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

[Xath]

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.

Good tanks freely look at logs and try to better their numbers. More people play dps because you can largely slack off without having a significant impact including in keys.

[SaucyThighs]

I used to tank in WoW, till mythic+ got big. Then I largely dropped it because mythic+ seems designed to be frustrating and stressful for tanks rather than enjoyable. Raids? Great, but mythic+ is a garbage fire for tanks.

Wish they would actually consider mythic+ when designing the dungeons. Its been a major thing long enough for them to do that, but they dont. They should enforce paths rather than having it so that a month or two in the players find out the "best" way to do things and if you dont know it your garbage. At least if blizzard enforced a path it wouldn't be a deterent like the player enforced paths are.

I don't think they should enforce a path. That's a social issue. You can't out-engineer human behavior and whenever they try they just make things messy and the problem crops up in another way.

The game design issue here is that the timed Mythic+ run model isn't very fun. It's a crude way to up the challenge. It's not the same as the rich balance of different gameplay elements that come together to create an enjoyable kind of challenge (of which pacing is a part). Tanks bear the brunt of the issue because they set the pace.

Some might enjoy M+ specifically as a tank because there is depth and mastery to knowing all these optimal routes but most probably don't, like myself. Some people like speedrunning, but that's a very different way to play a game and I'm not into it myself.

[Lordofbelbol]

DPS focus on the meters, and it's pretty dumb. Humans have a lot of self serving bias - they tend to overestimate their own prowess when they succeed, and blame failures on things outside their control, and the dps meter focus enables this. When someone leads the meters, they think, "Look at me, I'm awesome!" and when they don't, they have a million reasons why it's not their fault - their class is undertuned, they had to deal with too many mechanics, etc.

As a tank, there's also the endlessly frustrating thing where dps who focus on winning the meters are doing things actively detrimental to the group's success, like pulling aggro by dpsing too quickly. I don't understand the mentality at all, especially once you realize that no one cares or remembers who won the meters, particularly in a random group, and that 90% of the time, doing a bit of extra dps doesn't even matter.

who think look at me i'm awesome and come up with million reason why it's not their fault that their dps is low ? its not 2008 anymore
people who act this way are viewed as immature and stupid in todays raids/m+ progress

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That's the most common answer since the start of the thread. It's mostly a psychological fear towards difficulty rather than a pure technical difficulty.
E.g. if you start a new expansion as exclusively a tank: the routes are extremely easy to learn because everyone else has no clue about them either.

it amazes me how you had to type this 3 time because those lfr andies just don't get it
they just exaggerate how hard is it to figure out a route as a tank, it's like you will fail route 2-4 times then you will know and ppl will tell you where to go

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99% of the parses belong to 1% of the player base!

Occupy Azeroth!!!!

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Also, FWIW: I play DPS on retail (when I did) cause I don't want to have to learn the exact pulls for every fucking Mythic Plus dungeon, only to get shit on when I don't execute perfectly.

exaggerating on how routes are hard xD i did up to +18 this season with random routes sometimes
ppl get mad if weird routes but it's not always, you exaggerated it so badly you look stupid

[Tojara]

The thread is about why people play DPS as opposed to fucking tanks. People are discussing why that's the case. Whether it's 'hard' or not doesn't really matter, but player perception is all that matters and if people 'think' that tanks/healers face extra responsibilities, they will steer away from those roles.

Leadership roles (not saying this applies to tanks or healers) are a stark example of this. If you play classic and make your own groups for a dungeon, the amount of players that physically make an effort to get to an instance is laughable at best. These fucking forums in general are a cess pool of people crying about how the leader of raids on live are denying them entry to dungeons or raids, yet don't put forth the effort of actually well.. just doing it themselves. Whether it's general anxiety or people just accepting that they would rather be followers is moot, most players act and behave like this. People would rather wipe to organize, or just leave the dungeon instead of bringing anything up. It's weird and anti-social behavior, but the other parts of the community as just as toxic because the way they bring it up either isn't constructive at all, nor do they put forth any effort themselves to 'lead'.

Whether you like it not in dungeons, tanks are visibly seen as the 'leadership' role and people just don't want anything to do with that terrible moniker of 'leader'. It's easier to blend in as one of three DPS in a dungeon, or the 13-22~ people (depending what size flexible raiding, or if you do mythic raiding) than it is to be a tank or a healer in either role.

This isn't even accounting for the other major reason why tanks are in shortage, which is simply because ratios between raiding and dungeons are skewed.

