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.

[Seraphix2407]

Making it short. I don't expect healers or tanks to do dps, but if it means helping againt's enrage then yes. Best mitigation for a raid group is less mechanics or a boss getting killed faster. I rather do things faster than slower and make it more unsafe, because more mechanics shows up and that means you need to deal with more, which means again more chance of wipe

Examples are those people who don't do content till they are in echo or nerf, so they can skip mechanics to deal with less.

[WeekendSoja]

SE will never get rid of the current meta sadly, tbh, if any here has played this games predecessor before 2010 where everything was random time pop (original HNMs), kill time pop (sky's despot etc.), trigger item pop (almost all the NMs in endgame areas), and final bosses from collected trigger NM kills (Kirin, AV, and PW) than you understand that SE has a great deal of experience with the slow strategies (kiting, alliance switch, super buff, NM holding). Its been quite a while I have heard a boss take more than 20 minutes to kill in a game...the old MMO experience had players at least taking 30 minutes to a couple of hours to kill the boss...hell, back to SE's predecessor, they had two bosses who were near impossible to kill, one had skill usage that was unmitigatable and literally required all the luck of the Irish to hope he didn't use a certain set of 2 hour skills and the other was a true test of attrition...which even brought SE some really bad press release in a time where it was the WoW vs Final Fantasy hay days.

They made this enrage change to stop prolonged fights. The faster you wipe, the faster you notice what to change and beat the boss quickly or give up and send some time outside of the game to relax...SE probably still holds tight that login disclosure from FF11, Don't forget your family, friends, and work! (And don't stay logged in for 18 hours straight to not even get a boss to half HP lol)

[zmandude24]

How much raid tanking have you done in the current tier? As in, Savage Midas tanking.

Only 2 nights of A5S and the feedback I got was not to improve how well I can tank but to do higher dps. I was the OT but having the primary focus being dps is still ridiculous to me. If I wanted to push my dps, I would roll a dps class.

[PArcher]

Only 2 nights of A5S and the feedback I got was not to improve how well I can tank but to do higher dps. I was the OT but having the primary focus being dps is still ridiculous to me. If I wanted to push my dps, I would roll a dps class.

As OT in A5S, you're spending most of your time not tanking anything. So unless you're just sitting doing nothing, do some DPS. A6S you'll be tanking at least Brawler and Vortexer (some groups the OT tanks Blaster too, but he's not that punishing on the tank), and will need heavy mitigation for them.

But yes, generally as OT you are expected to do DPS, because otherwise you're just sitting there doing nothing. Especially as a WAR, the DPS-tank. Roll a PLD or DRK if you want to main tank primarily, or insist that you MT as WAR (which isn't something most group will want. Not that WAR can't tank, they just have the highest DPS-potential of the tanks)

I'm guessing you chose the wrong job for the role you want

[Sicno]

They've already mentioned a few times that tank and healer damage are not considered for balancing the content. Gordias was a special case, I've heard they didn't have enough time to test it and fine-tune it and that's why the dps checks were insane.

But otherwise the reasons why tanks and healers aim for bigger numbers can be:
1.- As a personal goal they aim to do better and they're already fulfilling their role well.
2.- Many dps in this game are BAD and they don't have any interest in improving, so when the group as a whole meets the enrage or adds don't die fast enough, etc. it gives the feeling that they HAVE to contribute to the group's numbers too.
3.- "Elitists". If they CAN choose between you and another tank/healer who's pulling bigger numbers guess who they're gonna choose.