Anyone else get this feeling?

[Zojha]

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.

[Kitfox]

...Hard enrages now destroy this dynamic...

This is a good point that I did not consider while writing. Nonetheless, getting rid of hard enrages and introducing "resource enrage" in the form of sparsity, forcing healers to conserve for healing and tanks to maximize mitigation goes more or less under my 3rd point, making it impossible, or inefficient, for healers and tanks to focus on damage. While turtling in that scenario might not straight up increase dps, it would increase the maximum amount of damage done in the long run, thus increasing chances of clearing the fight.

However, after reaching a certain "efficiency level" in this scenario to meet this specific resource limit, extra resources would again be spent on things that make clearing the fight faster, aka DPS, since there's no denying that even without an enrage incentive, doing things faster is more efficient overall. Unless this extra focus on DPS is made extremely risky, I have a feeling it would prevail. I find that finishing fights faster is a more natural goal of skilled play than skilled play increasing the safety margin. The safety margin is largely irrelevant with the current design where you can retry fights as many times as you like. I guess that's another aspect that supports the dps meta.

To sum up, here are the few design choices that support the dps meta:
-deplete enemy hp as goal
-hard enrages
-infinite resources
-infinite retries

Essentially, since we gotta get rid of that pesky hp bar, doing damage is good, so do more of it. Since doing bad damage causes an enrage, let's do more damage. We have infinite resources, so might as well throw those into damage as long as we don't die. We can try again easily as many times as we want, so go for broke. Since the risk associated with increased dps is so small, the design heavily favors it.

To discourage dps and encourage safety margin (aka healing and mitigation) we would have to affect one of those aspects. Taking away infinite resources would shift the focus from dps to resource efficiency. Increasing the retry time, thus making wipes a riskier time loss, by introducing entry items that have to be farmed or time limits between attempts would also heavily favor safety over a couple of points of dps, when a wipe might mean 30 mins of farming or the like.

With all that said, though, I feel like Midas Savage strikes a good balance for the current "sprint competition with obstacles" type of design. The fights are mostly about mechanical damage and fight gimmicks, the dps checks are quite mild. This allows raid groups to focus on defense or offense depending on their preference, although the meta still supports high dps because of the low risk wipes.