DPS Double Standard

[Februs]

Actually, its been my experience that DPS are often held to much higher standards than healers or tanks and are expected to carry the fight and get kicked at the drop of a hat over the smallest mistake. Meantime, the healers and tanks seem to get infinite "Ooops my bads."s or "Sorry, cat was on fire gotta go AFK midboss fight"s.

I don't think that has much to do with the Dps being held to a higher standard so much as it is a fact that if you have a crappy Dps you can swap them out in under a minute; whereas, if you have a crappy tank or healer you risk being without one for an hour if you vote/kick them.

It's for this reason that it is all the more important for Dps to at least be performing to the average level. I've never kicked a Dps for "small mistakes;" however, if you're looking for a carry, or you've repeatedly wiped the group, or you're not listening to the chat when the entire group tells you you've done something wrong, or you're just being a general A**hat in the chat box, you're done. Why should anyone put up with that when Dps are, quiet literally, a dime a dozen?

So the raid/dungeon is taking a little longer than normal because of slow/under-performing Dps? No big deal. It sucks, but that's nothing to kick someone over. One of your Dps is being a troll to the group... different story. There's plenty of other Dps who were waiting for that que timer to go off. Might as well give them a shot rather than stick with the bad apple.

[karateorangutang]

Actually, its been my experience that DPS are often held to much higher standards than healers or tanks and are expected to carry the fight and get kicked at the drop of a hat over the smallest mistake. Meantime, the healers and tanks seem to get infinite "Ooops my bads."s or "Sorry, cat was on fire gotta go AFK midboss fight"s.

I'll bite on this one.

It's true to a degree. The public image of what makes a tank and a healer great is very skewed in the community. In a 4 man dungeon my one true goal is to hold aggro.... which is like getting credit on a test for putting your name on it. It's ridiculously easy to do and alot of people are held to a low standard here. What makes a tank great though is much more than that. Holding high DPS numbers, proper postioning, prepping for tankbusters, and DPS in unison are what a tank great and not just passable. The bar is very low for tanks because its less played role. I'd agree that the bar should be set a little higher on what makes a tank great.

DPS is very black and white. If you not doing X DPS in a given situation then your simply not doing your job. There's less grey area's so it's easier to evaluate. Even if the game itself makes it harder to judge.

[Lollie]

I try to avoid these threads but this one shows promiss for now. This issue with poor performing dps/tank/heals is a social and mechanical interpretation issue. As a disclaimer I have only done progression as a dps, but have cleared midcore (ex/post overgear coils) as heals and more recently tank.

The role misconceptions (mechanical):
Dps role is not to "just dps" it is to determine the best application of their potential output to bring the squirmish to the safest as swiftest conclusion, while minimizing incoming damage to themselves. It is not easy, but it may be the easiest to do.

Heals role is not to "just keep every up" It is to provide the stamina to the group to carry a squirmish from start to finish. Which is not anywhere near as easy as it sounds since the are so many options in how to do so and everyone has an oppinion on which is best. The 2 most common debated being shorten the squirmish (dps) or increase the safety net on the group stamina (focusing on party hp) which baring very netch situations needs to be balanced.

Tanks role is not to "just hold enimity" it is to control the terms of the squirmish. Incoming sustaind dmg based on pack size and projected duration, determining location of squirmish to minimize enviornmental hinderances. Determining where and who incoming dmg is applied to, including mitigating the busters be it eating the an deflecting dmg or stopping them outright (crossover resposibility of dps).

I say squirmish instead of fight because the subject of 4man has an added twist to everyone of managing down time resource regeneration.

The expectations (social):
Just making this point first, omg bad tank/heal you should dps instead! Anyone who has ever said this candidly has neither the right or reason to call out bad dps, because all that does is focus said underskilled person into a differt pool, it does not fix the underlying problem which is usually one of 4 things.

Lack of knowledge (25% of the time in my observation)
Lack of practice (10%)
Lack of concensus in execution (30%)
Lack of concensus of importance (35%) this on increases goes up with level as the others go down generally speaking, the lazyness/boredness factor.

