DPS mentality in MMOs

[Adrestia]

See here's the interesting thing that a lot of you younger gamers probably dont know.
Back in the very original MMORPG UO the whole premises of tanking was based around outputting the most damage in melee range of the boss.But this could be decided between many melee characters who was going to tank.
There werent dedicated heales either.You mostly just healed with bandages and mages that were dps focused would heal you too sometimes.
This changed over years into creating seperate classes that are tanks.

Actually back in The Realm, years before UO, we had an entirely different definition for tanks. Basically they were just what today we call melee DPS. I mean they usually had more hit points and more armor than mages, but they were there for damage. Mages were crowd control. And in UO people did all kinds of manipulation of threat and terrain, like shoving someone with armor into a chokepoint where 3 people behind could bandage him while only one monster in front could hit him, and it couldn't get through.

[AdrenKael]

Your story sounds more like misinformation on the DPS' end than an actually issue with game design. DPS should keep their aggro in check period. Even if that means they stop dpsing. If dps is too slow because of an aggro cap, blame the tank sure but don't grab aggro and complain about grabbing aggro. That's like shooting someone and then complaining they didn't move from in front of your gun.

Also there's no way DPS get more commendations than healer or tank, not even close.

Yes this does indeed encourage some behavior like BLM standing in aoes, tanks dropping tank stance, and so forth. Everyone is tugging on the lifeline rope at all times and a big part of the fun of such games is finding a good balance.

1.) It's not normal to see a DPS pop a threat reduction cooldown in DF dungeons. So I don't think it's really misinformation but bad habits taught by the "Don't even move the mouse cursor or allow the half second delay for the cooldown cause moar deeps!!!!" attitude.

2.) Its not about getting more comms its about the most comms for the least amount of effort.

3.) My whole point of more development time is based on the fact there are more variety in DPS than in tank/heals. That's why it's more boring to play tank/heals couple that with the stress of the group's success hangs on the balance of whether or not you do your job well = less people doing it. Dps is a way less stressful position to play in dungeons than healer for example.

4.) The point of worrying about MP or mana is only viable when you're not having to heal through stupid. Which is what the DPS mentality breeds; Stand in stupid to cut half a second off the encounter = way less MP left over at the end of the fight. You are right about there being a balance but that balance is shot to pieces when the DPS mentality cuts in. Tanks fight over aggro because it proves they do more dps and ignore adds and the healer has to heal through it. DPS stand in stupid to get that last half of that spell cast so they don't suffer a .5 dps penalty.

These issues never come into play really when you're in a premade. Everyone knows each other and they actually care about the group as a whole. You don't have that "group" mentality in DF pugs. You have the "gotta get mines" attitude. The majority of what you find there is I don't care if you have to work 5 times harder if I can get out of this dungeon faster. Problem is you don't get the adventurer in need bonus in premades. Not that doing so would make any sense. So yea most of my dungeon xp has been in DF pugs. Which is where the DPS mentality is at its worst.

[KaivaC]

snip

Okay, so I'm a little bit too lazy to chop this up and address your comment point by point, so I'll just put a general thought on this. Your words about DPS popping enmity cooldowns not being normal is based on...what? How enmity is handled by other MMOs? If that's the case, XIV is not like other MMOs. The 2.5sec default GCDs should've been a big clue on that. Admittedly, my knowledge on how other MMOs handle this is limited, at best, but I disagree with your stance that this is "not normal." Enmity is one of the tank's primary responsibilities, sure, but enmity is a party responsibility. It's not that hard to just hit one little button to help the tank out.

More damage = less time spent fighting something. How is that a bad thing?

I think one thing you leave out in your assessment is that DPS job have always been more popular in MMOs. In general, people like doing big damage. Can it lead to dumb behavior? Absolutely. But really, the tools are already there for players to get through every run smoothly. If the issue over DPS was really as prevalent as you say, then premades should be having similar issues - but in general when it comes to just normal dungeons, they don't, because as you said, premades have a tendency to know what they are doing as a group. The issue is the differing playstyles that you get from PUGs.

And about your comments on mana. That is partially true, stupid tends to create problems. But you know what else is true? A particular fight dragging on for too long. Low damage numbers also contribute to mana issues and tanks eventually running out of cooldowns to use in some cases. So I'm not quite sure what you are complaining about here. This seems more like an issue of competency to me.

[Adrestia]

Okay, so I'm a little bit too lazy to chop this up and address your comment point by point, so I'll just put a general thought on this. Your words about DPS popping enmity cooldowns not being normal is based on...what? How enmity is handled by other MMOs? If that's the case, XIV is not like other MMOs. The 2.5sec default GCDs should've been a big clue on that. Admittedly, my knowledge on how other MMOs handle this is limited, at best, but I disagree with your stance that this is "not normal." Enmity is one of the tank's primary responsibilities, sure, but enmity is a party responsibility. It's not that hard to just hit one little button to help the tank out.

If you're interested, most trinity MMOs have had a pretty significant component of DPS managing their own threat.

