The reason most play DPS (it is not because they like DPS or because they hate tanks)

[Ezyah]

The most popular answer in here is to say either between the lines or directly: "because it's easy", but that's just the RESULT of what people see on their own experience and it's extremely SUBJECTIVE because to make something "easy" it means you kept something that was "hard" ... hard and haven't improved on it.

To say it in simple words: if you play ONLY tank: tanking is also becoming "easy"; the strategies you have to learn for dungeons for example is the only thing you learn at the start of an expansion so for you they become "easy"; if you generally play any role exclusively it's "easy" because of experience so it evens.

Can you please not quote people and change the content of the quote to fit your narrative? Ty

[meheez]

one of the reasons yes

[Azerox]

I play dps because tanking is way to easy and boring. Healer is just to much paying attention. Like to key/raid when I'm drunk af.

[Varanus]

The most popular answer in here is to say either between the lines or directly: "because it's easy", but that's just the RESULT of what people see on their own experience and it's extremely SUBJECTIVE because to make something "easy" it means you kept something that was "hard" ... hard and haven't improved on it.

To say it in simple words: if you play ONLY tank: tanking is also becoming "easy"; the strategies you have to learn for dungeons for example is the only thing you learn at the start of an expansion so for you they become "easy"; if you generally play any role exclusively it's "easy" because of experience so it evens.

You seem to be confusing responsibility with difficulty. More responsibility does not mean more difficult. It just means you mistakes carry more weight. I would guarantee that a pilots job isnt more difficult than a computer technicians. But if that pilot messes up, people are more likely to pay some serious consequences for it. Therefor more responsibility.
If a dps messes up and dies, the fight takes slightly longer. If a tank messes up and dies, everyone probably will as well.

[Lolites]

one of the reasons yes

one of the MANY reasons to be precise, and i would say one of the rather less frequent

[Naramag]

I nowadays play even my tanks in DPS spec. It's not about tanking is boring or making the best DPS. The reason is simple: Too many people treated me like shit. Impatient people, arrogant people. Tanking is a free service to the community. And if the community behaves like apes slinging their you know what around, who want's to be responsible for that?

If someone can't respect my role when dealing with trashmobs, why should I trust they respect it when the boss comes around?

[cuafpr]

The most popular answer in here is to say either between the lines or directly: "because it's easy", but that's just the RESULT of what people see on their own experience and it's extremely SUBJECTIVE because to make something "easy" it means you kept something that was "hard" ... hard and haven't improved on it.

To say it in simple words: if you play ONLY tank: tanking is also becoming "easy"; the strategies you have to learn for dungeons for example is the only thing you learn at the start of an expansion so for you they become "easy"; if you generally play any role exclusively it's "easy" because of experience so it evens.

to an extent yes... but for awhile i played both Tank and DPS regularly and DPS was always my "break" for alt runs. One dps falls behind, disconnects etc.. things can go on. that's harder to do if it's a tank/Healer. DPS is way more forgiving for a mistake as well

[crusadernero]

It's a multiplayer game and people instinctively want to beat others in multiplayer games; they want an objective mean of being able to say to others "see? I beat you"; if that is missing they lose interest very easily.
Tanking and healing heavily lack that; DPSes can be considered bad if they only look at meters but they are the only ones who CAN use meters in some fights ("Patchwerk" ones); tanks almost never have that.

For years I have mained a paladin and in every xpac I have healed or tanked. Last couple of xpacs, healed. For the first time ever im seriously considering just sticking to my BM hunter and chillax with it. Its a whole different ballpark entering m+ or raids as dps(especially with one of the easiest ones) than as a healer.

Why? cause its so much more relaxing being a dps. Only need to think of myself and do my part. As a healer? always some moron around complaining for his own fault. Cant be bothered.

[hulkgor]

In games like SWtoR you can do 5(4?) mans without tanks or healers, it sucked at the start, as it was too hard obviously, but with some refining it was doable

The lowest difficulty content that is nearly irrelevant, Veterans, yea, i'd compare them to the old MoP scenarios, which were role agnostic. In Master Mode dungeons (would be akin to Mythic0) you cannot join with a T \ H \ DDs setup.

[Varaben]

I mean, most players play DPS because DPS is by and large the vast majority of specs. I'd also guess that because the vast majority of people playing (I guess I don't know this for a fact, but assuming) have played for a long time, they "grew up" in a time where there were almost NO tanks and very few healers. Like remember in Vanilla where they was literally ONE tank spec? I mean there WERE others, but by and large you couldn't play them. So your choices were heal or DPS basically. And healing was really only a few specs too (since in Vanilla you either had Shaman OR Paladin). So there were 3 heal specs, 1 tank spec and what...18 DPS specs? So literally 75% of the specs in the game were DPS.

Also remember the raids were 40 man back in Vanilla, so DPS were actually needed by the dozens. Compared to Retail in 2022, there are more DPS specs and fewer raid spots for DPS. The nature of how the game progressed through adding more classes (always adding more DPS than heal/tank or at best, equal amounts), and making smaller raids has squeezed out DPS.