[kazeandi]

Once you established aggro, you can go full ham and won't have to worry about it anymore. That's not only true for raids, mind you - you can do that in dungeons already. Not that tanks, especially the pally, had a lot of DPS moves (and effective ones at that) that were tough to time right and get into the mix. Divert from the mitigation path and gear up for damage and half the battle's won.

The DPS-support is a bit more difficult for healers, with how clunky Cleric Stance can be sometimes (my healer is Scholar, so I've had my fair share of "fun" with that). However, if you're not doing DPS check encounters, it hardly matters, as the damage both roles can perform are minor (except for warriors, but even those only reach the damage of an average DD, if they try really hard) and mostly not worth the stress. You could make a dungeon run 5% faster, maybe 10%, maybe even 15% if you're overgeared, for much more "clicks per minute" than it's worth it.

This is a thing FFXIV put a weird spin on anyways, non-DD roles doing (some small amount of) damage. Them not doing it surely doesn't make them bad at their job, which would be healing or tanking respectively, it just hurts some peoples' ego a bit I guess when they're just the meatshield or the healbot, so if they go out of their way to do it, they suddenly compare themselves to their DDs in many cases.

It's more of a psychological issue than really a problem of "bad DPS", because let's face it, a good healer can carry a bad tank and bad DDs and one good DD can carry a bad party by killing stuff before it can hurt.

[Risvertasashi]

As I said in the original post, in a raid setting is a different environment than what I have been using (trials and dungeons).

Right, but here's the thing: it filters down. For example: On the FFXIV reddit, there was recently a post from a PLD where the group wanted to kick him on Bismarck for presumed low DPS (they weren't running parsers, save for the reddit poster). And the SMN as well, even though the SMN was doing twice the DPS of the DRG that complained.

Bismarck EX you might ask?

Nope, normal.

Others have already explained why tanking and healing is only easy if you do the bare minimum (and healing, of course, gets easier if the tank is overgeared and has enough of a brain to use DCDs) so I'll just leave that. But if you're still not convinced, go into Fractal with minimum ilvl sync turned on and then try to maximize DPS.

lol as a dps we are easy to replace if we don't do above the average recorded dps.

For some reason people that play tanks and healers thinks its fine not to dps at all and yet enter savage content and unless all 4 dps is il 200+ they isn't going to be able to carry lackluster I only tank tanks and I only heal healers.

A1S Faust:
I will raise a good example my barding majorly sucked this day lag wise + drinking missing many procs... but we did 10 attempts a1s. my dps was shocking that day 850 I wont lie. However the other 3 dps were 1.2k+ then warrior main tank 550-580dps and dark off tank was doing 130-150 dps and healers the whm 250ish and the ast 7.6dps but people only blamed the brd and yet im sure all see I may have been a major issue but the group failed to believe that anyone else was lacking.

Then I switched drg all 4 dps were around 1.25k 1.3k 20 runs more and guess what we still wiped cause the tanks and healers didn't dps much and I will add the fact I barely play BRD and only entered that static as one cause the tank and drg slot was taken. my pld could have done more dps than that war and drk combined and yet plds seen as junk by many including I cause I'm used to tanks doing good tank dps. let alone healers not even dotting.

There is so, so much wrong with this.

First off, if the tanks and healers are DPSing even a little, they're the one carrying the raid, not the DPS. If the DPS can't do it without help, they're scrubs (anyone got the Yoshi git gud image handy?). Plain and simple.

However, in your particular example, the DRK's DPS suggests that he was probably close to the minimum ilvl. Aside from lower output from lower gear, this also means the healers need to watch him more closely and heal more. Lastly, WHM's DPS there is really not bad. It starts out high but then as damage scales up, they need to stay out of cleric which causes the end DPS to be quite a bit lower.

Now if tanks and heals are doing awesome DPS and the group is able to clear because of that, great. But it's not the DPS doing the carrying, lol. In your example, the only problem is the heals and WAR weren't carrying harder.

It's for this reason that it is all the more important for Dps to at least be performing to the average level. I've never kicked a Dps for "small mistakes;" however, if you're looking for a carry, or you've repeatedly wiped the group, or you're not listening to the chat when the entire group tells you you've done something wrong, or you're just being a general A**hat in the chat box, you're done. Why should anyone put up with that when Dps are, quiet literally, a dime a dozen?

