The only real way to solve DPS queues

[Tex_Mex]

You guys seriously dig your own graves.

You wanna reduce DPS queue times, then use proper etiquette when you are actually in an instance. Believe me, tanks and healers WANT to give you their comms, and when you are not a sheep DPS player you will quickly get them. At least from those who appreciate your enmity control, group support, and following mechanics. When tanks and healers think to themselves, "Yup, pull the whole effin dungeon!" it's because you guys are seriously bringing the wrecking ball.

In short, just do what you are meant to do, and don't be a dick to your tanks and healers. It is seriously that simple. And when you queue as a tank or healer and witness a douchebag DPS player, know that this fvckhead is messing it up for all of you.

You nailed one big point on the head here. When I'm tanking, I will always take it one mob at a time to gauge the party strength. If the DPS arent capable of putting up respectable numbers, I will purposefully go slow, just because tanking half the dungeon with bad DPS is no fun for anyone, especially the tank that has to dodge 5000 AoE attacks.

Even worse is when healers are oblivious to DPS performance and run ahead to pull more. I do really believe that this game should implement a built in DPS meter that can be toggled on and off. But I know that there are a ton of people who will grief players for low DPS, so I understand why it is not there. I don't ever grief players for low DPS, but I will adjust my playstyle to help them succeed and increase our chances of success.

[Kazrah]

But i was Warrior / PLD :O

Yes, Stormblood proved that it's not the same both ways. Red Mage wasn't just viewed as a better alternative to Summoner at the time, but a job for healer mains to transition more easily into playing DPS. As for what players I know who went Samurai, the majority of them were tank mains who wanted something different.

[KisaiTenshi]

Not really, other games without the trinity still have tanky and healy builds and are used, but not necessary if you have a lot of good dps so theres lots of variables, but all viable.

Other games that do "skill tree" type of builds often don't let you switch without some kind of time/experience/money penalty, thus the incentive is to make additional characters instead. Ever wonder why some games trot out "X,XXX,XXX players!" instead of "XX,XXX active players" ?

FFXIV's 2.x jobs have more in common with FFV and FFX-2, where you have to level up the job independently of anything else. Other games usually make you put points into skills from a skill tree, and that often results in "bad builds" that can't do any content well, or "glass cannon min-max" builds which are good at exactly one piece of content and terrible at everything else. These are also too confusing for players who don't understand the unlock sequences.

Or in the case of F2P games, the cash shop is often designed to be the only way to fix bad builds by buying cash shop items to reset skills. "Sorry you were stupid, please pay 19.99 for an amnesia tonic"

But other games also let you simply make all content a faceroll by outleveling it. The Levelsync in FFXIV is what makes the content last. If you can simply get to level 70 and then solo all the ARR and HW content, that would of course make the dungeon content pointless. Dungeons in FFXIV 2.x+ are a completely different experience from other MMORPG games. Now I do wish SE would tighten up the levelsync/ilevel sync so that it has to be played at essentially minimum ilevel once cleared to get any additional rewards from it. Really, SE should remove "undersized party" as an option at all unless the content has been cleared at minimum ilevel.

[Araxes]

As for what players I know who went Samurai, the majority of them were tank mains who wanted something different.

Absolutely this! The Majority of Players speculated, some even thought its final, that Samurai is gonna be a Tank. Big was the dissapointment when it was just another DPS many would play but only few would actually play right. Now, Sam is stuck with a bad Reputation due to specific People wanting to play a Japanese oriented Job even though they dont play it right.

[Mikhaill]

I'm afraid the only real way to reduce the queue times for DPS is for more players to choose to play tanks and healers.

Its the price people pay for playing the most saturated role. If you want shorter queues, play a different role.

"For DPS" If we wanna get technical, this is false.
You're no longer a DPS if you're a healer or tank.
I say increase the the party slots and all like OP said.
No one wants to be a healer and tank all the time, but I admit
that even I just stick with the two because of the abysmal Q times.
I am sure most of us are adults and are quite busy and can't afford to spend
30 mins or more in Q times. I do recommend people using PF to find a tank or heal
for expert runs for example. Here on Aether it takes no more than 10 minutes.

[Jonnycbad]

People like playing DPS jobs and not playing tanks and healers. This is ingrained in players since the beginning of gaming. People generally do not like playing support roles. How many people want to play a goalie in football or a catcher in baseball? Defense in basketball? A military medic or radio operator? How many epic or glorious tales are there of radio operators or medics? No, films, novels, video games, anime are about wartime heroes: swordsmen, snipers, gun toters, samurai, people that kill and maim things in interesting ways. Support roles are integral to human civilization but they don't have the same limelight as more active and visible roles. Movies can't be made without cameramen and crew behind the scenes but they aren't visible. Healers and Tanks are the drummer/bass of the party, they carry and support but they aren't the lead singer/lead guitarist that get (most) of the fandom.

People (generally) want to be in a role that's visible, flashy, and visually impressive. Humans want their efforts to be be visible so they can feel validated. Gamers feel that healers, while important, aren't fun because their job is passive (to keep dps alive while dps kill the things with cool attacks). There is no way to change this mindset because it has been instilled in us. You can incentivize playing Healer or Tank with various rewards, but fewer people enjoy playing these roles because it's 1) not as flashy/cool, 2) more responsibility.

[TheMightyMollusk]

"For DPS" If we wanna get technical, this is false.
You're no longer a DPS if you're a healer or tank.

You are in this game. Try running pretty much anything as a healer and not DPSing at all. See how salty people get.

[Ghastly]

What we need is more tanks. With dps you have so many choices that you want to play them all (or a lot of them). For tanks it's the opposite, there's so few of them that eventually you're just basically on the same job all the time, maybe on an alt tank here and there. If there were 5 tanks I wouldn't mind queing as tank most of the time because there would be so many to choose from.

[Penthea]

It's the same thing in every trinity based mmo I played regardless of party size and healer/tank classes to dps classes ratio.

It's because most players don't want to tank or heal. That's the problem. It's not the lack of choice, party slots or class design. The problem is the players. There's no cure for this. Even in table top rpgs this sort of thing happens - most people are drawn to classes that specialise in dealing damage.

[RitsukoSonoda]

The DPS queues are caused by player base. Its not something the game developer can easily fix at this point.

Changing 4 man duties to 5 man to have a 3rd dps will help for all of maybe 1 month before queue times go back to what they are now. The reason being it seems a lot of you fail to realize a number of tanks and healers queueing these duties are doing so because it has a shorter queue time on those roles. If the DPS queue time goes down they will start queueing as DPS because its their preferred role or job and the role distribution in player base will shift to a higher DPS percentile.