I think the two most prevalent cases are tanks and dps. In general, dps accepts damage meters such as recount, are the end all of who’s doing the best, but tanks are a little harder to sort out. This leads to tanks boasting about gear, stats, avoidances, and all other things they might be able to bring to the table.

In a world that is as unquantified as tanking, its often very difficult to match up exact tanks against other tanks, especially when the 3 (soon to be 4) classes have varying degrees of differences. Additionally, most of the fights that blizzard designs, have 1 target to tank, and if there are more, they are often clearly designated as “off tank” style mobs. Trash usually requires more than one tank, but when you get to the boss (read: important) fight the other tanks are sidelined. This causes a bit of an inferiority complex in the additional tanks.

This will be alleviated a bit when Blizzard implements the “dual-spec” system, as dps/tanks will be able to switch back and forth, and the tanks won’t feel like such a lame duck when they are attempting to dps for boss fights.

The thing that really sparked my interest to write about this was the comments made by Rohan, about the difference between the WoW achiement system, and the similar concept in Warhammer online.

He does go over them pretty well, the WoW achievement system (shortened to AS in this post) is pretty transparent. All of the achievment point rewarding goals are listed before you. You can see your targets and work towards those goals. However, in the Warhammer equivalent, all achievements are “hidden” in the fact that you can’t see what they are, or what it takes to accomplish them.

Now while I do like the idea of being surprised by a unexpected/random achievemet, if it were not for the visibility of the goals, lots of the developers efforts would have gone in noticed.

Now, like I mentioned all of WoW’s AP awarding achievements are listed, but there is an additional category that has no reward at all, the “Feats of Strength”. These achievements are hidden to the user, in that they cannot see them before they have accomplished them. They are a little different from the normal goals in the AS, and I’ve only gotten about 3-4 of them (most retroactive from past accomplishments).

I like the direction Blizzard has taken with the AS, it’s definately brought a new aspect to the game, as well as given us high level characters something to do until WotLK drops and we get to level our many alts again.

*prays*