Quote Originally Posted by Kitfox View Post
Do you know why DPS is the meta of the game? Because this game is about depleting boss hp bars.
This isn't entirely true.

There are many games which are about depleting health bars, but nevertheless, kiting and turtling strategies can be dominant in those. It is all a matter of: What gives you the best chances at depleting the enemy resource (health) before your own resources (health and, if healers exist, mana) are depleted. People tend to be risk averse after all.

And this is the age old trinity system: Tanks mitigate as much as they can so the healer can keep them up longer with the mana he has (resource retention), which gives DPS more time to do their thing (resource depletion). It's quite a dynamic system since every role can compensate for the others to some degree by playing well. And it can well be that giving your dedicated DPS more time to deplete the enemy resource gives a better chance at clearing than focusing on that oneself.

Hard enrages now destroy this dynamic, because better resource retention does not, in fact, prolong the fight and give the DPS more leeway. Once you can hit enrage, the 'only' thing giving you a better chance at clearing is more DPS and thus, resource retention can not be optimal. So why are hard enrages a thing? Because resource retention is completely trivial already, to the point solo healers are common. You have a ridiculous amount of resources to spare for DPSing or healing the bonus damage in DPS stance. If two healers would focus solely on healing, fights could go on near infinitely. At that level of resource retention, it's simply not surprising people will want to dump the spare resources into DPS.