Why not just make everyone a DPS?

[Sapphidia]

Personally I feel like Warriors are superbly well balanced. They're a great class, don't need any nerfs and seem to be really fun for the players who like that kind of aggressive playstyle. They do okayish damage in pure tank stance, can stance dance easily in safer situations to really pump out good tank dps, and in an Offtank role they do just a little bit less damage than the more support-focussed DPS classes. They don't really have any irrelevant or clunky skills. Noone in this thread is calling for Warrior nerfs.

The issue is more that we've been told that Warrior's "niche" is being the tank the does dps. Paladins and Dark Knights have a niche of being able to take more physical or magical damage respectively, although as maths have proven the difference in mitigation is very very little, and is more an ease of use thing. It's fine really, but due to how all the current tough raid encounters are all about hard DPS checks, the stuff that non-warriors bring to the table is basically irrelevant for most raid groups right now. "Don't mind that our MT does 100 less dps, she has Divine Seal!".

To all the people saying that it's about playing your class to its fullest, l2dps and suck it up etc : I get that, and I do. All of us tanks going through Savage Alex right now are focusing on maxing our DPS. We're not being bads, we're not taking a stand and forcing our raid groups to let us tank in vit gear doing 200 dps.

We're questioning why DPS output is the ONLY thing we're being tested in. People say that "we're undergeared" compared to the tuning of the encounter and thus tanks need to step up DPS to help the raid hit targets. I ask this : if we're undergeared for the encounter tuning... why are we not being tested on our ability to TAKE DAMAGE? Why are we not having to weave stoneskins between big boss attacks and keep cooldowns rolling 100% of the time, why are we not dropping dead if a healer spends half their time DPSing? Why are we able to spend half an encounter in Sword Oath and go in with 16k health?

If we can go into current encounters "undergeared", and complete them successfully in DPS gear and DPS stances, all that shows me is that the fights are completely undertuned when it comes to testing the tank's tanking ability, and there's literally zero reason for me to care about my survivability. All i need do is go in like a glass cannon DPS and pop a cooldown at the right moment. Is this bad or wrong game design? Not really, it's just a little unexpected for some people.

Is it fun to max DPS? Yes. It's always fun to push the limits of a class. But where's my incentive to make myself tougher? It's a design decision, and it's one that half the players like, and half the players seem not to. I doubt it will change, and whining about it on the forum wont necessarily do anything. I'm still going to be going into Alex Savage again tonight in strength spec with sword oath readied and a stack of HQ Strength pots. It's fine to have encounters that focus on DPS.

But I'd like one or two that massively test my ability to take damage when undergeared too, please. I guess Alex 2 is kinda close to that, albeit a bit weird due to tachikoma stuns and an ideal want for high AOE dps from tanks too. I hope people know what I mean though. There's only four tough raid encounters in the game right now - I just hope the next set of raids are less like Alex 1/3 as far as tank expectations.