Leveling/playing DPS is actively punished

[Hysorn]

I agree that the whole situation is overall bad. I leveled a bunch of classes for the job quests and honestly, yeah. Leveling is already super boring for Healers and Tanks, for DPS though? It's straight up dull, completely monotonous, 15 min queue, 20 min dungeon, rinse and repeat, Limsa Lominsa benches will be your best friend because you will be watching videos, shows or lives on your second monitor while you wait for the damn queue to pop.

The thing is though, I don't think there's much to do, even though Tank design feels very oversimplified right now, I think it's the imaginary responsibility assigned to Healer and Tanks that triggers people's anxiety and makes them avoid the roles. DPS is a hell of a lot more laid back, Healers is more about you reacting to situations, Tanks is about awareness, know what to do and when to do, position boss correctly, etc while optimizing rotation, while DPS is more of a "dodge and do mechanics here and there while trying to optimize rotation".

Idk, overall DPS always felt to me, in every MMO I played, a more relaxed role and I know it's the same to many people, considering it's often more popular, and because of said popularity, devs usually make their gameplay much more exciting than the other roles.

[AaronSound]

It would definitely help to make tanks and/or especially healers more fun, but they could also just make dungeons be 1 tank, 1 healer, and 3 dps instead of only 2 - that alone would instantly cut dps queue times drastically.

I think i agree, Dungeons aren't hard nor it's their goal, the balance of it being thrown wack woudn't be that much of an issue, i assume Hp of bosses would change to accomodate so many players, but due to the nature of what the Dungeon is, i think i agree. It would definitely help with DPS queue immensly.

[Silverbane]

DPS will always be more popular, because it imposes less responsibility and underperforming in it is less obvious (unless you parse).

All DPS have to do is dish out damage, hopefully not stand in stupid, and occasionally do a mechanic. And there is always another DPS to blame when a DPS check fails.

Tanks have to do everything the DPS do and manage the mobs.
Healers have to do everything the DPS do and heal people.
Most often there's only one of each, and when either screws up, it's usually obvious.

As a result, there's less stress when playing a DPS, so of course more people gravitate to DPS. This is inherent in the roles, so it isn't going to change.

As compensation, however, it's been my experience that DPS classes clear solo content (e.g., FATEs, solo duties) faster.
Perhaps over time that compensates for the longer queue times, perhaps not.

[Jaquan]

DPS will always be more popular, because it imposes less responsibility and underperforming in it is less obvious (unless you parse).

All DPS have to do is dish out damage, hopefully not stand in stupid, and occasionally do a mechanic. And there is always another DPS to blame when a DPS check fails.

Tanks have to do everything the DPS do and manage the mobs.
Healers have to do everything the DPS do and heal people.
Most often there's only one of each, and when either screws up, it's usually obvious.

As a result, there's less stress when playing a DPS, so of course more people gravitate to DPS. This is inherent in the roles, so it isn't going to change.

As compensation, however, it's been my experience that DPS classes clear solo content (e.g., FATEs, solo duties) faster.
Perhaps over time that compensates for the longer queue times, perhaps not.

Honestly this. There's also the fact that DPS simply fit the Hero Fantasy much more. They're the ones that stay in the spotlight slaying dragons and saving those in need while the rest just supports them.

[Hysorn]

Honestly this. There's also the fact that DPS simply fit the Hero Fantasy much more. They're the ones that stay in the spotlight slaying dragons and saving those in need while the rest just supports them.

Funny you should say that, for me it's always the tank that feels like the hero, you got the enemy's attention, you are the one attacking it's face instead of it's butt, you are the one protecting your group, everyone else is just there to help you out.

[cjbeagle]

As compensation, however, it's been my experience that DPS classes clear solo content (e.g., FATEs, solo duties) faster.

Solo duties only apply to the player's first job though - for alt jobs those aren't part of the picture at all.

In my experience, for FATEs, DPS clear bosses faster (obviously), but tanks clear mob/collection quests faster since they can safely pull the entire FATE and just AOE them all down.

[Yeastyloins]

DPS will always be more popular, because it imposes less responsibility and underperforming in it is less obvious (unless you parse).

