I’ve never played WoW, but game design assumptions, and common practice among gaming groups, both vary quite a bit. Sometimes this simply won’t be an issue; it’s hard to imagine what an optimized Toon character would look like, for example. But a lot of games and scenarios are designed mainly around tactical challenges, including many of the most popular ones; and when a group finds itself in such a scenario, problems tend to arise if it includes both highly optimized and highly suboptimal characters.
It’s one thing if we’re talking about a deliberately nerfed character built for comedy or storytelling potential; most groups handle that well, as long as they’re not populated entirely by munchkins. But a character that’s meant to be effective and just happens to have taken some really weak choices… that causes real problems. The player running such a character usually gets frustrated because they aren’t doing as well as they think they should; players running more optimized characters tend to be resentful because they have to pull more of the weight. In the worst-case scenario it can even break the balance assumptions that encounter generation is built on, endangering the entire group.
A competent GM can adjust for this by creating house rules or modifying encounter difficulty or tailoring challenges to their group’s skills and preferences. But these are all workarounds, not fixes, and they only go so far.
I’ve never played WoW, but game design assumptions, and common practice among gaming groups, both vary quite a bit. Sometimes this simply won’t be an issue; it’s hard to imagine what an optimized Toon character would look like, for example. But a lot of games and scenarios are designed mainly around tactical challenges, including many of the most popular ones; and when a group finds itself in such a scenario, problems tend to arise if it includes both highly optimized and highly suboptimal characters.
It’s one thing if we’re talking about a deliberately nerfed character built for comedy or storytelling potential; most groups handle that well, as long as they’re not populated entirely by munchkins. But a character that’s meant to be effective and just happens to have taken some really weak choices… that causes real problems. The player running such a character usually gets frustrated because they aren’t doing as well as they think they should; players running more optimized characters tend to be resentful because they have to pull more of the weight. In the worst-case scenario it can even break the balance assumptions that encounter generation is built on, endangering the entire group.
A competent GM can adjust for this by creating house rules or modifying encounter difficulty or tailoring challenges to their group’s skills and preferences. But these are all workarounds, not fixes, and they only go so far.