Also not sure what realm people are coming from. Gone are the ages of tanks in your guild bragging about how much HP they fucking have. Most tanks do care about their performance and how much damage they can get out of their classes.

Again like in my former post this isn't really talking about mythic raids, or the very top of M+. At that level everyone is free to communicate, gives advice, modify strats and your success is going to live and die based on everybody in the group. But random ass pugs? You're naïve if you think tanks or healers don't face more criticism in M+ as opposed to DPS. Even if it isn't hard it's reason enough for people to not bother even learning.

[Toppy]

I don't think they should enforce a path. That's a social issue. You can't out-engineer human behavior and whenever they try they just make things messy and the problem crops up in another way.

The game design issue here is that the timed Mythic+ run model isn't very fun. It's a crude way to up the challenge. It's not the same as the rich balance of different gameplay elements that come together to create an enjoyable kind of challenge (of which pacing is a part). Tanks bear the brunt of the issue because they set the pace.

Some might enjoy M+ specifically as a tank because there is depth and mastery to knowing all these optimal routes but most probably don't, like myself. Some people like speedrunning, but that's a very different way to play a game and I'm not into it myself.

Counter part: Other MMO DO enforce paths and its just fine.

Hell I typically like speed running games. Normal speed running. Not the "Learn these bugs and exploits" speed running which is what mythic+ is.

[AudibleEscalation]

There's only 2 tank spots per raid group. And only 4 healers (and let's face it, they're going to drop one as soon as it's feasible). The rest are DPS spots. It's just so much easier to find a raid if you're a dps.

[ifrah]

Regarding 5mans:
Tank and you will get the blame for at least: any and every hiccup in the routing, be it your fault, ninja pull by that hunter or whatever. Pull too small when dps A has his cooldowns up (but B and C not), or too big when the opposite. Miss a kick, as the dps are too busy with meters, that's on you as well. If the dps is going full monkey and the mobs are dying in the most uncontrolled way into sanguine pools and whatnots, guess what? Shitty tank, uninstall, etc.
Heal and you get the blame on any death. It's highly irrelevant if the boneheaded tank did not know how to use cooldowns, or the some other hero soaked a completely avoidable 90% hit, and then subsequently died from some unavoidable damage, it's all on you. You miss that one explosive in whatever pull, despite requesting assistance, fuck off shit healer, never queue again. List goes on.
DPS. Sometimes you get mocked if your meters underperform. It's the path of least shit on your face, so go figure.

[epigramx]

only that 1 percentile of the players cares that hard.

That's a double standard; you are trying to prove that it's hard to be a tank; if you ignore DPSes with skill then you should ignore tanks with skill too.
Yes it's easy to be a mediocre DPS but it's also easy to be a mediocre tank.
In fact it's easier to be a mediocre tank since they're carried more often.

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It's a number of reasons like others have mentioned but this is definitely a big one. After years of going all-in on topping meters and parses it doesn't matter as much to me as much as it used to so I'll be healing in Dragonflight.

That said I do enjoy having measurable progress and am still competitive in a low-key way, and that's what logs are good for. I'd like to cultivate a guild environment where performing well is aspired to an acknowledged, but beyond a flat number. One where nobody is impressed that you padded the meters, and we acknowledge whenever someone actually did what was optimal for the fight. Then when it's on farm we can all pad the meters together if we want.

I don't know much about it but I'm assuming there is plenty of skill to measure for tanks within logs that goes beyond the damage meter.

Yes all that is very true, but on the OP I was describing the resultant force that pushes the 'average of the majority' of people who want to compare themselves to other people towards that direction.

Besides: even a very smart guild who knows how to ignore the meters of people who failed in mechanics: will often have a "Patchwerk" fight to compare themselves on pure numbers.

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I used to tank in WoW, till mythic+ got big. Then I largely dropped it because mythic+ seems designed to be frustrating and stressful for tanks rather than enjoyable. Raids? Great, but mythic+ is a garbage fire for tanks.

Since I had personal experience on what you say (both as seeing it hard and easy), I believe it depends enormously on whether you started an expansion as exclusively a tank or not.
E.g. I dropped into tanking at the end of BfA and it was hellish but if you start an expansion as only-tank: it's easy because nobody knows the routes either so there's no pressure.

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I think to be more clear -- tanking has a higher skill floor, at least the impact of doing it poorly is more significant on the lower end. DPS have more room to be brain dead and "get by" in the game. Tanks, Healers, and DPS all have a skill ceiling higher than almost any player will reach.

