Quote Originally Posted by NYCAcimStudent View Post
Can somebody give me a valid reason as to why FFXIV has only 2 DPS slots per party and not 3 slots like most other MMOs? Having 3 DPS slots for Light Party and 5 DPS slots for Full Party would solve a ton of issues.

Sometimes, being different does not automatically make things better. FFXIV only having 2 DPS slots is a perfect example of this.
Sometimes, the number of DPS slots aren't the major factor.

It all comes down to the ratio of Tank/Healer vs DPS.

For example, back when I played WoW (Pre-Unsub from Azeroth expac) it was normal for DPS to have 30 minute queues for dungeon at a minimum. LFR's could often reach 1 hour minimum queues.

This is 5 man content with 3 DPS slots and 25 man content with 17 DPS slots.

Of course, the worse the DPS to Support ratio is in a game, the better queues will be with larger parties consisting of more DPS slots. So if in the aforementioned WoW scenario if there was only 2 DPS spots in a dungeon, queues would be a lot worse.

That said, a portion of the blame rests on the fact that people would often run premade groups rather than PuG because the average IQ of match-maker groups was in the negative region... No-one wants to Tank for/Heal Billy No-Brain who keeps standing in all the fire and is doing 0 DPS, so they just stopped grouping with him.

As for why XIV is using a 4x/8x system? Who knows. Perhaps they liked the idea of parties being Tank/Healer/mDPS/rDPS with full parties having an 2x each with an extra wildcard DPS that could be either mDPS/rDPS. Perhaps they were just fond of even numbers. Maybe developer got bullied as a kid by someone that lived at house number 5.