Quote Originally Posted by javid View Post
All MMO’s battle systems are basically about DPS & mitigation.
More precisely: Damage and Sustain. (Effective) Health and Reduction of Health. And that's not unique to MMOs, that's also in fighting games, bullet hells or shooters. And in all those games, the goal is to maximize the relation between outgoing and incoming damage - Ideally KO the enemy (Maximum damage) without getting hit (Minimum damage taken).
The crux in MMOs like this one now is: There is damage you cannot possibly avoid, such as autoattacks or tank busters and it is not trivial. Mathematically, what happens to the aforementioned relation through that? You have less control over the denominator and focus shifts to the numerator - Outgoing damage, aka DPS.

Most games lack roles however or put the player in charge of all the roles at once. MMOs have copied that concept more or less blindly, which resulted in constant quarrels about one or multiple roles lacking players to make parties. It's still popular however because it works like an assembly line: The production (fight) process is broken into smaller, simpler parts of which each worker (role) only has to do one. That makes it a lot easier and the process more efficient and that is also why roles came to be in the first place - efficiency. The result is specialization - the worker (role) becomes far more efficient at that one operation he does, but loses sight of the whole due to his isolation (Yes, labor division means isolation, not interaction) in the process and develops tunnel vision. I'll spare you the psychological side effects for now.

And the roles introduce another issue. I already mentioned non-avoidable damage earlier. Now consider what tanks and healers as roles do.

Let's start with tanks:
Tanks take hits. And why do they take hits? Because they got the fat armor. And what does fat armor mean? Taking less damage per hit. And what does that mean? They can take more hits, which means nothing else but more effective HP. A point of health on a tank is more health than the same point of health on someone else. That is a nice characteristic, but pointless if you could avoid all damage by simply being a good player - you wouldn't need a tank, ever. That's why tanks need unavoidable damage to become relevant. And what did unavoidable damage do? Right, shift the focus to outgoing damage. Things are interconnected!

Next: Healers.
What do healers do? They restore Health. We already established that health is worth different amounts on different people. But in order to have a job, healers need people to take damage and since avoidable damage means people might not take damage, it also means healers might not have a job. Again, this role thrives on un-avoidable damage. And thus, we go back to the first point again.

In other words: The existence of these roles is majorly to blame for the DPS focus on principle, with their power being a strong supportive factor.

That said, I personally would rather we move away from the role system, rather than reinforce it further and naturally disagree with your suggestions as a result. Where you want to increase the control of tanks over the denominator, I'd rather everyone got more control over it. Where you want a specific support role, I'd rather everyone have supportive interactions. And I mean interactions, where both people need to react and adjust to each other, instead of just throwing a buff at someone and never bothering with it again while the other just does their rotation as always with more oomph behind it. And I'd honestly like to phase out healers entirely, but that's an unrealistic pipe dream.

My 2 cents.