I get the argument about very low difficulty parts of the game, but I don't believe the game has that many people on low difficulty brackets but it has more characters on them.
I imply that many of those "noob characters" are often a real life person with another main character on high skill brackets and those are usually DPS.

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Good tanks freely look at logs and try to better their numbers. More people play dps because you can largely slack off without having a significant impact including in keys.

Of course, but this is a subject about people basically pumping their ego (not necessarily in a bad sense), and it's much harder to convince people you're amazing at tanking if it goes through defenses and routing than to convince them "muh numbers big!".

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it amazes me how you had to type this 3 time because those lfr andies just don't get it
they just exaggerate how hard is it to figure out a route as a tank, it's like you will fail route 2-4 times then you will know and ppl will tell you where to go

I empathize with them, because people will personally attack you if you drop on mythic+ tanking in the middle of the expansion because they have the delusion everyone else is playing for months just like them and don't realize not everyone bad is stupid (they may have just started learning).

But of course those tanks should be conscious on that and they shouldn't say "tanking hard" but "tanking hard if you everyone else knows the routes perfectly already" in that case.

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tanks are visibly seen as the 'leadership' role and people just don't want anything to do with that terrible moniker of 'leader'.

Sure but I believe they're also a big technical error they do even if they think at first a leadership role is fine for them. E.g. many of them appear to love to tank for low level levelling-5mans because it's easy for them and then explicitly say here "but mythic+ [not heroic or normal] is hard".
That's where I'm a broken record telling them here it depends a lot on if you started an expansion as exclusively a tank or not; if you drop in Shadowlands right now as a tank: you will be unironically personally attacked for not knowing routes; but do it at launch: nobody cares.

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Here’s the real thing: if you’re parsing 99% in m+, you’re getting carried through mechanics. People are giving you power infusions and maybe innervates. No one is asking you to spend gcds on interrupts or stuns because that would push your percentile down.

You can’t get 99th percentile unless you’re a selfish player. And consistently 99th percentile? I’d love to see evidence that’s even possible, because this is a game with lots of rng. Also, at some point wouldn’t that mean pushing up to a higher key level where the competition is harsher?

So it’s a nonsense example.

Not entirely true. A team of god-like players will often "99th percentile themselves" by just being too fast in encounters as a team together.
By the way I mentioned "99th" first in this thread and I didn't have 5mans in mind but simpler raiding encounters where ranking is clearer.

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Regarding 5mans:
Tank and you will get the blame for at least: any and every hiccup in the routing, be it your fault, ninja pull by that hunter or whatever. Pull too small when dps A has his cooldowns up (but B and C not), or too big when the opposite. Miss a kick, as the dps are too busy with meters, that's on you as well. If the dps is going full monkey and the mobs are dying in the most uncontrolled way into sanguine pools and whatnots, guess what? Shitty tank, uninstall, etc.
Heal and you get the blame on any death. It's highly irrelevant if the boneheaded tank did not know how to use cooldowns, or the some other hero soaked a completely avoidable 90% hit, and then subsequently died from some unavoidable damage, it's all on you. You miss that one explosive in whatever pull, despite requesting assistance, fuck off shit healer, never queue again. List goes on.
DPS. Sometimes you get mocked if your meters underperform. It's the path of least shit on your face, so go figure.

I don't believe most of that is true, with the condition that you're exclusively a healer or exclusively a tank since the start of an expansion. E.g. If you start as exclusively a Disc Priest: you may learn how to heal an encounter so well: that you don't give a shit if they blame you; you know you did your job well and it was easy to do your job well because that's what you do since the start of the expansion; other skilled people in the group would know that too and they will easily single out the moron who whines and they will support you.

[Fitsu]

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.

Nah, it's because as a tank if you lose aggro or pull wrong you wipe. As a healer if you miss a global or get hit by a CC someone dies. As a DPS if you miss a global the dungeon takes 1 second longer, if you get hit by something you just blame the healer. People pick DPS because it's the more relaxed role, all you do is follower the leader and push your buttons.

I actually think the concept of healers is a bit outdated. I would like to see an MMO where it's everyones responsibility to keep themselves alive. You can still have a tank as I feel that is kinda required, a class with more damage reduction in trade for less DPS but I honestly think dungeons/raids would be more interesting without healers.

[Ethas]

At higher levels you might be right. At lower I assume its because dps are the free carried role. It's rare blizzard ever has a mechanic that wipes a group of one dps is awful but a awful tank or healer can kill a group.

