What if DNC is SHOMHOW a DPS?

[Barraind]

There's only so many ways you can do tanking/healing.

I mean, theres only a couple ways to do damage. You can hit something, you can hit something from far away, and you can shoot magic at it.

14 has decided to do make that

Hit things with a sword. Hit things with knives. Hit things with your fist and feet. Hit things with a spear.
Shoot things with a gun. Shoot things with a bow.
Cast elemental magic at things. Cast elemental magic at things and then hit it with a sword. Poison a guy and have a pet go tink to let you cast slightly better magic missles at it. Cast a lot of nonsense things and be level 50.

(If 14 followed other games and let you use different weapons (or let paladins use a goddamned mace already), youd end up with:

hit stuff with a melee weapon and sometimes hit it harder, hit stuff with a melee weapon and jump on it, hit stuff with a melee weapon and sometimes sneak around, hit stuff with a melee weapon or your fists, shoot it with a range weapon and sing, shoot it with a range weapon and a flamethrower)


That you dont think its possible to have MANY healers capable of operating through: Direct Heals, Heal over Time, Shielding, Percentage Mitigation, Field Effects, and Ancillary Buffs (because theres about 30 different ways to make those work BEFORE you get into ways other games make healers work that are mechanically impossible to work in this game [Guild Wars Monks, WAR Shaman, WoW Shaman [Chain Heal is probably on the list of "things we would never see in 14"]) is incredibly short sighted.

Tanks are slightly less easy to work with, and its pretty telling we already see some of the worst parts of tank mechanics in the Gunbreaker trailer, because they decided at this point to give tanks similar amounts of mitigation and not use a mitigation / evasion / HP pool balancing as a core mechanical difference (or something like how other games handle the Warrior / Knights / Evasion Tank paradigms).

Rift's system pretty much invalidates the "but how can you have more healers?" just by existing. Its incredibly easy.

you just have a lot of people who play games that want to see huge flashy numbers and see things die, or who just dont want to have to keep people alive, and they will never seriously play tanks or healers even if you had that much variety. Its been like that in MMO's since MMO's were a thing.

14's classes are also significantly reduced in what they can be capable of due to a lot of the balancing coming around 5-10 minute single-fight 8-man mechanics. You cant actually have a huge amount of depth in what healers and tanks can do in healing and tanking mechanics, because the game doesnt let healers be healers or tanks be tanks.