I would argue that the core doing (different from motivation, goals, or the ambiguous “experience”) of an MMORPG like WoW would be in the combat. Specifically, combat against epic enemies and dangerous dungeons with your brave buddies (ok, I’m done with alliteration). Anyway, the reason why I want to break this down is because I believe that it gives us a good idea of what kinds of play styles people are interested in and thus give us something to map our own doing in GoI:Online to. So let’s start gutting out the interiors and try to find the foundation.
There are many roles a players can specialize in when dungeon crawling. I believe the most distilled format is tank, hitter (dps), and healer where more likely than not you will have one tank, one healer, and several hitters. A tank is responsible for maintaining aggro (aggressiveness) in order to attract the various creeps and enemies. The tank is ultimately a meat shield and are aggressive in order to prevent enemies from attacking everyone else. Hitters (yes, that’s what I called them in my MUD days) are responsible for dishing out as much damage as possible and as quickly as possible, thus the Damage Per Second ratio. Healers needs to heal mainly the tank who will be taking most of the damage. If the tank is unable to maintain aggro, then the healer must also make sure everyone else is safe too.
