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The WoW doldrums are upon us as the last raid content for Wrath of the Lich King has been released. One of the many things that I’ve been doing to pass the time until Cataclysm is to level up my Paladin alt. Plec is hanging around 73 and as I’ve invested the money to buy him another spec, he is currently a Ret/Holy Pally. Most of my time is spent questing but I’ve been healing more and more instances lately (any Paladin resources that you all refer to for info on the class are welcome!).

During one of my breaks from leveling this weekend, I picked up the re-launch issue of Electronic Gaming Monthly (great to see you guys back) and came upon and interesting article that talked about the psychological factors that motivate gamers. They tapped a psychologist, Dr. Benjamin Donner, for his expert opinion on the matter. One pearl of wisdom stood out among others in the article. Donner stated, “In gaming, the skills acquired in earlier levels are honed and utilized in increasing combination’s as one progresses, and that in of itself is rewarding and growth promoting.” It was at this point that old man Plectical leaned back in his chair and scratched his head.

You see, I’ve spent the large majority of my time as a Paladin leveling using the Retribution tree. It was only recently that I got the idea to grab a Holy spec and try healing a few instances. The problem with this is that I may as well have rolled a completely different class at level 70. All of the spells and talent procs are completely different and there are a whole new set of rules and stimuli to respond to (apparently mana conservation is a big deal to Holy Paladins). When read through the lens of the Donner’s analysis of rewarding play in RPGs, it became clear to me that something was off.

If the main point of healing classes is to heal, then why has Blizzard created a system in which you spend the majority of your time not healing? The easy answer here is you can heal your way through instances all the way to 80! Sure but you are only experiencing a small cross section of all the content that is available to players leveling. The other easy answer is that its simply easier/cheaper to only have one branch of content that a player can move through as they level up through the game. Again, this reasoning would be sound for any company other than Blizzard. They usually rebel against anything that resembles conventional wisdom (games are done when they’re done, raid content should be made accessible to all players, etc).

This game design inconsistency doesn’t necessarily have me putting down the class altogether but it does have me putting in an incredible amount of time researching the capabilities of a class that I thought I was getting to know pretty well.