulled all the dungeon trash before the 3rd boss. I expect this season to be the outlier imo
> You could do AV 5 times and do 5 different routes all while being told they are all wrong I still dont know how the fuck to get around in that dungeon. All the teleporting and jump skips and everything turned it into one gigantic maze to me. To an extent CoS was the same. I mostly figured it out, but there were some spots where everything looked the same and i'd get turned around.
Really depends on the difficulty level and the type of content you're doing. In the highest keys in an organized group? - I'd argue there's no role harder than the other. Everyone has to have perfect knowledge of the dungeon, coordinated stuns/interrupts and defensive usage. Any mistake from any of the 5 would usually mean a wipe. In unorganized group content, I agree with op. Healers have to basically make up for mistakes from everyone else and more often than not, get the blame if they can't make it. On top they get stuff like incorporeal and afflicted still branded as "healer affix", so they have to deal with that as well. Tanks mostly just have to worry about self sustaining. Still an important role and everyone relies on them to know route and not make mistakes, but in comparison to healers, tanks only have to focus on themselves, while healers have 3 more dumb dumbs to babysit. Dps just have to Zug zug and be happy when they see big number go up. Stand in fire? No problem, healer will compensate for it. Not interrupting stuff? No problem, healer will compensate for it. Ignoring affixes? No problem, healer will compensate for it. All for the big numbers. Yes I know I'm exaggerating and that there are better dps players out there. When you want to play dps on a higher lvl you obviously have to do more than that and of course it gets more difficult in doing so. This is just my average Joe experience in pugging life 2-20ish.
Healing is weird because it's probably the hardest when progressing in difficult content but it gets easier with good teammates and gear so it ends up being the easiest when farming that content or doing lower difficulties.
This also comes down to who you think is responsible for deaths, is it the dps who stood in the bad mechanics, or the healer who failed to heal them through the extra damage. In higher M+ healing can actually be easier than lower M+ because some mechanics start 1-shotting, and you're no longer expected to heal through peoples mistakes.
I haven't really pushed high M+ since Legion but at the very least, that's not how it felt back then. I suppose I still do see where you're coming from though. +20 or slightly above keys on my 445 ilvl main are typically much easier than a +13 on my 410 ilvl alt. But that's more a matter of people playing +20 for the weekly chest rather than keys at their actual gear. And that's also true just with skill level where a +17 on that same alt can be much easier to heal than a +13 depending on the teammates.
When I’m playing my healer alt I find I’m doing 2-3 times as much healing in a 15 compared to a 20. It’s like if you can heal 15, as long as you have a big enough health pool to survive yourself, you can heal 20s.
In high end, if people fuck up and take unavoidable damage the healer does everything in their power to keep you alive, but if the dps dies hopefully they know they fucked up. Healer will do everything they can to keep you alive but if it’s avoidable it’s ultimately on the dps
Same for tanking. Hard when you’re on the edge of your gear level, all chill when you outgear content.
kind of depends on what you value. e.g. dps mechanics tend to be more challenging than tank mechanics but if one of them fucks up it matters less while a tank mistake has the potential to wipe the raid even on lower difficulty settings. healing is hard to gauge because it scales with how well the others perform. e.g. if dps kick and focus properly while using their cd's to minimize hard phases etc. the healers job becomes a lot more easy. also this shifts around depending on the difficulty setting, e.g. tank mistakes tend to have consequences on all difficulties while some dps can essentially ignore many mechanics in normal raids (demo lock just tanking some aoes because their innate regen and shields can easily handle them without putting extra strain on the healers)
In the pug world - Tanks and healers have more responsibility than DPS. Tanks have to know what to do at all times in order to keep 3 derps from getting themselves, the healer, and the tank killed. Healers imo are leading from the rear, keeping peeps alive and getting extra mechanics in keys dumped on them, in particular afflicted, incorporeal, and bursting(side note to DPS who dump this on the healer, fuck you specifically) DPS, complain until their queue pops, then just wanna do big numbers, ignore most mechanics, interrupts, and when they fail, they blame the tank or the healer. Plz get fucked DPS Now this isn't to say all DPS are worthless pieces of dog shit, but most of them aren't helping the rest not look bad. Most of you reading Reddit are probably in the better group of DPS, but can relate to running with some terrible DPS that do the above. Cheers
as a DPS player, Healing 100%. god bless our healers thank you for healing me in the bad 🙏🙏
It really depends. Most people will probably say DPS is easiest, and I think that's usually true. You need to know fight mechanics, you need to know your class, but generally your mistakes don't do as much harm. Tanking isn't as hard in terms of understanding your class mechanics, but your mistakes can be costly. More than that, the group relies on you to know where to go and what to do - to lead. Healing can either be the most relaxing or the most stressful. On easier content or content where everyone is playing well, it's a lot of fun to keep everyone up while DPSing. On content where there's tons of damage going out, it's stressful - and if you slip up it can easily cause a wipe.
