The trinity, party responsibility, and how to try and improve the game from within

[Miyaka_Vigiles]

IMO a big part why all this mess is happening is the fact that DD classes don't do much more damage than Tanks/Healers compared to other MMOs.
Its a point that some of you have mentioned.

For example

FFXIV: Tank does 1k, a DD does 1.4k. That is very close and the tank damage will be a big factor in the raid DPS. If the tank tweaks his gear and rotation to do 10% more (which is doable) he can even become much closer to lets say utility classes such as BRD.

Other MMO: Tank does 1k, DD does 4k. Here the bulk of the damage is from the DD classes, even if the tank goes out of his way and do 50% (which is HUGE in an MMO), he wont impact the over all raid dps.

Another issue is the fact that other MMOs empower the tank stance. Examples include access to abilities only usable in tank stance, those abilities define the tank role in raid/dungeon.

Another example is increase tank damage the more armor or vit he has (a ratio of course). This makes getting more beefy a double dip for tanks. More HP & armor = more damage. This wont make tanks do as much as DDs, but will encourage them to use tank items.

[Artemiz]

The simplicity of the game is a large part of the problem in my opinion, take the healer DPS issue as an example. The problem we have is if they don't need to cure then they either stand there and do nothing or DPS. Throw in that they can do good DPS and pressure gets put on people to fullfil a role they feel they didn't sign up for. If the healer had something else to do, such as put buffs on players or debuffs on mobs then they would be busy enough, and contributing enough without needing to DPS. Haste and Refresh from FF11 are perfect examples of this.

I'd also like to throw the trinity concept out of the window to an extent and include the 4th class, support. If all dungeons where for 8 players not 4 and one role was reserved for a true support class (what BRD should have been imo) then it would help to get out of the situation we have now where everyone is similar in DPS output.

In my opinion the game should focus more on the buffing/debuffing meta game if we are to get away from the DPS mentality that people find so frustrating.