Ideally...No one should ever have to put up with that. Regardless of the color of their job icon.

But even with DPS being a dime a dozen, there are plenty at 60 that get away with doing 300-400 DPS in EX roulette. The amount of times that I am second highest DPS for the entire dungeon at the end of a run as WHM... it's depressing.

[Malevicton]

Some personal thoughts and maybe some clarification on the skill stuff, because while a few decent points have been brought up I think some people just noticed the word "skill" and took things a bit personally

Tanks: highest skill floor, lowest skill ceiling. It's harder to do the minimum required for a tank, but they have little room for optimization compared to dps and healers.

Dps: The opposite. Lowest skill floor, highest skill ceiling. You can literally be afk through most content and it won't kill your group (will annoy em though lol, do not test). They definitely have the most room for optimization though.

Healers are right in the middle.

[Immut]

It's easy to bitch out a DPS for being bad, because the only thing that happens if they're bad is you do low dps. Or fail a mechanic. It's all very up front stuff.

If your tank is bad, they're not going to use cooldowns efficiently, which reduces the healer's dps uptime. If the healer is bad, the tank gets more stressed and has to blow bigger cds but you won't notice it until you're suddenly only taking one pack at a time, because the healer likely wasn't dpsing anyway. It's a co-dependent relationship. If both are good and in sync, the healer is going to do SCADS of dps and your clear time will show it. If either is bad, the dps will just think "Something is wrong, this is taking way too long" without actually knowing who's at fault until the tank dies.

[Sevyn]

The real problem in my opinion isn't the players. It's the fact that outside of Savage Alexander and maybe Ravana Ex everything is TOO simple. If the dungeons are so simple that no one ever runs out of resources of course how much damage you do, what cd's you use as a tank or what you do as a healer besides keeping up the bare minimum heals then skill or how well you do doesn't really matter anymore. I've played MMO's for a long time and while I don't think they should be super hardcore difficult so that only 10 percent can clear them I do think they should be a bit more challenging to motivate the entire population to have a vested interest in becoming better players. As It currently stands that is not the case. That is why when you que up for your daily expert you run into dps doing 200 DPS, tanks that don't pop cd's, and healers that just barely heal to keep the party up. The OP makes some valid points but I've seen just as many bad tanks and healers as I do DPS and It's the content and not necessarily the playerbase as a whole.

There will always be not so good players though or players that are better then others, but currently with how the game is that lowest skill set of players is so low it's almost laughable compared to other MMO playerbases, because why the hell not? I can just afk and clear it anyways, get my Eso and be done right?

So the real culprit is SE looking down on the playerbase as a whole. It's honestly SE you should be upset with for making the content so easy a monkey could do it (not counting savage of course that's great). Anyways those are my thoughts on this subject.

[Jim_Berry]

*SNIP*

Throughout all of the game, and after quite a while of playing and from what I’ve been reading, is that to me, I have noticed that there’s a DPS double standard that I see in-game and from what I have read from different forums and from what I have heard from my friends. What do I mean by this? That DPS are much more likely and have it easier to get let off the hook than tanks or healers, and are able to get away with doing stuff that tanks or healers wouldn’t be able to even dare attempt to do (such as coming in under geared, not knowing half of how to play their job, or scratch that, even their role).

*SNIP

The thing you fail to realize is that us DPS are constantly, constantly, constantly in need to keep our skills on par. The minute we slack, that's when we start to fall off a bit. As a DPS, we HAVE to always keep our gear updated. A healer can get away with a low-level weapon and still heal good. A tank can wear STR gear and still not be squishy. If I have a low-level weapon, it's felt. If I have low-level equipment, it's felt.

[Jim_Berry]

*SNIP*
But even with DPS being a dime a dozen, there are plenty at 60 that get away with doing 300-400 DPS in EX roulette. The amount of times that I am second highest DPS for the entire dungeon at the end of a run as WHM... it's depressing.

The trend is that, "...as long as we clear." is in full effect, especially outside of Savage.