Want vs. Need

Amid all the reaction to the latest class changes (which, surprisingly, I have very little thoughts about), I thought I’d write about a completely different topic. This is something that has come up in recent days with the server transfer, and I think in several ways it may be affecting my enjoyment of the game.

One of the things I like most about playing the game as a social activity is the feeling of being wanted. I really enjoy it when people say they want to run with me, or implicitly indicate that by asking to run with me on unscheduled runs. I can tell, for instance, when Leafie wants to run with me by either her reactions to things I do, or simply because she’s running with me when she could be doing something else. It’s a good feeling.

The feeling of being needed is something else entirely.

At first, one might find it odd that a reaction to being needed doesn’t encompass the reaction to being wanted, or at most adds upon that, because by definition someone who is needed is also wanted. If you want to run ICC 10, for instance, you need two tanks, and therefore you must want two tanks if you want ICC 10. Or so the thinking goes.

The problem with that logic is that you really don’t want two tanks at all. You just want to run ICC 10. If you could run it with your nine closest friends and have it work, that would be ideal. If your nine closest friends don’t happen to include two tanks, you’re in trouble. Then, you would have to take two people who aren’t your closest friends to actually do the run. You don’t really want to be with them. You tolerate their presence in order to get the run done.

It’s quite possible to want someone and need someone at the same time. If the best tank in the guild also happens to be your closest friend, you’re in luck. But the two things are different, just as there is a different feeling when one senses that one is tolerated versus when one is desired.

My guild on Thorium Brotherhood (Seraphim — I see no reason to refer to it obliquely like that since anyone could figure it out by looking at my armory) suffered from that, I think. In our waning days, when there was only a 5% buff in ICC, we felt we needed our best players for Lich King attempts. Among some of those players were people that I know some other people didn’t want to play with — those were among the people who were not “invited” into the new guild (Storm) on the new server. Were some people disinclined to participate in a Lich King attempt because it would involve people they didn’t want to play with? I think that’s quite possible. In any case, I think the problem turned out to be that many of the people, including the officers, got tired of playing with people they “needed” to play with in order to get ICC runs going. It wasn’t that we couldn’t put ICC 10 runs together. It was that putting those runs together involved including people who the officers didn’t want to play with, either because their personalities were abrasive or because they weren’t good at the game.

On my end, I have almost an aversion to feeling needed. I feel guilty being there — not necessarily because other people don’t want me there — but because I feel like I’m doing it for other people rather than myself. It’s a bad feeling to sense that I have to be anyplace, and it will often (and ridiculously) mask the feeling that I want to be there in the first place.

Let’s take our Lich King attempts as an example. I find it very difficult to imagine someone other than a death knight off-tanking in phase 1. There are two tools the death knight tank has that make the phase much easier: the ability to generate AoE aggro at a point centered at a distance, and the ability to grab a mob at a distance and move them to the off-tank.  I’m sure there are other ways of doing this (after all, not all 10-man groups have a death knight tank), but it definitely seems to me to be easier than it would for other classes.

There’s a set of knowledge and capabilities I have for phase 1 of the Lich King fight that no one else in the guild has. It’s also something that took me a few tries to figure out, and as much as I could try to explain it to someone else (and, believe me, I think I could write something as long as this post on it), it’s not experiencing it. If I weren’t there, I would guess that the group would need to spend at least an hour, and possibly an entire night, learning phase 1 to work with a new tank. In this way, I feel needed for the fight — I don’t think the run would work without me.

This is quite a different thing than saying that people want me to be there because I’m particularly good at doing the fight. Perhaps people do feel that way, but it’s difficult to express because they don’t really have an alternative.

The difference is feeling that everyone would replace you if they could, versus being eager to run because you are there. Being needed encourages the former feelings, no matter how true the latter is.

Which brings me to my point.

Lately, I’ve been feeling needed, and not wanted.

When I first joined Seraphim, I thought I brought a lot of new abilities and skills to the table, and people were very happy to run with me because the runs were successful. People wanted me on Rotface because I was good at kiting. And so forth.

But now that we’ve transferred servers and our numbers are very thin, I feel like I need to make every single raid. Note that it isn’t really any different from before, because I pretty much made every raid anyway. But now I need to be there or it just doesn’t go. It’s a different feeling, and I’m not liking it.

I’m not sure that makes sense. But I’m trying to get at a feeling of dissatisfaction with the game right now that flies in the face of any objective evidence. Maybe it’s because I’m feeling needed as opposed to feeling wanted.