What are the most common reasons people don't dps?

[Jollyy5]

The guide posted here says that with those words: "DPSing isn’t something you start doing when there’s nothing for you to heal. It should be something you stop doing when the fight requires you to heal."

TL;DR: DPS first, heal only when needed.

Accurate, true in every MMO, your job is not to keep everyone at 100%, it's to keep everyone alive.

The more you can pump out damage, the faster the enemy dies which is the primary goal most of the time. You could apply that in WoW as well, but that game gives you very little time to do anything but heal, but that's just how WoW works.

In FFXIV however, healing requirements are much lower and cause downtime, which has been pointed out many times, and that downtime is then filled with DPS because it's the best thing to do.