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

[Byleth]

I heal for M+ and Tank for raids, I very rarely DPS - It's just what I find most fun.

I don't think you should put every DPS into one box. I don't think there is any one reason why someone plays one role more than another. It's just comes down to what we enjoy as individuals.

[Sinaa]

I don't think that's it. I loved tanking in TBC & Wrath, surviving with my rotation felt very satisfying. Now however tanks have to learn 10 times as much mechanics as Dpsers and that's not all! You have to also pull-pull-pull at an unreasonably fast rate, because if you don't, dpsers will take matters into their own hands. So fork no, I will never play a tank in this game again.

Also the way how fights are designed with healer & tank dps in mind is just bad. It's better to have a lot damage, so that tanks & healers can spam their buttons in suspense, rather then what we have now, which is one shot mechanics and barely any damage. The later is far easier to balance though, the assumption that healers will enjoy dpsing during their downtime is wrong for many, though most players that don't like this have either quit, or transitioned to dps.

[Karlz0rz]

It all boils down to responsibility in the end. As a DPS, you need to think of yourself, and yourself only.
The same can not be said for tanks/healers!
There's also a more competitive element to DPS, over the other two.

[Lolites]

And a lot of that is people having this attitude that "DPS is chill." It's actually the most active/important role for success.

on a high "level", kind off, but vast majority of people never goes that high

[Paperfox]

A DPS can go into a dungeon without knowing about any of the fights, follow the group and hit what others are hitting and you're fine.

Healers need to know the fights.

Tanks need to know all the fights, the best routes, when to stack/swap (if in a raid), able to pull threat off DPS when they pull something (or many somethings). Oh and take the heat if things go wrong.

[crusadernero]

on a high "level", kind off, but vast majority of people never goes that high

Yes, and that fact makes it even more weird that not many many more are playing tanks/healers.

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A DPS can go into a dungeon without knowing about any of the fights, follow the group and hit what others are hitting and you're fine.

Healers need to know the fights.

Tanks need to know all the fights, the best routes, when to stack/swap (if in a raid), able to pull threat off DPS when they pull something (or many somethings). Oh and take the heat if things go wrong.

Pretty much this. Playing a tank/healer is everything a dps does, plus much more.

[MoanaLisa]

My reasoning was pretty simple: I would never want to tank anything with strangers seeing the abuse tanks get when something doesn't work out the way everyone expects. Life is too short.

I tried healing for a bit and was never great at it.

As a shadow priest I was OK with DPS, could do some emergency side healing and shielding if necessary and I enjoyed the role of support (doing adds and the like).

[GoodMon]

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.

That is not my reason at all, and I suspect many will agree with my following statement:

I play DPS simply because I want to quest and see mobs die the fastest way possible.
DPS is the default role in all single-player RPGs, it is by definition the get-go spec for any solo player.

Since you are not thrust into groups and dungeons from the start, many players will stick to DPS for all those activities like instances too,
since they have gotten used to the DPS mentality while leveling solo.

I personally couldn't care less about "beating other players in terms of big numbers", but I see the reasoning behind that sentiment too.

[Loveliest]

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 have been playing tank main since forever (both raid and M+, did both CMs etc). I don't find it easy. Sure, I don't stress like I used to stress at the start, but I still stress. The success of the dungeon doesn't rest only on me, but if I fail it will most definetely fail. Tanking is a lot about practice, and with the way seasons are designed, it's actually becoming increasingly more stresful. As a tank you not only need to learn pulls and route and what mobs are priority (and when to call for stuns and interrupts), but you also have to get used to how much you can pull on each key level. You don't want to pull too much and risk dying and not too little that dpses get frustrated. With season and rotation dungeons, it's getting to be so much work. When I want to relax, I play my hunter alt.

[Nephod]

DPS is sooooo boring to play. You just sit and stare boss health bar go down while doing a rotation a website told you to do.

This. I want this person to be president.

[Loveliest]

That being said, there is not one unique reason why ppl don't tank. Everyone has their own reason and it will be entirely valid for them.

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Guys, don't forget we are talking here about why don't peopke tank at all levels of tanking. Everyone's opinion is relevant, because we are not talking exclusively at high keys or low keys or in groups with amazing dpses etc. As long as everyone talks for themselves and not generically, there is no point trying to convince ppl they are not right. If one feels role is hard, it is for them. If one feels role is unfun, it is for them. And so on.

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It's the common theme in most replies that disagree with my premise. In higher difficulties no DPS is being carried.

Sometimes they reek more than the healer because you can tell if a 5man trash pack doesn't die for example.

I heard you can boost dpses in very high keys. Never heard of a tank boostee in a 25 though.