In EQ for example, one of the "highest DPS" items a wizard could get was a pair of pants that had a right click effect that made the target forget some of their enmity. Because if you didn't have those pants, you couldn't chain nuke without pulling hate.
In WoW, especially if you weren't Alliance (Paladins had ridiculous threat management capabilities and were Alliance-only), the mantra early on was "wait for 3 sunders," which was the equivalent of "let the tank do a threat combo before you go wild."
In FFXI, well . . . Yeah, threat in FFXI was really freakin' weird. It's a long topic to go into, but the short story is that if you tried to straight up DPS without spending a great deal of time with your back turned or otherwise twiddling your thumbs, on most jobs, you were eventually gonna pull hate and die horribly. It required substantial discipline to know when you were at risk of pulling, and a quick trigger finger to switch to -physical damage taken or similar gear so that when you did get smacked on a black mage, it wasn't a one-shot.

FFXIV today is a lot more like modern WoW. Between the tools the tanks have and the tools the DPS have, you "should" never have to slow down DPS for anything. But if you don't make use of those tools, for example tanks not setting up a shirk rotation or DPS forgetting Diversion is a thing, well, you know what happens.

[KaivaC]

If you're interested, most trinity MMOs have had a pretty significant component of DPS managing their own threat.

In EQ for example, one of the "highest DPS" items a wizard could get was a pair of pants that had a right click effect that made the target forget some of their enmity. Because if you didn't have those pants, you couldn't chain nuke without pulling hate.
In WoW, especially if you weren't Alliance (Paladins had ridiculous threat management capabilities and were Alliance-only), the mantra early on was "wait for 3 sunders," which was the equivalent of "let the tank do a threat combo before you go wild."
In FFXI, well . . . Yeah, threat in FFXI was really freakin' weird. It's a long topic to go into, but the short story is that if you tried to straight up DPS without spending a great deal of time with your back turned or otherwise twiddling your thumbs, on most jobs, you were eventually gonna pull hate and die horribly. It required substantial discipline to know when you were at risk of pulling, and a quick trigger finger to switch to -physical damage taken or similar gear so that when you did get smacked on a black mage, it wasn't a one-shot.

FFXIV today is a lot more like modern WoW. Between the tools the tanks have and the tools the DPS have, you "should" never have to slow down DPS for anything. But if you don't make use of those tools, for example tanks not setting up a shirk rotation or DPS forgetting Diversion is a thing, well, you know what happens.

The closest relevant experience I had was with SWTOR during launch and again several years ago, but both times, I could only manage maybe two weeks at most before my laptop noped out on me. It's been so long that I don't even remember if the holy trinity is prevalent there as it is here and in WoW. Seems like most other MMOs that try to enter the market sort of lower or outright remove the trinity. I'm getting the impression that OP may want XIV to go that direction...but I feel that's a terrible idea for this game, if that's what they are wanting.

[EaMett]

1.) It's not normal to see a DPS pop a threat reduction cooldown in DF dungeons. So I don't think it's really misinformation but bad habits taught by the "Don't even move the mouse cursor or allow the half second delay for the cooldown cause moar deeps!!!!" attitude.

As others have already stated. It's very common in MMOs for DPS to have to manage their aggro. If you meant that it's not common to see a DPS pop threat reduction in DF dungeons then I can see that being mostly true yes. Doesn't mean they're in the right, it's just that for the most part enmity generation for tanks is pretty easy in FF14 so it's not often that you have to use it, hence it isn't a go to.

The DPS in your example is totally wrong for complaining to the tank though. He should be managing his own enmity.

2.) Its not about getting more comms its about the most comms for the least amount of effort.

How do you measure effort? If you want 100 comms it's less effort as healer or tank. If you mean how much effort went into clearing content.... it's a little hard to measure as everyone will have a different opinion. Some people find DPS hard, others tanking hard or healing hard. DPSing for me is way more effort for instance.

Honestly though, most of the content in ff14 is pretty easygoing on the healers. Especially ex roulette stuff. A bit of stupid is barely a dent in the process, not anywhere as penalizing as a squishy tank for example.

3.) My whole point of more development time is based on the fact there are more variety in DPS than in tank/heals. That's why it's more boring to play tank/heals couple that with the stress of the group's success hangs on the balance of whether or not you do your job well = less people doing it. Dps is a way less stressful position to play in dungeons than healer for example.

That's because tank and healers are much harder to balance. Not only is their balance complex because if you up one aspect of their kit it has the effect of uping/nerfing another aspect of their kit as a result (give a healer a stronger heal and his DPS could potentially go up from not having to heal as much). But also because changes to these classes can also affect the damage output of the rest of the party (better mana management or mitigation could outright change strats and dps output).
And lets not even mention synergies between healers' and tanks' mitigation and healing kits.

Because of this these classes really need to be homogeneous to avoid serious imbalances.

Also there really isn't anymore pressure. The only pressure you have is not to die because your death could be hard or impossible to recover from but that's about it. Yes some responsibility is transferred to healers mostly. But with greater responsibility comes greater power, you also get to pick who gets to live and who dies because you can't be bothered healing stupid.

Overall I don't think tanks and healers are abandoned because of any of this rather than it being due to every kid wanting to be a virtual badass and healer/tank isn't really that.