All DPS have to do is dish out damage, hopefully not stand in stupid, and occasionally do a mechanic. And there is always another DPS to blame when a DPS check fails.

Tanks have to do everything the DPS do and manage the mobs.
Healers have to do everything the DPS do and heal people.
Most often there's only one of each, and when either screws up, it's usually obvious.

As a result, there's less stress when playing a DPS, so of course more people gravitate to DPS. This is inherent in the roles, so it isn't going to change.

As compensation, however, it's been my experience that DPS classes clear solo content (e.g., FATEs, solo duties) faster.
Perhaps over time that compensates for the longer queue times, perhaps not.

This. This is especially compounded by the fact that you can actively hit maybe like a 1/10th of your buttons and you will still clear the dungeon as a DPS since there is no in-game means to tell if a DPS is doing their job other than the wildly inaccurate metric of "the boss is taking longer to die". The only way you can really tell is having to use a 3rd party addon which shows something is wrong with the game design in my opinion. DPS is a role you can sandbag and clear content and progress the MSQ, whereas healers and tanks don't have that luxury. It's even worse for healers given that healing isn't that strenuous unless you have a tank pulling 4 packs and popping no mit.

[Ransu]

potd and hoh are both faster than dungeon running when it comes to exp per hour. Bozja is just about equal to 81-89 dungeons. Queue times for 81-89 dungeons are still relatively fast in my experience though.

[Genisay]

Of course, if you want to skip queue times altogether, there is always completing story content with the Trust and Support systems that have been out since earlier this year.
The play-through of the dungeons does get a bit longer if you are not running as a tank, though you can still force your NPCs to pick up larger pulls if you want to do the pull and run back strategy. But it sure cuts down on the time you will have to wait for getting in.
I enjoy playing content with live players, so I will often still do the regular queues, but if I am in a time crunch, I'll go with Support Duty.

I have played a DPS most of my five years in the game, not because I do not enjoy playing my tank, but simply because I just have so much fun playing as Bard. Not for the lack of responsibility, I just find the fast-paced action and rotation it brings to be super satisfying after picking it up several years ago and keeping it as my main.
I tend to try and make myself useful even as a DPS, being on top of trash clean-up, wrangling any mobs that get off the tank somehow and drawing them back, and taking care of mechanics that require interactions that are not specific to the tank.
Granted, I came from WoW and I was used to DPS also having responsibilities, like taking off-turn interrupting duty and being on the lookout for mechanics and certain types of adds.

But I think what a lot of people, like myself originally, who came from WoW at least, don't realize is that overall, the people who play FFXIV are far more friendly and willing to help them than the vast majority of WoW players were and that tanking and healing in 14 still need people to pay attention and manage things, they are not nearly as daunting or difficult as they were in WoW. I played tank in WoW for several years. I only enjoyed doing it when I got in with the good guild that picked me up because people were just so harsh and toxic. There were few opportunities to truly get good at it because pugs would drop new tanks in under a minute.
I love tanking as a Dark Knight in this game and since I have actually been trying to be a good tank, people tend to be very understanding if I make a mistake or don't do it perfectly my first several runs, especially as I know the content, I just don't know it from that perspective as well.

There might be more tanks and healers out there if people were not so worried that they were going to get chewed up for making mistakes. The only real thing for that is to talk to people and encourage them to try. Give them the confidence they can do it.

Overall though, I did not feel that it took me huge amounts of time to get into dungeons as a DPS, but then again, came from WoW, where DPS had half-hour to nearly an hour queue times if not in premade, so I might be a bad judge. XD Queue times seem downright fast to me here.

Some of it can also come down to the content itself though, especially if there are not many players doing it at that time. For some older content, even as a tank I have waited 10-15 minutes in the queue outside of the mog tome season.

[AluneTempest]

I just do fates/leveling between queues when im leveling DPS, is a good extra exp and save me some runs of the same dungeon.

DPS queues are high with a reason, because everyone like to play DPS, you have less responsibility about something wrong happen in dungeons/no high end content and DPS are the most jobs in the game.