The last leg of the MMO trinity, the damage dealer, has a simpler job than the tanks or the healers. They do as much damage per second as possible to whoever the bad guy is.

But they have one other important job, and I want you yahoos in pickup groups to pay attention to this: DO NOT STAB THE SHEEP.

Also do not shoot the sheep, fireball the sheep, cleave the sheep or otherwise harm the sheep in any way.

That sheep never did anything to you. Leave him alone.

While damage-per-second classes, or just DPS, are responsible for the hitting part of “you hold ‘em, I’ll hit ‘em” that the tanking sytem entails, they also usually get saddled with crowd control duties. In World of Warcraft, rogues can sneak up and knock a guy out from behind. Hunters can freeze people in traps. Mages temporarily turn people into helpless sheep.

It doesn’t help kill anyone, but it keeps the fight managable so you can take people on one at a time, Bruce Lee style.

The catch is, anyone who does damage to the crowd controlled target wakes them up, or unfreezes them, or breaks the sheep spell. Then it runs after whatever squishy man in a dress turned them into mutton and attempts revenge. For this reason, DPS goes after whoever the tank is hitting, ideally.

I wonder if perhaps WoW has fallen short in training its players about the basics. There’s plenty of tutorials on how to play solo, but the group basics are left for people to figure out on their own. Maybe that’s why non-guild groups always seem to be such disasters. Either that or the player base is just crazy for lamb chops.

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