I agree with this. This is all about responsibility.
Apart from interrupts (which tank and healer too can back you up a little) DPS has no other responsibility but DPS things down pressing buttons. Melting enemies, watching crits etc etc.

That said I hate the fact that they force healers to DPS. It is boring and unrewarding experience. You always end up doing abysmall damage so I see no benefit in it.

Why noone plays tank? Because apart from pressing buttons you also is responsible for knowing where to go in tons of dungeons and raids they created over these years. Blizzard should really help tanks to navigate.

[epigramx]

Nah, it's because as a tank if you lose aggro or pull wrong you wipe. As a healer if you miss a global or get hit by a CC someone dies. As a DPS if you miss a global the dungeon takes 1 second longer, if you get hit by something you just blame the healer. People pick DPS because it's the more relaxed role, all you do is follower the leader and push your buttons.

I actually think the concept of healers is a bit outdated. I would like to see an MMO where it's everyones responsibility to keep themselves alive. You can still have a tank as I feel that is kinda required, a class with more damage reduction in trade for less DPS but I honestly think dungeons/raids would be more interesting without healers.

If you know how to do the job of all 3 roles (an important distinction because many here confuse "tanking hard" with "I have no clue how to tank" or "I don't know the routes") , then tanking can be the absolute easiest because it's basically 1) move there 2) use your EXTREMELY SIMPLISTIC ROTATION a beginner can learn perfectly in a day 3) wait for others to kill.

I disagree that healers are useless; it's a role about supporting others directly; tanks and dpses can not do that as well because they're mostly "follow me" and "help me".

[Ashana Darkmoon]

Nah, it's because as a tank if you lose aggro or pull wrong you wipe. As a healer if you miss a global or get hit by a CC someone dies. As a DPS if you miss a global the dungeon takes 1 second longer, if you get hit by something you just blame the healer. People pick DPS because it's the more relaxed role, all you do is follower the leader and push your buttons.

I actually think the concept of healers is a bit outdated. I would like to see an MMO where it's everyones responsibility to keep themselves alive. You can still have a tank as I feel that is kinda required, a class with more damage reduction in trade for less DPS but I honestly think dungeons/raids would be more interesting without healers.

Games that have tried that like GW2 haven't had a lot of success. And other games like ESO (and maybe STO) end up with the issue of 99% of the content being trivial because it isn't tuned around taking damage. Same as SWTOR flashpoints, actually.

Personally I think dungeons need more unavoidable damage so healers are pressured to heal more instead of DPS, unlike the SL model of groups taking almost no damage if they are remotely competent (until s4 dungeons). Cataclysm took this way too hard to the extreme, but there were some decent ideas in the healing model. Like staring at the priest talents here, I already imagine just picking all the DPS talents whenever I decide to heal. It's hard to get excited about throughput when it so rarely matters.

[CosmicAnomaly22]

I'll offer a different perspective. I played a tank from BC until Legion, doing mostly raiding just below hardcore and stuff like challenge modes during WoD, etc. I thoroughly enjoyed being the "leader" and dictating the pace and going into every dungeon knowing that I would be able to stop and explain things if needed and that the group could rely on me to help drive towards victory.

I always felt more engaged as a tank than as a DPS.

Once M+ was released, I initially enjoyed it with friends as we would do a lot of keys and it was a great time. Now that all of my friends no longer play and I pug everything, I have stopped tanking completely. Getting into M+ groups as a DPS is the hardest, but Tank/Heals are the ones subjected to the most toxicity in PUGs. After seeing how people react nowadays to not knowing the perfect meta routes, what adds to pull/not pull, etc. I completely lost interest in tanking.

I still tank M0's, but I have too much anxiety about tanking keys with how toxic the game has become. If I had friends or if dungeons weren't designed as an eSport, I might enjoy tanking again, but I have no choice but to play DPS now if I want to do anything beyond standard Mythic dungeons.

For raiding I would roll a tank main, but because of my work schedule I am not able to raid every 3rd week of the month so being a tank doesn't work for guilds with set schedules. So my entire life in the game right now is through PUGs and it's probably going to drive me to quit like it has for several expansions. I refuse to give Blizzard anymore money for transfers and most guilds refuse cross-realm raiders (from my experience).

I actually hate competing with others. The game used to be about fun and helping each other. But now it's designed like an eSport and I think it forces people to try and choose FOTM classes instead of what they would actually have fun playing. It's an endless cycle of comparing yourself to others now and it's exhausting.

