What if light parties had 3 DPS instead of two?

[Zojha]

This is because it gives the devs far more freedom when it comes to dungeon difficulty [...]

You 'do' realize that the only thing you achieve by adding another healer is to trivialize non-lethal attacks and mechanics further? It doesn't give the devs "more freedom with difficulty", it simply makes each and every content easier by allowing one healer to fail and thus forces them to make every dungeon considerably harder to achieve the same overall intended difficulty, which puts more strain on EVERYONE in the group.

And "harder" equals more punishing in that context. Healers already trivialize almost every non-lethal damage, hence why vulnerability debuffs are used everywhere nowadays (Even in freaking Skalla!) - it's the only way to scale difficulty for them at this point. Since non-lethal damage equals trivial damage, mechanics need to one-shot to matter. But if everything did one-shot right away, that would make things far more difficult than intended. Vulnerability debuffs allow you to fail X amount of times before you get one-shot and thus present the only way they can create a middle-ground in terms of difficulty. This is already an ongoing trend, putting more healing power on top, either by adding another healer or buffing healers further, is only going to exacerbate it. It's a corner they have already designed themselves into.

And worse, adding a healer without having an increase of healer population and popularity only artificially increases queues for everyone else.

But I could go on to rant over healers as a design for years - It would only lead off topic. I'll leave it here.

[RydiaFey]

Okay, maybe 2 Healers is too many.

With a guaranteed ranged support and a caster we can hopefully make their life a little easier at least...

Do you think having an extra person to heal would make healing too tough? Or would it balance it?

[Teraluna]

Played with a few formats over the years. Couple of popular ones as examples:

5 person ala WoW: 1 Tank, 1 Healer, 3 dps
6 person ala Aion: 1 Tank. 1 Healer, 4 dps - or one of the dps could be a support class (Chanter for example) - which was the intended ideal group at launch.

Aion does have the option of letting the group organizer decide what they want in the group. It is completely flexible and doesn't dictate which class roles should be in it.
I think this works very well, but of course would require a massive amount of dungeon re-work for it to appear here.

[NovaLevossida]

They've needed to increase the number of DPS in a light party for a long time due to queue times.

[Clicked]

I'm all for 3 dps in a dungeon group. 5 is a nice number and it would help DPS queues more than anything else they could possibly do in the game.

[RBlackshield]

A while back, I had this same discussion with my FC and someone brought up a very good point. There are a percentage of tanks and healers that play those classes because of the shorter queue times they get for doing it. Now, if you shift the party make-up to include more dps, then the dps get shorter queue times while the tanks and healers get a longer queue. How long will it be before those people playing tank or healer classes shift to dps classes and put us into the exact same situation that we have now?

From a technical standpoint, increasing the number of dps in a party would require all of the current dungeons to be redesigned. Additionally, many healers use the time when they aren't healing to help dps. If they suddenly have another dps player's health to keep track of and keep alive, then their play style would likely see a large shift to more pure healing.

In the end, adding an extra dps player to light dungeon parties would only help the dps players have shorter queues while making life worse for the tanks and healers. If it is difficult to get people to play a tank or healer now, do you think they will stick around when one of the main benefits to playing one is taken away or their entire style of play has to shift? I main red mage now, but I do have paladin and white mage leveled and decently geared for daily dungeon runs if I want faster queue time or a change of pace. Without those faster queue times, I would just stick with my red mage.

[Critical-Limit]

Stuff .

It would need to be a decently sized wait like dps do with sometimes 30minutes being probably average. If we do the change and tanks and healers only have to wait 5mins that may not persuade them to change. I go healer i que when I realize I'm waiting probably waiting 40 minutes

If dps que is instant, and tank had to wait 10, and they switch to dps. Then they are helping everyone's que. Same as now, people switching to tank and healer are helping que times, people switching just for the run is not a bad thing

[Sunako]

I like current 8 man raid content because mechanics works very well between 8 players imo. And more players = more players messing up and more wipes.

[giantslayer]

1 tank, 1 healer, 3 dos would work well. As a healer, it wouldn't be hard because most of our healing is either single target on the tank or AOE for the whole party, so it doesn't matter if it's 4 or 5 people. Light party content has lower party AOE damage than Full Party content does to compensate for the number of healers.

There are more people playing Tank/Healer who would rather play DPS than there are DPS who would rather play Tank/Healer, especially in casual 4-man content. When you get to more advanced stuff, I feel like there are a higher percentage that main Tank/Healer than in the casual realm.

The biggest issue is that everything is designed and balanced for 4-man. Changing it to a 5-man format would require adjusting a lot of stuff. Changing numbers around (more HP for enemies, etc) wouldn't necessarily be too difficult, but there are other mechanics and things designed for 4 players that would not be so easily adjusted.

[Okamimaru]

There is no good reason to add a 3rd dps.... 2 dps already can mow down everything in dungeons with little effort... dungeon wipes as is come from tanks pulling more than a healer can heal... I have never been in any light duty where one dps was needed over another so class balance is a non issue...