Last night started out as a standard friday night raid, sure things weren’t perfect as only 9 profession raiders had turned up but we’d pugged a random guildie and headed to kick dragon butt anyway. This random guildie was a mage, we already had a mage in the group who usually ran on their resto druid but we’re used to duplicate classes. Anyway, fast forward we had to do a character shuffle before Hagara as one of the tanks had to leave which is when this problem reared it’s head.

I raid as a holy paladin but my off spec is protection as I quite like tanking 5 mans. However, I really dislike tanking raids. Exactly why that is will have to wait for another post. Anyway, I got swapped to tank, the mage got his resto druid and we pugged another dps from guild. We got Hagara down and raid leader asked in vent for the pug mage to pop Time Warp, they then raid warned TW half a dozen times. What happened? You guessed it no time warp. They claimed they didn’t see it/hear it. We wiped but ran back and tried again. This time there was no possibility of time warp as the mage was dead, this got me thinking.

Heroism/Time warp are necessary staples of the raiding toolkit. You wouldn’t raid without flasks and buff food and similarly you wouldn’t raid without a shaman or a mage to pop that magic button. However, I think this is a bit wrong. In this age of accessibility why should every raid have to have a shaman or a mage? Ok I get that it’s a powerful ability and classes have to have defining characteristics etc. but the problem is actually more, when you have that class, but they can’t press the button. In many fights, particularly punishing dps fights, heroism/time warp is a necessity. That is a lot of responsibility for one player to have to shoulder. Yes, there are other roles with that level of responsibility. If a tank dies and there’s punishing debuffs or too much damage etc. that’s too much for the other tank to cope with then it’s a wipe. If a healer dies and the other one or two healers can’t cope then it’ll be a wipe. However, in both of those cases there’s a possibility of someone else able to help. A feral cat going bear in a tank emergency, a shadow priest popping divine hymn in a healing emergency. You get the picture.

Even if it was just one more class that could press that magic button I think it would improve matters. Perhaps blizz is going to add that ability to the monk class? In terms of existing classes there’s a lot of different arguments as to what would be the most beneficial. A pure dps and a healing/dps hybrid already have the ability. There’s an argument to be made that giving the ability to a hybrid such as paladin or druid would increase the likelihood that raid composition would include that class. There’s also an argument to be made however that hybrid classes already have enough utility and reason to bring them they don’t need another massive boon.

Personally, if I had to pick a class to gain the ability, it would be druid for the stated purpose of having more people in a raid with that ability. Druids are a true hybrid able to perform any role (tank, healer, melee or ranged dps) therefore most likely to be included in a raid. If a hybrid shouldn’t gain the ability then I think priest might be a good second choice. Whatever the class choice though I firmly believe that the time has come for another class to get the heroism ability. Cataclysm gave mages time warp. What will Mists bring?