4.) The point of worrying about MP or mana is only viable when you're not having to heal through stupid. Which is what the DPS mentality breeds; Stand in stupid to cut half a second off the encounter = way less MP left over at the end of the fight. You are right about there being a balance but that balance is shot to pieces when the DPS mentality cuts in. Tanks fight over aggro because it proves they do more dps and ignore adds and the healer has to heal through it. DPS stand in stupid to get that last half of that spell cast so they don't suffer a .5 dps penalty.

That's not true. Mana is a huge liability for DPSing as a healer in plenty of content. Dungeons and aoe DPS particularly. A dungeon party with low DPS is a HUGE HUGE HUGE Mana drain for the healer even if there is ZERO damage to heal. Caps for emphasis because I cannot stress this enough. If your party takes forever to kill packs of mobs you'll burn through your mana management tools in no time by just DPSing. It's much easier on the mana being in a party where the DPS is high and everyone is standing in aoes.

The other two things that can drain your mana are raising and overhealing.
It's extremely rare to have mana issues if dps is good, nobody dies, and you don't overheal much (<30%). Sounds like a captain obvious statement but what it means is that stupid is rarely a big hindrance if stupid survives. Classes like BLM are pros at "surviving stupid" but a lot of players use moves from their books if they feel like the healer has their back and it comes at very little expense on the healer end.

I'm not saying DPS mentality isn't a thing (it is for very good reason, namely game design). I'm also not saying it doesn't suck. It very much does if people are dying right and left for that .5%. It's just that everything becomes easier with more DPS and if people being stupid for that sake is upsetting, it's even more upsetting getting people who have no clue what they're doing, have low dps and/or non-optimized characters that you need to carry around like dead weight even if their mechanic handling is flawless.

Pick your poison, basically.

[Adrestia]

As others have stated already. It's very common in MMOs for DPS to have to manage their aggro.

Not sure if this is related to the descriptions I gave to KaivaC earlier, but just to clarify, those were *legacy* mechanics. DPS managing threat in WoW died around the launch of SWP in TBC, over a decade ago now, when they buffed Consecrate on Paladins to the point that losing threat would be a challenge. Other tank classes followed suit. In other recent(ish) holy trinity MMOs I’ve played, DPS classes didn’t even have tools for threat management. It was all up to the tanks to use some combination of tank stances and/or increased threat moves to hold hate. Most of the time, much like say the Rage of Halone combo, these threat multipliers were so high that losing hate was pretty unimaginable. XIV is just more convoluted than many other games (just speaking in terms of threat management) in that the aggro combos are the things you try not to use more than absolutely necessary and the DPS jobs have kit to help deal with that reality.

[whiskeybravo]

Trying to deal the most damage you're capable of in any game is fun. Period. SE realizes this, and even though it seems to be making them uncomfortable, I highly doubt the community will stand for anything less than what we have now.

[wereotter]

Your story sounds more like misinformation on the DPS' end than an actually issue with game design. DPS should keep their aggro in check period. Even if that means they stop dpsing. If dps is too slow because of an aggro cap, blame the tank sure but don't grab aggro and complain about grabbing aggro. That's like shooting someone and then complaining they didn't move from in front of your gun.

No. Just... no.

A DPS should not stop performing their role because of a failing on the part of the tank. DPS at this point all have many options to keep their emnity under control with every job except ninja having access to an agro dump, and every job except bard and machinist having access to Diversion. However if a DPS is using their tools and a tank isn't holding hate, the DPS should not be expected to just sit around with a thumb up their butt doing nothing, the tank, in that case, needs to be doing their job and holding agro, because at the end of the day, that's the tank's primary job. Anything the DPS is doing is all their only to help the tank perform that role.

[EaMett]

No. Just... no.

A DPS should not stop performing their role because of a failing on the part of the tank. DPS at this point all have many options to keep their emnity under control with every job except ninja having access to an agro dump, and every job except bard and machinist having access to Diversion. However if a DPS is using their tools and a tank isn't holding hate, the DPS should not be expected to just sit around with a thumb up their butt doing nothing, the tank, in that case, needs to be doing their job and holding agro, because at the end of the day, that's the tank's primary job. Anything the DPS is doing is all their only to help the tank perform that role.

There's a thread somewhere that goes in depth about this over and over again so feel free to search the forums for it, lets not side track this one with the same stuff over again.

Bottom line is that party survivability trumps all and the only one with any control over their own enmity is the dps himself. Your enmity your responsibility. The aggro puller gets the blame for pulling aggro the tank gets the blame for capping DPS.

Just because FF14 can be forgiving if you pull aggro doesn't mean it's your right. If you pull aggro on a boss/primal and he cleaves and wipes the party when you could have just stopped dpsing and still cleared, you are at fault for not sticking your fingers up your butt. Your tank is to blame for capping your dps, potentially making you hit enrage, so on and so forth. But again, your enmity your responsibility. Your DPS is not more important than party survivability.

That was the tldr, there's much more to this topic than what I just posted (pertaining to party goal priorities, group effort, etc.) but don't want to reiterate info that is already somewhere in an appropriate thread on the topic.