[Kalisandra]

i was in a pretty high guild in tbc t6/sunwell and there were absolutely meters. it was why you stacked glaive rogues and warlocks (and benched mages).

And why Paladins got to stand at the raid entrances and buff people walking in...

And why you built your raid groups so carefully so the warlocks had their token sPriest mana battery, and so on. Oh, and all those LW for the drums. All the drums.

[epigramx]

Personally I think dungeons need more unavoidable damage so healers are pressured to heal more instead of DPS, unlike the SL model of groups taking almost no damage if they are remotely competent (until s4 dungeons). Cataclysm took this way too hard to the extreme, but there were some decent ideas in the healing model. Like staring at the priest talents here, I already imagine just picking all the DPS talents whenever I decide to heal. It's hard to get excited about throughput when it so rarely matters.

The whole "everyone does deeps" philosophy might be a mistake. It might be cool if healers only heal and tanks only defend; that might literally mean 0 dps for healers; 0 dps for tanks too and their 'damage' being only 'threat points'.

As it is now: DPSes cannibalize the tanking and healing experience; if it's so important to "deeps" why not roll a DPS to begin with; just make the roles very pure so it's cool to be tank or a healer because they do a unique thing.

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Getting into M+ groups as a DPS is the hardest, but Tank/Heals are the ones subjected to the most toxicity in PUGs.

Since you sounded that you knew how to do the job of the tank, I think in your case it was generally a "pugs suck at high difficulties" problem rather than a "tanking sucks" problem.
Don't worry: DPSing sucks for those too; sure I can clear even heroic raiding as a solo leader but anything beyond that is hell; even if you know your job: people will whine.

[Kalisandra]

Top guilds used meters ever since they became a thing, i.e. in BWL. General majority has started to use them since the beginning of TBC.

My not seriously progressing guild in BC had DPS requirements if you wanted to qualify for our raid team (and a minimum Health, to stop people stacking gear with no Stamina to hit the DPS requirement). Testing was by going through some heroic 5-mans with an officer running a meter to confirm.

I remember it clearly because I spent a good long time putting together a Ret gear set that could make the requirement (we're Alliance, which didn't help), while someone else's sPriest alt hopped into their crafted cloth and was raid-ready.

LK we most certainly ran meters (everyone did), and a lot of people put parses up on the logging sites. On our server in the PuG community nobody cared about gearscore - it was about DPS epeen and having a rep for doing great DPS and not being a jerk. I used to get into PuG raids by doing great DPS and being willing to respec to heal if necessary (and being good at that, too - and good tank healers were quite rare at the time, at least on our server).

[rrayy]

Most people play DPS because they are lazy and can hide in the mass. That's it, playing with the least responsibility, nothing else.

This is utterly wrong and comes purely from tank elitism.

Wanting the least responsibility does not mean you are lazy. What it does mean it you want to have things simplified so you can focus on what you know you can handle.

[xuros]

I wouldn't mind tanking but after playing a DPS in this game since launch I'm not sure I have the awareness to keep others alive lol.

[epigramx]

This is utterly wrong and comes purely from tank elitism.

Wanting the least responsibility does not mean you are lazy. What it does mean it you want to have things simplified so you can focus on what you know you can handle.

Some of the simplest jobs I did in this game were tanking jobs. E.g. looking at the butt of a boss 24/7 because everyone else had a complex job apart from me (the most ludicrous case was a blood death knight in the next to last boss of Ulduar because they could solo it (at its butt) even at hard mode).

The highest complexity I've seen probably goes to healers on high end raiding; but I might be wrong because I've mained healing the least in my life so I was always inexperienced at it; there's also the high complexity of a single dps doing a special errand in an encounter.

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I wouldn't mind tanking but after playing a DPS in this game since launch I'm not sure I have the awareness to keep others alive lol.

If you try tanking: start at the launch of an expansion. Everyone is clueless about routes so you learn together. If you start in the middle of an expansion people suck against new tanks because they'll be whining you don't know the routes perfectly like they do.

[Ashana Darkmoon]

And why Paladins got to stand at the raid entrances and buff people walking in...

And why you built your raid groups so carefully so the warlocks had their token sPriest mana battery, and so on. Oh, and all those LW for the drums. All the drums.

Yeah i was playing pal at the time and was buff/logging on m'uru before i started tanking the adds.

DPS was a HUGE deal and everyone knew how much the rest were doing.