DPS don't *only* do 4-mans and raids. You can use it in deep dungeons and in FATEs. Deep dungeons are a great place to use all those skills like Leg Graze and Sleep.
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Arm's length for a dps should be used to block pull and push effects from a boss.
For a tank it should be used for the same thing, and for slowing mobs on big pulls.
It is punishing because you're pressuring the tank to go at the speed that you want and some people don't like that which is why it it falls under griefing. I understand that people want tanks to go faster, but let them pull and do their job. If Sprint is down, then it's down and there's no much you can do about it. In reality when you sprint and finish off the first 2 packs in a dungeon, sprint should be ready for the next 2 packs. If someone uses it wrong, then you have no choice but to wait.
If the DPS died for having done a single pull, it's a 100% because the tank and the healer deliberately let them die, which is a lot more griefing than pulling ahead of the tank. Again, if doing that makes thing THAT much more difficult for a tank past level 50, maybe that tank should consider either using Trust a bunch to practice or changing role.
A DPS would not pull one at a time. They would try to pull both groups back to the tank. But I digress. if you don't think it's such a big deal that's perfectly fine. But if you pull this kind of stuff in dungeons then you're going to get pulled by a GM because somebody didn't appreciate what you were doing.
And if the tank gets the habit of letting mates die because they refuse to take aggro, the tank is also gonna be pulled by a GM at some point. And I pretty much agree with Astronis, I don't know what kind of tank you're playing with for the DPS to get so far ahead that they pull both pack before the tank gets the chance to do anything. The only "valid" case I could think of is if the tank is AFK and in that case, sure, it's pretty stupid to go ahead alone and pull everything.
Ironically enough the closer you are to lv100, it gets easier to W2W without tanks as healers. Healing a 1H/3D dungeon runs are pretty fun where aggros are ping-pong'ing. A lot buttons that I almost never see its uses... finally gets their use in these cases. Deaths? Sure, more likely, but it doesn't take much to prevent those from first place.
If you want to hand out the "mission impossible"-challenges, probably pick dungeons like Bardam's Mettle, Stone Vigil, or even Mt.Gulg. Which hey, if you need to pick a dungeon selectively for this, it just shows how little the punishment there is for non-tanks to pull everywhere else; it's what 'encourages' people to pull for tanks from first place. If you want that gone, then like I've said before, resources has to be more scarce. Tanks has to be squishier/less of an immortal. Mobs needs to pummel harder. etc.
Until that happens, non-tanks pulling ahead will remain a thing - they even encourage this indirectly by designing it in a way that's impossible to overpull in modern times.
There's also the fact there's only one tank in every dungeon, and dungeons are the most abundant in this game. If a person starting out as a tank, chances are good they will NOT see another tank's performances. That greatly diminishes the "learning by watching"-aspect of an MMO. Some of these tanks never realize how much the devs are essentially making tanks semi-immortals in these contents way past 50 up till capstones until they start leveling another role, watch another go do W2W so seamlessly and be like "Omg you can do that???". I've had somebody back in EW who never thought to treat WAR's RI/BW as a self benediction in W2W specifically rather than 'another layer of mit' (I cringe everytime I see WARs popping BW on top of any other cds at all in W2W), which is usually the reason why even today there are still WARs failing to sustain themselves in the event their healer is gone for whatever reason.