
Originally Posted by
LineageRazor
Folks brought up the point that, without enrage, you could just toss DPS to the curb and bring nothing but tanks and healers to a fight to guarantee a win. Thing is, though, nobody wants to farm a fight that takes an hour for each completion.
I bring up, once again, FFXI, a game with challenging fights and (mostly) no Enrages. Why didn't folks bring nothing but tanks and healers to these fights? Because tank and healer DPS SUUUUUUUCKED. Many enemies had built-in regeneration that would easily overtake an all-tank/healer's ability to pump out damage - but even for the ones that did not, the amount of time it would take for a such a group to win was simply untenable. It was also the case that resource regeneration was much more difficult in that game; with the exception of specific jobs (and even then, only in minute quantities), players did not regenerate MP or HP. In theory, a party of all tanks and healers could rotate a "resting" rotation to recover resources, but that would slow an already slow fight even further. In general, a six-man party contained one tank, one or two healers, and the rest DPS - it was the only sane way to play.
In this game, tanks and healers have decent DPS. They were given this so that they could participate competently in SOLO content - but folks (understandably) leverage it against GROUP content, as well. I believe Yoshi P said himself years ago that healer DPS was an unexpected component in raids, and that they needed to bump up the DPS check to compensate.
Even if we want to keep tank and healer DPS, and even if folks were actually willing to play it safe in spite of the longer fight times, there are plenty of ways to prevent the tank/healer zombie apocalypse. For example, rigidly enforce the role restrictions, even in pre-made parties - you CANNOT bring six healers to the fight, because exactly two healers is enforced. Another idea would be to have recurring DPS checks during the fight, without an enrage on the fight as a whole - you'd still have to pump out the numbers during these checks, so tanks and healers alone wouldn't be able to cut it.
tl;dr: The removal of enrage does not automatically give DPS a free ride, nor does it make them obsolete. It all depends how the content is built. I, personally, would have preferred that they built the game without Enrage being a necessity.