Know Your Role!

The new LFG tool is pretty awesome.  It's opened up content that had been lost to most players for years.  While leveling up when was the last time you did BFD or RFK with a level appropriate group?  2006, 2007?  Many players who are newer to the game probably haven't run any or many dungeons until they got either to max level or close.

But there might be a problem.  I think WoW has become more and more of a solo game as time goes on, and quite a few players are joining their first groups.  For a lot of us, the concept of Tank, DPS and Healer roles is more than clear, but I'm not sure everyone has a grasp on what they should be doing in each of the roles.

Listen, at level 20 no-one should be expected to be an expert in their class, have the absolute most effective distribution of their handful of talent points or be awesomely geared.  Heck, I'm a mid 20's healy feral druid at the moment.  I do fine in dungeons because I know what I should and should not do.  Would this work well in heroics? I would not recommend it. 

But if you queue for a role, I do expect you to know the basics of what you should be doing.  So I will bestow my vast knowledge of the game upon you now.  Listen, and take heart, for I now blog.

Tank:  The tank's job is to gather up mobs and hold them in place while the DPS burns them down.  In most groups the tank also chooses the next group to kill, the kill order within that group.  Your task is to keep mobs off the other players, because if the healer is wasting cooldowns and mana on others it makes it that much easier for you to die.  It is much more easier for a healer to keep a group alive if they are just focused on healing one player.

Be prepared to taunt mobs off other players.  Also be able to spread out your damage to multiple mobs in order to build up threat.  All tanking classes are given an AOE threat generation ability early on, make good use of it.

Healer:  Your job is to keep the others in the group alive, in this order of priority:  Yourself, the tank, DPS.  Why not the tank first?  If you're not healing the tank isn't going to last very long, and you've got the ability to res people.  Realistically once the tank goes down, the rest of the group is soon to follow, but sometimes you get lucky and end up being able to res your fallen comrades making the best out of a bad situation.

DPS are expendable.  If you've got excess mana throw a heal or two their way during the fight, but don't heal them at the expense of yourself or the tank.  You want to keep everyone alive, but if a lock keeps pulling aggro, and you need to focus on keeping the tank up he's going to have to go down.

Communicate when you need to drink.  It's often the tendency of non mana classes to forget we need a 30 second break every so often to mana up.  Make a macro that you can hit when you need to drink asking for a quick break.

Finally I recommend using a healing mod to help monitor things, and make your life a little easier.  VuhDo, Grid, and Healbot are all common options.  I use VuhDo personally, it allows me to use a combination of clicks and key modifiers to cast spells on party members by clicking their unit frame.  It also very nicely tracks HoT spells and when they expire, and highlights party members who have a dispel-able debuff.

DPS:  Your job is to make things die without taking aggro yourself.  Give the tank a bit of time to gain aggro before going full bore on the target.  You can use a threat mod such as Omen to help out with this. /focus the tank so you can see what he's currently targetting which can help a lot.  You can also make a macro which will target his target allowing you to quickly switch targets while in combat when you notice you're taking on more aggro than you're comfortable with.

It's not about topping the meters.  If you're constantly pulling aggro and the healer is having to expend mana keeping your squishy butt alive, no one really cares what type of numbers you're putting up.  Hold back a little if you need to.  If you or your pet has threat generation abilities, turn these off, please.  If you have threat mitigation abilities, use them when needed.

Unless agreed upon by the group, let the tank do the pulling.  Even if you always do the pulling with everyone else you run with, unless everyone is aware of this, and knows how to make it work you're going make the run tougher not easier.

Overall have fun, and try to treat the other players as people not pixels.  People will need to drop the group because something comes up for them, the LFG tool helps you find a new member in a few minutes usually. People will be new to their roles, and need a group to be forgiving as they learn.