by Ronni Dee

Created on: December 26, 2009

It is important to know and understand the different roles played by characters in the MMORPG World of Warcraft, or WoW. There are three essential raiding roles: Tank, Healer and Damage. These three roles completely rely on one another to ensure the ability to clear content and survive.

Tank

The Tank assumes the role of keeping the NPCs, non-player combatants, ‘aggroed’ to his character. What this means is that the tank wants to retain the threat against the NPCs in an effort to keep them attacking him, and to have him not attack the other players in the party. A tank will need to have a large amount of health, or hit points, in order to successfully fulfill his role and soak up large amounts of damage. In addition, he will need to be sure that has a large amount of defense and is at defense cap to help ensure his survivability against NPCs.

Tank Spot is a wonderful website with hundreds of videos on how to properly tank certain bosses in all of the WoW dungeons and raids.

Healer

A healer is the person or persons within the group that will be responsible for keeping the group alive. As you will learn below, a few classes have healing capabilities. Healers are essential in World of Warcraft, especially in end game content. Without a healer, even the best tank character could die and the NPCs will wipe out the entire group. A healer is geared to have a large amount of spell power in order to simplify their healing efforts.

Damage (DPS)

Damage positions are referred to in game as DPS, or damage per second. These positions fill the role of damaging the NPCs, while the NPC is generally hitting the tank and while the healer is healing the tank and DPS. DPS characters take a large amount of damage as they are geared to hit hard and hit fast rather than to survive like tank. A five-man dungeon will consist of one tank, one healer and three DPS. These three DPS will do the most damage in taking down the NPCs and continuing on with the dungeon or raid.

Classes

Druid

The druid is an all around character because they can serve as a healer, damage or a tank. The druid has multiple forms he can take on to ensure survivability as a tank, damage as a DPS and healing as a healer. I have seen exceptional druids perform in all three roles during dungeons, raids and PVP (player versus player). As of patch 3.3, a druid can only be a Night Elf (Alliance) or a Tauren (Horde).

Hunter

The hunter can only serve the role of ranged damage in WoW; however, their pet can serve

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