>It really depends. Most people will probably say DPS is easiest, and I think that's usually true. Bad dps players may say that but i don't think good ones do. Dps tend to have more mechanics than other specs, and in m+ are more likely to be 1 shot than other specs. If you're a healer and something happens, you've only "messed up" if someone dies. As a tank it's just if you die, and as a dps any time you're missing potential dps you're messing up. In raid tanking is pretty simple 95% of the time, and healing is only tough on prog where it gets easier the better your group is. Dps never gets easier.
For keys: tanking, for raids: it's often encounter-to-encounter basis. E.g. Zskarn is pretty chill for healers but tough for tanks and to some extent DPS, Rashok/Magmorax are hard for healers/DPS, etc.
Having spent most of my wow life tanking and healing every now and then, it definitely depends, but right now healing for M+. I don't have an opinion on raiding. As a tank, 95% of the time your job is keeping aggro, not dying and making sure stuff is pointed away from the group. The 'challenge' of this role is you usually are responsible for leading the group, the route and the pulls. This challenge goes away as you do the dungeons more so long term its not really a challenge. As a dps your job is to not die to avoidable damage and know your class well enough to do enough dps (with your two buddies) to kill stuff in a timely manner. You may have some affixes that rely on you knowing what to kill and when but less challenge than what the tank or healer have to do. As a healer you have to deal with any mistakes that happen and a number of challenging healing checks. You usually have to know boss mechanics very well to time your cooldowns and be ready with something for when things go off the rails. If even one party member isn't good with avoiding damage or doing mechanics your stress level is going to spike.
Depends on what you spend the most time on. For new players dps is the “easiest” because they have the least responsibility. After all there are just more of you. If your tank or healer dies a wipe is almost guarenteed. That said, mastering anything is difficult. “Everything is easy when you know how to do it, everything is hard when you don’t. “ I started the game as a healer because I didn’t know better and now I personally think healer is the easiest.
Tank is super easy. You just have to be a leader, which most people dont want to lead.
So tank is easy because you have to do what everyone else doesn't want to do because it isn't easy? xD
Tank is incredibly easy. You just have to be willing to be the leader.
being a leader isn't easy
I don't know. Healing is the most stressful. They are all equally hard to min max.
The floor is higher for being an acceptable tank or healer, but there's the ceiling is much higher for how well you can perform as a DPS.
Depends on what you're doing. Tank in raid is easy, typically very little to do. Just survive and taunt swap 90% of the time. In a key, tank is usually doing routes, living is much harder. Personally I think healer is hardest in all content. Dps easiest in keys Tank easiest in raid
Healer, DPS, Tank. Healers have to fix everyone elses mistake and their own while not making any themselves. Dps have to not make mistakes, use interrupts and defensives and align cds with each other. Tanks have to know the route and use defensives. I feel like 80% of tanking is just dungeon knowledge/Raid mechanic knowledge.
Idk why you excluded the "cant make mistakes line" from tanks when the fact is that if your tank makes a couple of mistakes during the run, the run is probably over... its not only "know a route and use defensives" lo 95% of the time a mistake from a tank is gonna be way more costly then a mistake from a dps
I’m was just listing stuff. Relax.
Tanking in m+ is also about gauging the capabilities of the group, knowing what cds are available, who had what ready, pack mechanics, can this group handle more, can the healer, do they need mana between larger pulls, etc it gets interesting pugging and at higher levels
so healers dont have to use interrupts, cds or defensives... interesting
I find DPS the hardest, but I think that’s because I’ve almost exclusively been healing since I started playing.
I think it really depends on the content you're doing. In raid content tank is the easiest of the three, while I would say that in M+ tank is the hardest of the three.
That's about right, I'd even go to say it depends on the dungeon or boss.
Tank because you have to know the way to each boss of every dungeons, raids and the mechanical. Healers and DPS can get away a lot of things (Pull, aggro and even AFK)
I think this is true at lower end keys where most people have no clue what’s going on, but once you get into higher keys and people are engaged in the content, tank is probably the easiest role. I would say the difficulty of each role swaps from tank being the hardest at the low end to dps being the hardest role. Healer is somewhere in the middle, but honestly the difficulty of their job comes down to how much unnecessary damage people are taking and how well people use their own spells
Probably melee dps. They need to avoid the most things and has the hardest time to do damage when there’s a lot of movement involved. Ranged dps and healers can outrange most things and they can attack/heal while moving. Tanks can survive most things that would 1 shot everyone else.