So if you've been playing since like Wrath or before, and especially if you've been playing since Vanilla, DPS was very likely the spec you played BY FAR. Raids needed SO many more DPS than tanks/healers and even the tanks were probably DPSing most of the time because you didn't "need" 5 tanks or anything for many of those Vanilla encounters.

[Tentim]

The most popular answer in here is to say either between the lines or directly: "because it's easy", but that's just the RESULT of what people see on their own experience and it's extremely SUBJECTIVE because to make something "easy" it means you kept something that was "hard" ... hard and haven't improved on it.

To say it in simple words: if you play ONLY tank: tanking is also becoming "easy"; the strategies you have to learn for dungeons for example is the only thing you learn at the start of an expansion so for you they become "easy"; if you generally play any role exclusively it's "easy" because of experience so it evens.

I mean no its easy because you can afk through being a dps on early content. There isn't anything close enough to check hard enough that requires one competent dps to pass. Most of the time a tank and healer can solo it.

[Tyris Flare]

oh trust me they know, because they let you know

lol

well sadly or not, this is a reality of the game I don't think a lot of people get. The job of a tank is to mitigate damage, sure, but it's mostly to facilitate DPS. A good tank is not someone who uses defensives appropriately; it's someone who uses defensives and groups up mobs to enable the group to do more damage.

DPS in this game is all about proper CD usage and tanks pulling around them. So this partially drives toxicity because a tank who does baby pulls then suddenly grabs 20 mobs when the dps don't have any CDs is 100% responsible for that wipe.

The same basic principle is true of healers: their job is to enable DPS. Sometimes that means keeping DPS alive, but it also means killing explosives, dropping CC, doing damage, or whatever else allows the group to kill mobs the fastest.

Moving green health bars up does not defeat the content, moving the red ones down does. Everything in a group is just a means to that end.

[dragonflight10]

lol

well sadly or not, this is a reality of the game I don't think a lot of people get. The job of a tank is to mitigate damage, sure, but it's mostly to facilitate DPS. A good tank is not someone who uses defensives appropriately; it's someone who uses defensives and groups up mobs to enable the group to do more damage.

DPS in this game is all about proper CD usage and tanks pulling around them. So this partially drives toxicity because a tank who does baby pulls then suddenly grabs 20 mobs when the dps don't have any CDs is 100% responsible for that wipe.

The same basic principle is true of healers: their job is to enable DPS. Sometimes that means keeping DPS alive, but it also means killing explosives, dropping CC, doing damage, or whatever else allows the group to kill mobs the fastest.

This is the only reply in this post where someone knows what they are talking about

[Sorrowseer]

Because I pretend its not easy.

Yeah no not what i said.

[MoanaLisa]

It's a multiplayer game and people instinctively want to beat others in multiplayer games; they want an objective mean of being able to say to others "see? I beat you"; if that is missing they lose interest very easily.
Tanking and healing heavily lack that; DPSes can be considered bad if they only look at meters but they are the only ones who CAN use meters in some fights ("Patchwerk" ones); tanks almost never have that.

If true, and I'm not saying it is, it reinforces the argument to do away with meters completely or to make meters so that only the player can see them. If the response to that is that someone would leave that would be fine. A social game that has an enormous amount of PVE content doesn't need players who use their DPS meters as a stand-in for PVP.

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well sadly or not, this is a reality of the game I don't think a lot of people get. The job of a tank is to mitigate damage, sure, but it's mostly to facilitate DPS. A good tank is not someone who uses defensives appropriately; it's someone who uses defensives and groups up mobs to enable the group to do more damage.

DPS in this game is all about proper CD usage and tanks pulling around them. So this partially drives toxicity because a tank who does baby pulls then suddenly grabs 20 mobs when the dps don't have any CDs is 100% responsible for that wipe.

The same basic principle is true of healers: their job is to enable DPS. Sometimes that means keeping DPS alive, but it also means killing explosives, dropping CC, doing damage, or whatever else allows the group to kill mobs the fastest.

Moving green health bars up does not defeat the content, moving the red ones down does. Everything in a group is just a means to that end.

Good post. This is exactly correct.

[Tentim]

If true, and I'm not saying it is, it reinforces the argument to do away with meters completely or to make meters so that only the player can see them. If the response to that is that someone would leave that would be fine. A social game that has an enormous amount of PVE content doesn't need players who use their DPS meters as a stand-in for PVP.

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Good post. This is exactly correct.

The friction point comes from when dps does matter and you need to replace the weak link. WoW is different from other mmos because it has content for all skill levels. A lot just are not honest with themselves about what skill level they should be at.

[3DTyrant]

I mainly play dps because I find healing, and especially tanking too much responsibility. That simple. : |

Mhm, this aaaaalll the way. I've given both tanking (on my main DK) and healing (lowbie priest) a try and for me healing/tanking is something I'd rather not do from personal experience.

[ringpriest]

Healer is sooooo boring to play.

You just sit and stare at health bars while using click casting to keep the bars full.

