Is it really rewarding to play tank/heal role?

[Lyth]

Tank is actually probably the easiest role to play.

I hate to break it to you, but the natural tendency is for people to seek out the maximum reward for the least amount of effort. 60% of the playerbase didn't choose the DPS role for the challenge. Most did it to avoid responsibility and fly under the radar. The remaining 40% took on most of the leftover responsibility either to secretly revel in the thought that they could kill off the party at any time ("If you get 6 more vuln stacks, I'm gonna do something about it... maybe.") (20%), or in a misguided attempt to use their encounter knowledge to hash seven single player games into something resembling a cohesive whole (20%). Even if you look within DPS jobs as a whole, people tend to migrate towards "pure DPS" over jobs that involve support interactions with their teammates, especially if they require coordination or communication.

Mechanics often specifically target DPS players because without mechanics, every fight is essentially a target dummy, and thus identical. Tanking and healing require you to understand the fight script, so no two fights will be the same, even in the absence of "targeted mechanics". There's actually a lot more thought required to design interesting tanking encounters, in part because raid positioning and movement is intrinsically more complex than being randomly picked to jump through a hoop every two minutes and coming back for a delicious treat. Even still, we go out of our way to dump these on tanks and healers to maximise uptime and reduce these fights to target dummy conditions wherever possible (What's a DPS jail?) DPS are intrinsically valuable by design. There are some incredibly talented players, to be sure, but the exception is not the rule.

To be honest, the only reason why there needs to be a dps discrepancy between pure DPS and "support roles" is because you'd otherwise just get your tank friends together and clear content. You'd just bring DPS along to cheer you on.

[Yorumi]

Tanking and healing require you to understand the fight script, so no two fights will be the same, even in the absence of "targeted mechanics". There's actually a lot more thought required to design interesting tanking encounters, in part because raid positioning and movement is intrinsically more complex than being randomly picked to jump through a hoop every two minutes and coming back for a delicious treat.

This is the kind of utter arrogance and blindness that's so often displayed by tanks it's annoying. Your job is not complex in this game. You have to know the fight? ONLY in savage, and you tell me a dps doesn't need the exact same intimate knowledge of a fight in savage and I'm going to laugh my ass off at you. You are way to full of yourself and entirely blind to other players. Lets apply the same bull crap you apply to dps to tanking. You have to stand there and press 1,2,3. Oh and if you're in savage you have to press a cooldown during a scripted event. Good god man tanks must be brilliant players to pull that off.

99% of this game tanking is utterly brain dead, and for the 1% that matters EVERYONE is performing and I can assure you the dps in those situations are executing much higher APM, utilizing intimate fight knowledge, proper positioning, and interacting with more mechanics than tanks.

[Lyth]

Every job requires an intimate knowledge of the fights to play optimally, down to the GCD. Support roles like tanking and healing require it at baseline, because of the coordination required, that's all. Anyone can master a target dummy rotation in under a month, and there's nothing intrinsically difficult about this. Nothing to get upset about.

Also, what's outside of savage? Void Ark?

[Seku]

This is the kind of utter arrogance and blindness that's so often displayed by tanks it's annoying. Your job is not complex in this game. You have to know the fight? ONLY in savage, and you tell me a dps doesn't need the exact same intimate knowledge of a fight in savage and I'm going to laugh my ass off at you. You are way to full of yourself and entirely blind to other players. Lets apply the same bull crap you apply to dps to tanking. You have to stand there and press 1,2,3. Oh and if you're in savage you have to press a cooldown during a scripted event. Good god man tanks must be brilliant players to pull that off.

99% of this game tanking is utterly brain dead, and for the 1% that matters EVERYONE is performing and I can assure you the dps in those situations are executing much higher APM, utilizing intimate fight knowledge, proper positioning, and interacting with more mechanics than tanks.

99% of this game is utterly brain dead, it's made for casuals.

I'd say that DRK probably has the most APM actually due to blood weapon shortening the GCD and the stupid amount of OGCD's it currently has, while keeping a eye on low blow proct assuming stun isn't needed. The only class I could imagine having more is Monk.