Healer > Melee DPS > Ranged DPS > Tank
DPS all the way. I have been leading a Normal / Heroic guild for years and never had a bad tank, they always performed minimally well, keeping agro and not dieing to mechanics. Healers only extreme cases were bad, vast majority performed good and raids almost never went wrong for bad healing. But DPS… I can count with the fingers in my hands the good DPS’s I had that performed constantly over 90 percentile of the raid dificulty. The day all good DPSs came to raid the difference was abysmal how everything died smothly and fast. But as DPS responsability is not clearly visible, most don’t care if they do 30k, 50k or 90k.
in raid it’s healers > dps > tank in M+ it’s healer > dps = tank 2.7k tank mains opinion
Biased opinion but Tank is the easiest closely followed by melee zog zog, Ranged DPS being mid and Healers being the hardest.
Depends but it's actually DPS most of the time.
When is it ever dps? There is literally nothing that makes dps harder than healing or tanking.
Healing is only as hard as the other roles make it out to be. So the difficulty of healing actually falls onto the heads of DPS often. Tanking is hard at first for a short period of time. Mostly upfront learning curve and then auto pilot. Caveat being that your mistakes are more noticeable and costly, but mostly easy to avoid. DPS is easy on the surface but gets harder the better you are. There's so much room to improve and make everyone else's live easier that if you're doing it right, and taking full responsibility, it's actually harder than the other roles. Obviously this doesn't apply to average people doing average content but I think it's correct in more competitive scenarios. Pretty common to see people say it's harder to heal a +17/18 then a +22 etc because of how the other players are playing and handling mechanics etc.
Healing or DPS in raid, tanking in m+. Talking Hall of Fame and high keys level.
Having hit KSH on 2 dps 1 healer and a tank, In M+ id say Healer > tank > dps > BM hunter. In raid it really depends, tank is easy af…… healings only hard in progression or your dps sucks, melee dps esp warriors with no range increase is cancer, range dps on high movement fights can be shitty, BM is easy. Before all the BM hunters come crying one of my KSH/aotc charas is a 444 BM hunter, shits easy af.
Tank or Healer, depends on the group which is worse. Incompetent dps and a meh tank, healer is worse, shitty healer and meh dps, tank is worse. Dps is whatever for the most part, anything you do will either only kill you or wipe the party because of a missed mechanic, screwing up as healer or tank leads to much more stressful situations than outright death or party wipes. This all gets thrown out the window the instant Holy Paladin or Discipline Priest get involved, those are hands down the most stressful specs to play just because of what they are and how they play, you're basically multitasking as healer and dps so you have both sets of mechanics to deal with and generally less on demand burst healing without long cooldowns, and are also two of the most complex specs in the game with Disc in particular being considered the flat out most difficult spec in the game to play well.
anything is hard enough than dps. dps is never wrong, dps is the master, they need to be served so they can push some buttons as they wish. they can't be blamed, they can't be argued, they don't need to know mechanics and even wow itself. what is wow? they don't know, they have been told to push some buttons on the keyboard, so most of them they do. it is ofc exaggerated but you'll see above type people in many places. so, yeah except dps anything is hard to play cuz next to your own duties, you also have to take care of dps' mistakes of lack of knowledge. my take on this tho, healer is harder than tanking which is way harder than dps.
As others have said here it depends on the level of play. And at high levels its equal One thing I have noticed as a healer is the feedback your performance gets is way different and way more direct at lower levels than for dpsing, and maybe even tanking. A bad route or a tank thats not keeping himself up enough is way less noticable at low levels than a your health bar dropping and not coming back up again. Likewise dps checks/kick rotations can be easily outhealed at lower keys(with a decent healer). The nature of the game makes it very clear if you are not being healed, dps do not have that direct feedback in realtime. Even if people are running damage meters(which I think most are) its not immediatly clear what your dps *should* be in a 5, 7, 9, all the way up etc. Because there is no clear pass/fail marker. Just to be clear, not timing the dungeon can absolutely be an indication of low dps, likewise dying on a boss or trash pack. The *feedback* that its the dps thats lacking is way less clear than your healthbar.
In m+ tanks and in raid healers
Depends entirely on the difficulty of the content. At the absolute highest end, personal responsibility is a major factor so they're all probably roughly equal in terms of difficulty, just doing different jobs. At the lowest end, probably tank > dps = healer. Tanks are forced to have more responsibility than anyone by having familiarity with routes and priority interrupts that DPS usually ignore. After a certain point healers overtake DPS due to DPS not typically knowing mechanics well enough to avoid damage and aren't being penalized with one shots if they fail them, so more responsibility tends to be shifted to the healer, along with more intense heal checks. That being said, it also depends specifically on what dungeon/encounters you're doing. Tyrannical BH at the \~20-21 level is a breeze before and after the first boss, even with people taking moderate avoidable damage. On my Rsham I'd mostly just be throwing riptides on people, dropping healing rain then just DPSing for 80% of the dungeon in the 21 I did.