[Noctiphobia]

For me, there are a few main reasons why I DPS, even though I really like tanking:
- the classes that can tank to begin with don't have a DPS spec with a playstyle that I enjoy in PvP, so I rarely main any of them (the only one that I think I would usually like, Druid, is what my arena partner plays)
- if I actually play a class that can tank, usually there's some expansion feature that makes playing multiple specs at the same time inconvenient, more time consuming or suboptimal (covenants, legendaries, artifact power, etc.), so if I want to play both PvP and PvE, DPS it is
- pretty hard to jump into M+ tanking since you have to lead the group under a timer

So if there was a button that would let me play, say, outlaw rogue in PvP and protection paladin in PvE while keeping the same character progression in both of those, I'd definitely tank. But if I have to choose one for both or be behind, then I'm picking whatever I'm playing in PvP.

[Accendor]

Just came here to say fuck that clickbait title

[Ashana Darkmoon]

I heard you can boost dpses in very high keys. Never heard of a tank boostee in a 25 though.

I mean, you sit in a corner while the other tank and players actually do the dungeon lol

[Gumble]

Vengeance would like to know your location.

This is the final encounter of SoO and you have to scroll to rank 96 before you see something that isn't a tank.

I miss that mechanic..... I so do.



People play dps because the game encourages you to do so while you level. Most people level as dps (because its easy), so they are used to the dps roles of their class. Unless they REALLY want to tank or heal, they spent level after level as a dps and so they are comfortable with those specs and that translates into how they see the character.

If tanks and healers did as much damage while leveling as the dps roles, everyone would be that. People gravitate towards what kills fastest and what they are comfortable with.

[Raisei]

I think Healers are just as competive as DPS in many regards. For example, I always strived to be the best in my guild, not necessarily because of my ego, but because as an officer I wanted to set a good example. I know that several of the DPS think similarly. It is a nice feeling to be top of the meter, but you might also help out your guild if you can be good at your role.
This conviction has suffered a bit over the course of SLs thanks to it's half-arsed dev work, i hope I will get my drive back in DF.

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.

Not sure how it is with the new system, but when I was still playing around the Revan expansion we had an assassin that used to Tank go in as DPS in Hardmode FPs (or whatever was the hardest difficulty then). It wasn't really a problem. The melee damage in that game is/was a lot lower then what we have in WoW, so that non-tanks could survive a few hits. WoW's tuning is dependend on having a Tank (in all but the most trivial content), because everything else is just squashed like a bug by 1 or 2 melee swings.

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At high end content a healers or tanks damage is very relevant.

Yeah... unfortunately. I hate this meta that judges Healers by their DPS...

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It all boils down to responsibility in the end. As a DPS, you need to think of yourself, and yourself only.
The same can not be said for tanks/healers!
There's also a more competitive element to DPS, over the other two.

That would only be true for the bad DPS players. Good players apply their utility to support the group no matter which role they play.

[epigramx]

I actually think a lot of the people who prefer to play tanks and healers have different personalities than regular players because it's often a totally different experience.

I believe it's generally more for people who want to offer services to others. If you really want to beat others on meters and rankings they are really bad roles.
Even if you try to do it on healing - which is the closest that can do it most of the time - it's not as good as on DPS because overhealing is a "crime".

[Soikona]

Not really. It doesn't become easy. It becomes easier, but not easy. And tanking become easier the more you play it doesn't mean that tanking, from an objective perspective, would ever become easier than DPS.

As an example, driving a manual shift car becomes easier with time, but that doesn't mean it's now suddenly easier than driving an automatic shift car.

Tanking itself is easy. The only difficult part is remembering routes for keys for pugs, but that’s not a tank thing specifically. During S2, I was doing 20’s on my pally as a tank cause our main tank was sick, and was just pulling what the DPS told me. Still times them.

[epigramx]

This. I loved tanking up until Mythic+ came along.

Having to know every route of every single dungeon down to 0,5% and having to rush to complete a countdown is not enjoyable for me.

It depends a lot on when you start tanking in an expansion and by how much you're exclusively a tank. E.g. for BfA: I *started* tanking at the *end* of the expansion and it was absolutely hellish to get KSM because everyone knew the routes perfectly and since it was the end of an expansion too the affix was extremely more complex on top.

But: if you mainly spend your time on a tank and you enter an expansion together with all others: most of others are completely clueless too for about a month or two at least and within 2 or 3 weeks you basically know all the routes perfectly and even if they change the affix: it would be fast to learn the difference.

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The role of DPS requires the least amount of personal and group responsibility /thread.

Go to the end-game of raiding, and in some fights it's explicitly the inverse. Some fights are patchwerk for the tank(s) and extremely complex for others and at the very last fight of a tier: they try to make it complex for every role in there.

[Lodreh]

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...

This entire premise is flawed. People that play multiplayer games come a wide vareity of backgrounds. Most of the people I know play with friends in order to slay internet dragons. They do not care about parses... they are not interested in competition. They are there for the cooperation aspect. Knowing that you can not take down that BBEG on your own so you get some friends to help. That is what is entertaining and engaging to them. Someone pulling big numbers means nothing next to that.