Square, please make dungeons 5 players.

[Shurrikhan]

Honestly, I don't think upping the party to five in dungeons is the answer. I think splitting the DPS role is. Instead of being 1 tank, 1 healer, and 2 DPS (or 2, 2, 4 in trials and non-alliance raids) it should be 1 tank, 1 healer, 1 melee, and 1 ranged/caster. (and 2, 2, 2, and 2 for trials and the other stuff). I think that would ease up the queue better for 2.x-current content.

How would that not make the issue worse, if anything?...

On topic:

As Zohja said, reducing the bottleneck allows for faster queues; simple as that. That can be done by increasing the proportion of people interested in tanking (and to lesser extent, healing), or by adjusting the compositions to what's there. Personally, I'd just as much like to be able to see 3 DPS and 1 tank or healer comps as 1/3/1 comps in dungeons. Sadly, SE has gone out of their way to ensure that such things are impossible by stripping the game of most CC as of level 50.

To me, the key is compositional scaling. Want to keep 2 healers busy alongside 1 tank and 2 DPS? So be it. There's now more damage. Want to roll tankless? Alright, better be on the ball with CC, kiting, threat swaps, focus targeting, and environmental damage.

[dynus]

They've already tried to get people to tank more. Bigger rewards, special mounts. What else can they do to get people to try tanking? Automatic weapon drops everytime they do a dungeon? A complete set of gear for that dungeon? That's not fair to the other roles. And I say this as someone who's currently maining a tank role.

Is my suggestion perfect? No. I'll admit that. But I don't see how it'd make it worse. A group will move a little faster while another group will be pretty much the same.

I would like to see five party dungeons, but the content from 2.0 to current would be way too easy with that. Not with a complete dungeon overhaul. Otherwise, it won't be fun. Even then, I'm not sure they could. The 8 member party dungeons at the end of ARR was too easy.

[Saerydoth]

Making dungeons 5 player won't help. Making more tank/ healer classes won't help. Blizzard has done all these things. WoW has 6 tanks and 6 healers and 5 player dungeons. And the dps queues are just as bad there as here, if not worse. This is a player problem, the solution has to come from players. Not berating your tanks/ healers is a good start.

[Zojha]

This is a player problem, the solution has to come from players.

No, it is not a player problem, it is a design problem and that is fairly easy to prove. Imagine for a moment the game was designed without the trinity while keeping the playerbase constant. Would the problem persist? No, because there would no longer be a role bottleneck. Therefore, it cannot logically be a player problem, as the same players do not create the same problem under a different design.

Further, it is not up to the players to solve the issue. It is up to SE. It is their job to create an enjoyable experience for their players - they are their paying customers after all - and telling people to play something they don't enjoy just so their design works out runs counter to that. That's like telling a customer that wants an apple to just buy milk instead. And just like in real life, it can happen that apples are sold out and you need to wait for the next delivery - but if apples are consistently being sold out, the company will take notice and order more apples from their suppliers (or in this case, open up more DPS slots for groups).

That said, I personally doubt that one additional DPS slot would solve the issue right away. It helps, but it might not suffice. We don't know how skewed the ratio actually is and the important thing is to get as close to that ratio as possible. It's not 100% possible, because group size is a discreet ratio, whereas the player ratio is fluid. But the closer you get, the less wait time total.

That aside, you can also create more content without the design that causes the problem in the first place. You can go super wild here - Falling boulders, spike traps, swinging blades, platforming sequences, action time sequences, priority spells that need to be stunned and the entire repertoire of regular dungeon and raid mechanics that have some way to be avoided. Tethers of all kinds, stack mechanics, spread mechanics, meteors, divebombs, gaze attacks, telegraphs, boulder blocks, clock positions, plume baits, add priority, positioning puzzles... everything goes, as long as performing it right leads to no damage being taken.

One dungeon that's all mechanics and no tank&spank per patch would help funnel DPS off the regular dungeons. PotD fails in that regard, because it's built like a trinity dungeon - mobs still have autoattacks, you still take unavoidable damage. It facilitates its lack of role requirement by simply making that damage low, rather than compensating its lack with engaging mechanics. And that's just plain boring.

[Frizze]

So its not a player problem because if they made a different game we wouldnt have this issue? I started playing this game knowing it had defined roles that we werent really going to be breaking out of, and i chose to main DPS because i dont enjoy healing or tanking. I knew(and have seen time and again since) that put me at a disadvantage in certain situations, but stuck with it anyway because if im not going to enjoy myself why bother to play at all. In a sense, im part of the problem. But ive also looked at the tank and healer boards, and read some of the absolute garbage that those people have to put up with sometimes. Ive heard from several friends who will only tank/heal for people they know because the randoms arent worth it(whether its not knowing how to play your class, sabotaging a fight, abusive behavior/language, or whatever else). Every person who stops queing as tank/healer because of bad behavior only makes the problem worse for the DPS in line. So you cant say the players bear no responsibility for the way things are. We got here because the devs made this system, but its gotten worse because of the way we treat each other.

[Lambdafish]

If anything, 5 player dungeons should have two healers. That way they can scale the content difficulty up without having to worry about solo healer strain.

[ToasterMan]

That chart should be much different now with how many have jumped ship from tanks and healers because SE failed to balance them for this expansion.

[Blanchimont]

They've already tried to get people to tank more. Bigger rewards, special mounts. What else can they do to get people to try tanking? Automatic weapon drops everytime they do a dungeon? A complete set of gear for that dungeon? That's not fair to the other roles. And I say this as someone who's currently maining a tank role.

Is my suggestion perfect? No. I'll admit that. But I don't see how it'd make it worse. A group will move a little faster while another group will be pretty much the same.

I would like to see five party dungeons, but the content from 2.0 to current would be way too easy with that. Not with a complete dungeon overhaul. Otherwise, it won't be fun. Even then, I'm not sure they could. The 8 member party dungeons at the end of ARR was too easy.

I feel that the "big" rewards they offer are miniscule, especially once you are a higher level and you have to run low level content in the daily roulette for the small bonus of like 40k experience. Just running a single level 50+ dungeon already makes it insignificant for anything more then the daily roulette. The way I see it, they have to scale dungeon rewards with even low level dungeons offering experience equal to mobs at their level and maybe even small amounts of tomestone (mainly due to lower level dungeons being shorter in length). They could also allow experience gained over the level cap to be transferred in some way, but that would be a nightmare to deal with.

[Darty123]

No this is dumb, its really hard to design an enemey to be a challenge and kill a party of 5 there is to much utility involved with another dps in the party for a dungeon boss. All fights are balanced off the min i level sync settings which means they would need to adjust every single dungeon for this. Will never happen

[topdogbehemoth]

Making dungeons 5 player won't help. Making more tank/ healer classes won't help. Blizzard has done all these things. WoW has 6 tanks and 6 healers and 5 player dungeons. And the dps queues are just as bad there as here, if not worse. This is a player problem, the solution has to come from players. Not berating your tanks/ healers is a good start.

I would also like to add that tanks are often seen as the 'default leader' of a group, and not everyone enjoys herding cats. Not sure what the issue with being a healer is. I enjoyed it in other games, so I am bias I guess /shrug.

It's the very nature of the roles that steer some people away from pugs. Doing those roles among people you play with on a regular basis vs doing them for a random group of maybe good maybe derpy player is almost night and day.

You know their capabilities and weaknesses and how they will react if the encounter goes tits up.