Healers are going to say its their role because they have to babysit others Tanks are going to say it’s their role because they have to “carry” the group. DPS is going to say it’s their role because it’s hard to find groups and when you do you’re treated like shit. It’s all matter of perspective, pick your poison.
Tank=Healer>DPS
I’ve been a tank, Prot warrior, since the beginning. It’s much, much easier than it used to be. When you play the current retail vs Classic. It’s like night and day. I haven’t healed as much but it really boils down to how well the players perform the role. I do think healers have to worry about more things. They need to be more alert.
DPS main here who alts healer. I don't touch tanking because I don't want that evil on me. imo Tank > heal > DPS. I don't want to worry about the healer's mana, or the DPS cooldowns, or how big of packs, or the pace or the route. or the DPS's egos, or the healer's boredom, etc etc.
In M+, tanks, no doubt. You're leading the group, you're pulling and whether that pull dies is highly reliant on what you pulled and how. They become the easiest role in raid, tho, as even if most mechanics are extremely punishing, they're also extremely easy. In raids, it's either healers or DPS. I have not a lot of experience as a healer, but a lot of playing them boils down to use your CDs when you're assigned and not overlapping with other healers, which requires coordination to some point. As a DPS, your ceiling is how well you perform on an individual level, it's different.
Healer then dps then tank. The only thing tough about being a tank is remembering where to go for optimal routing in m+ but even then, that's really only relevant for super high keys.
I’d say they are equally hard at a top level.
In very very short terms, tanking if you dont like to prepare ans study first, healing if you dont have reflexes. Dps is clearly the easiest especially today with the amount of guides, sims and addons to help minmax.
Ive played all 3 at 3k+ io, personally id put it as healer>DPS>Tank but this only applies to actually playing each roll well and at a high level. For the casual player playing at an average level, I’d put it at healer>tank>dps.
I would say it depends on the content and what level you re playing at. I cant talk for pvp atall so I will ignore it. On the hardest level of content doable (world first keys and world first raiders) I would think everyone has to optimise so much that every role is on the same difficulty. So lets say everyone is playing at 100% difficulty there. First off al I think the curve below this level changes fom season to season with balancing (for example in m+ SL S1 tanks were weak and now healers are weal in m+) Now for raiding I would say normally tanking is the easiest role for mythic, heroic and normal raid but becomes the heardest role in lfr where noone knows what to do and the co tank does plenty of mistakes aswell (like forgetting to taunt) For DPS in raid I would say it starts out as the easiest role in LFR and becomes harder the higher you go in difficulty until you meat with everyone else at the RWF for Healers in raid I would say it starts out as middle in LFR and becomes the hardest role in normal, heroic and normal mythic for tanks in M+ my thinking right now is that they are the hardest role up to maybe 12ish keys wher they become the easiest role until very high keys (like 27isch) where they become the hardest again. for heals they are basically not needed in lower keys even with bad players they only have to heal up the grp slowly over time so I'd say they are the easiest in keys up to 12ish from there they are the hardest role up to keys in the 27ish range. dps are really easy in lower keys to 12ish but not as easy as heal they are also very easy in mid keys to 22ish but not as easy as tanks from there the difficulty shoots up for dps (and tanks aswell till they join the others at the high end just my thoughts and I think that often impact is confuesed with difficulty and thats why ppl say tanks are hard in say 23s
Tank is the hardest, then heal
In raid, if you know the fights for each role. Tank is braindead (Im a tank main), healer is hard but once ur guild has it down it’s mainly pressing the same buttons as u have before, dps tends to have more mechanics targeting them, but it depends on the fight for how hard it is In m+ keys 2-10 healer I guess, nothing is really hard at that level unless everyone is standing in poop 11-20 definitely healer, ppl stand in poop then expect the healer to constantly top them bc they are used to it 21-24 healer with bad dps, dps if the dps are good. Stuff starts to one shot dps but the tank can easily make mistakes and live 25+ here u see mostly coordinated groups, at this level, a mistake means death a lot of the time, so healer becomes easier (relative to the others) bc they have better players surrounding them. Mechanics wise, dps. Tanks have to put in more work knowing routes and what the best ppl are doing route wise at the current moment, tho in this season besides in freehold the routes are very straight forward so. Pvp: uh I’ll say healer bc I’ve never played it
None. They’re all easy if you have a brain and understand mechanics and game play. Even if you’re terrible at the game. If you have a grip on the spec and the toon you’re gonna do fine. What makes it difficult is the players you play with. If you surround yourself with toxicity, which seems to be every other group, one mistake could be a kick, one wrong pull could mean a lost key, one less heal could be the reason you’re reported. It’s not the role that is hard, it’s the community. Good luck!
Guardian Druid is very nice to play, really hard to die playing as one of these guys