The tank's job is to take the damage, usually this involves knowing fights in order to position bosses to reduce party damage. The healer's job is to keep everybody alive. This usually involves casting healing spells, or buffs to reduce damage - though priests get a skill at level 85 which pulls someone towards them, which can help save someone from being stomped on, or something like that (I haven't hit 85 yet, so I don't really know how well it fits into my current toolkit). DPS are required to do lots of damage, and occasionally they will have a skill that lets them disable a monster, which they might also need to use.
During the week or so after the release of Cataclysm, the general consensus was that things were much harder than Wrath of the Faceroll. Things like crowd control are actually important, at least in heroics, and everyone has to pull their weight or the group will probably wipe. I've found that healing is actually a challenge now, and there have been a few times where I've felt like I've done everything I can, and it's still not enough. I took a bit of a break for a while, in order to farm up better gear, and things seem not so dire at the moment (although there was a hotfix that buffed priests not too long ago - I'm not sure what it did, but healing seems much, much easier now. It was kinda crazy, there was a poll on MMO champion about which healers people preferred. At the time I checked, 82% of people preferred paladins, and I forget the distribution between druid and shaman, but only a measly 3% of people preferred priest).
Previously in WoW, when a group wiped, unless it was really obvious someone else had done something absurdly stupid, the blame typically went towards the healer. If you send a letter, and find out later that it never arrived, it makes sense to assume something is wrong with the postal system. It would never occur to you that perhaps you addressed it incorrectly, or you might have completely forgotten to mail it in the first place, as these are usually unlikely events, and who blames themselves anyway?
As I mentioned, one of the big changes in Cata is that it's not just the healer's responsibility to keep everyone alive. As Olek puts it, the most important thing to learn in this expansion is it "stay out of the hurty shit". If you don't move out of the lava, you will die. If you don't keep adds crowd controlled, and the healer can't keep up with the damage, you will die. If you don't move away from the falling rocks, you will die (*cough, cough*).
Not too long ago, I came across this situation in a dungeon.
(If you don't understand what's going on: the warrior (brown - Nag) is telling the druid (orange - Dat) to focus on the mob marked with skull. The druid is saying he did, but the warrior said he was using an area of effect skill which was causing the druid to gain threat on other targets, and so they'd go and beat on the druid and he'd die. The druid said that what he was doing was fine, and if the warrior was any good, he would be able to hold aggro even with hurricane.)
Add to this, later I get a message from the warrior:
Thinking back towards the roles I described earlier, is the tank at fault for not being able to hold aggro over the druid's pitiful hurricane damage (I don't actually know how much damage he was doing) so that the mobs would attack him instead of the rest of the party? He purposely assigned an attack target so that he could build up enough aggro on that target not to have to worry that it would change targets. Holding a lot of aggro on multiple targets at once can be difficult, because while you are trying to build aggro on another, the DPS classes are unleashing everything they have on the marked target, so unless your threat can keep up, someone is going to get their face smashed in. At the same time, the tank can't completely ignore the other targets, as healing causes aggro on all mobs, so if the tank doesn't get at least some aggro on the others, eventually they're going to decide to beat down on the healer.
Is the druid at fault for.... doing too much damage? So as a DPS class, his job is essentially to deal damage, and lots of it. Also, they should crowd control where possible to ease the stress on the healer (druid wasn't able to do anything that pull). If he doesn't do enough damage, eventually the healer will run out of mana (it happens now, it's so great!), the tank will run out of health, and you'll all die (unless you're pro like Rob).
Am I at fault for letting the druid live? That doesn't seem to make sense, as it's my job to keep people alive, so letting them die seems counter-intuitive. I had a discussion with Julian ages ago about how to spot a good healer. DPS have damage meters, but using healing meters to judge skill doesn't quite work. I can make my way to the top of the healing meters spamming heals on random people all fight, but if half the raid is dead at the end, does that make me a good healer?
Knowing your class well is something that makes someone a good player in general, and I have read a lot about priests in Cata, and one of the things that crops up the most is holy priests are the best (unlike the other healing classes, priests have two healing specialisations - discipline and holy). I am a huge disc supporter. Other than a brief period in WotLK when I had disc for PvP and holy for PvE, I have always been disc for PvE (I was 31/30/0 in TBC, and that meant I was "hybrid", but I count that as disc as I had one point more in disc than holy!) and although the reason behind that might not be the greatest, it's something I want to stick with. According to the number crunchers, this is the less-than-ideal path.
This makes me worry that I might not be carrying my weight. Maybe I'm just feeling this way because after wiping on a boss many, many times, they managed to kill him after I was kicked from the group. MrMan5.5 says that it wasn't my fault, but if you look at the common element in all the failures that wasn't present in the success, arrow points to me (and all the random players who left as they didn't have the patience to keep trying, but it seems like they were just replaced with more of the same people).
The other pandemic that is spreading is the trigger happy vote-kickers. It seems that rather than give someone a chance to learn, they'd rather kick them from the party and hope to get someone new who is good. I understand that it is a waste of time explaining to someone how something works and possibly dying because they're still learning the encounter, but everyone was in that boat not too long ago, and someone was kind enough to explain it to them, so why don't they do the same to others?
I've read some stories about people who have waited in queue for over 40 minutes, only to get kicked the moment they join without any explanation (which is another problem, when you kick someone, you are required to give a reason, yet the person who gets kicked never finds out the reason - although the reason can be "asdf" and they'll still get kicked if the vote is passed). That is why I'm really reluctant to kick someone, especially a DPS class who has another long wait ahead of them.
I'm not sure if I'm doing the right thing though. It's unfair to the rest of the party to die over and over just because I'm happy to be patient and teach someone new. As I said, I'd be happy to pay for people to repair their armour, but you can't trade gold across realms (I did offer to give the DK the loot I won so that he could sell it for gold, but he ignored me). But it's not just gold, it's also a waste of their time. That being said, the vote kick system would still allow the person to be kicked even if I voted no, assuming everyone else voted yes. It also punishes people for votekicking people too often, which is why the DK had to ask me to do it, as I'm guessing he has tried to kick too many people.
QUICK WoW DUNGEON QUEUE EXPLANATION
There are many different dungeons in WoW, and can be completed in parties of five people. Previously, you had to find the other party members yourself, but now you can just pick a dungeon (or a random) and tick the roles you can fulfill (tank/damage/healer) and wait in queue. The system matches people based on roles, puts you together in a party, and off you go! There is a shortage of tanks and healers compared to DPS, so they typically have short wait times, with the average DPS wait time sometimes getting to over an hour (compared to the instant - 1 min wait times for tanks and healers). =/
The good/bad thing about it is that it can match you with people from other servers, so you can be a complete asshole to everyone else and probably never see them again!
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