I'm far away from the current state of the game, but back in the day healing was a fun exercise of on-the-fly resource juggling and problem solving. You had to keep awareness of what was happening damage-wise, as well as what was likely to happen, plus keeping enough resources in your pocket to avoid a wipe if something went a little pear-shaped. And you "solved" every fight by coming up with a workable balance between delivering the healing needed and husbanding your mana bar (and mana-recovery), while also cleansing debuffs and managing other utilities as needed.

[exochaft]

The friction point comes from when dps does matter and you need to replace the weak link. WoW is different from other mmos because it has content for all skill levels. A lot just are not honest with themselves about what skill level they should be at.

That's ironically part of the problem with WoW's retention: content over time has shifted the difficulty of the hardest content in the game to where someone who could do the hardest content of a previous expansion in the past may not be able to now... but that's another thread discussion.

More on the thread topic: it almost always comes down to responsibility when considering the choice between being a healer/tank and DPS. If you've done any sort of recruitment for guilds and certain roles, it's very easy to see a clear divide in players when it comes to wanting to take on responsibility and those that don't. Typically, tanks and healers get filled by people who are willing to take on more responsibility because generally those roles will make you stand out more if you don't know what you're doing or you screw up regardless of the type of content. DPS have a much higher chance of blending into the background and skating by, especially in larger raids where others can pick up the slack. When Blizz started adding more and more personal responsibility mechanics that were pass/fail for the entire raid, it kind of exposed the already-known truth that many players are not focused on responsbility tasks compared to others.

I actually have a story about this as it relates to my role back when I was CE raiding still. I've basically been a tank since vanilla, but it wasn't until towards the end of my raiding career that I went DPS. Was it because I didn't want the responsibility or was bad at tanking? Far from it, to the the point where the raid leadership was always torn about having me DPS because they loved my tanking and how I learned/executed down to the small details that seem mundane but matter to the group as a whole. Ultimately, the problem was that it was getting harder to find good DPS that could also do mechanics while sacrificing their DPS or just not tunneling. While I'd maximize my DPS as much as possible, I knew that I'd never have top tier parses running around soaking/executing mechanics. One could basically say that my meticulous execution and attention to minute details got me pegged into a DPS role because quite often a tank had to worry about boss positioning instead of dealing with mechanics.

While some would say "Well this runs counter to the argument that tanks/healers don't have the huge disadvantage of mechanics and responsibility," I'd still say the real situation is that Blizz starting adding in mechanics to try to spread out the responsibility... but made it so extreme in some cases that only people who typically gravitated towards tank/healing roles would do them to any effect. I'm sure others have dealt with this in raids where their tanks and healers don't just try to do as many of the mechanics of the fight not just for DPS purposes, but instead because you probably don't trust the DPS to handle it as well as your tanks/healers from a execution standpoint. I'd even go so far as to say I think Blizz really screwed the pooch when they started adding extreme pass/fail mechanics that were randomly assigned to players out of your control, because the common strategy (especially if recruitment wasn't that great or you weren't on a high/full population server with disposable players) was to have a set group of people you trusted to deal with mechanics.

As a slight aside, I think it's perfectly fine to have roles in your content where their job doesn't require a lot of focus or multitasking because most people aren't that good at it. If you think back to the older raids and content, the content usually chose between being a DPS check, a healer check, or a mechanics check... nowadays Blizz has an obsession with trying to do all checks at the same time. While some will relish in the challenge of adding more and more responsibility into what they're doing in their content, I can safely say the vast majority of players do not... they'd rather quit the content or the game than adapt.

[Niwes]

lol

well sadly or not, this is a reality of the game I don't think a lot of people get. The job of a tank is to mitigate damage, sure, but it's mostly to facilitate DPS. A good tank is not someone who uses defensives appropriately; it's someone who uses defensives and groups up mobs to enable the group to do more damage.

DPS in this game is all about proper CD usage and tanks pulling around them. So this partially drives toxicity because a tank who does baby pulls then suddenly grabs 20 mobs when the dps don't have any CDs is 100% responsible for that wipe.

The same basic principle is true of healers: their job is to enable DPS. Sometimes that means keeping DPS alive, but it also means killing explosives, dropping CC, doing damage, or whatever else allows the group to kill mobs the fastest.

Moving green health bars up does not defeat the content, moving the red ones down does. Everything in a group is just a means to that end.

very well said and 100% accurate. experienced players realize that.

also the examples are perfect. can’t tell how often i did some m+ run, with me and 2 other dps and everyone of us did 24-26k sustained. and either it was horrible close or time was running out. why?

because a tank not knows how to combine pulling and cds. and a healer doing 2% dps, no sooth, no slows, nothing. and then, when he should realize, big pull is incoming, be ready for using fat heal cd (i.e. spirit link), to give dps classes room to burst, the ability is on cooldown, because it was used on a 3mobs pull, because tank and dps got inc damage at the same time lol. what most ppls not realizing is:

running a key intime is not mostly dependent on:

- sustained dps
- route
- tank dps
- heal output
- or whatever

it is mostly dependent on tank and heal using their spells and doing their things at the right moment. and know when and what to use. playing around pulls and cds is key.

exactly what above poster describes. heals and tanks ENABLING the dps classes. this is one of the best statement i heard since a long time. and it’s 1000% true.