Tanks have their own set of mechanics, the responsibility of positioning the boss correctly, and knowing when to use a cool down without any indication other than memorization. VS visually cued mechanics for the DPS and coordination of where to bait AoEs, which when you have 6 other people doing it, provides a bit more slack and is negated in most cases for those that are ranged DPS. I'd say tanks have to have more knowledge of a fight, more so if their doing timed tank swaps to further increase their DPS.

Not quite too sure what's really outside of savage. Most Duty Finder DPS are brain dead to the point they still think single targeting is better option over their AoE skills in every situation. Even with 5+ enemies. And Tanks put up with the same mechanics, if not more, in 24 man raids, which kills your argument more.

If anything though, I'd say healers have it the worse. Unless their group is perfect. Which isn't the case in most situations.

[Venjenz]

Every job requires an intimate knowledge of the fights to play optimally, down to the GCD.

In a ton of content, I would submit that tanks need to know and do less than DPS, especially to play optimal. Point boss away, don't stand in fire, and know what CD to use before a tankbuster. That covers like 99% of the tanking I have ever done in almost any MMO. But if you look at boss encounters up and down the spectrum, there is a lot more to think about and do as DPS in a lot of cases.

Tanking has less tolerance from the meta, but the job itself is easier. Expectations might be harder, but the button pushing and actual gameplay is easier.

[MistakeNot]

Your job is not complex in this game. You have to know the fight? ONLY in savage,

This is equally true for ALL the roles, not only tanks. All the jobs are simple - unless you try to perform optimally, then they are all hard.

[Steelbreeze]

I'd say that DRK probably has the most APM actually due to blood weapon shortening the GCD and the stupid amount of OGCD's it currently has, while keeping a eye on low blow proct assuming stun isn't needed.

I dunno, DRG have a large amount of ogcds too.

[Seku]

I dunno, DRG have a large amount of ogcds too.

leg sweep, jump, fire jump, jump v2.0 vs Low blow(randomly pops up), reprisal , salted earth, Carve and spit, dark passenger, plunge.

4 (DRG) vs 6 (DRK). With low blow possibly being ready at any given point in time off a parry proct. Add this on top of blood weapon lowering gcd to about 1.6 seconds instead of 2-2.5, and the managing of the correct use of Dark Arts.

This will change soon. But right now the point stands that DRK probably has the highest, or one of the highest APM out of all the jobs currently.

[Lyth]

The main challenge in fights doesn't come from mechanical execution of a rotation. Everything is scripted. For the most part, you can plan out everything in advance, whether it be the timing of offensive cooldowns like Trick, or defensive cooldowns such as Rampart or Virus. A lot of this comes down to how passionate you are about learning, and whether you have a group who is equally interested. It comes down to your understanding of your job, a willingness to experiment with timings (what's the last moment that you can run out of the AoE to squeeze in extra GCDs?), and creative thinking about how to set up the fight.

There are actually a lot of similarities between tanking and melee dps, and you can learn a lot about tanking from watching a good melee dps. The key difference is that when tanking, the mob's position, and by extension, that of the entire raid, depends on your position. There are endless possibilities in how you can set up a fight. You can tank the same fights for years and not recognise that there's a more efficient way to do things until you see another tank come up with a more clever solution. The problem is that most information about tanking on forums gets communicated in text, so we tend to spend more time discussing rotation than we do on positioning. The former is probably the simplest part of tanking, while the latter is the core of the job. That's where you really get to be creative.

You can achieve the bare minimum by studying fight timings in a relatively static fight. But if you're conscientious and actively trying to find ways to assist your teammates, you can usually come up with ways in which they can perform mechanics with minimal movement and disruption. I'm a big fan of fights which force dynamic position changes, because that's really where tanking truly shines. Not only do you need to understand what's optimal for each of your teammates, but you need to be able to move in a predictable, consistent fashion on every pull, so that your group can plan their own movements around it without losing GCDs and uptime.

Mechanically executing rotations and timings are a part of any job. You're the conductor. You understand how all the instruments harmonise together. Their melody is the focus, but your actions are what tie everything together. That's what makes tanking fun.

[aqskerorokero]

Well, no matter how a fight is dumb and easy, YOU still need a tank and a healer to finish it!

BUT

If you go into a normal duty with 3 tanks and 1healer, you can potentially finish it but slowly.