FFXIV players are so obsessed with DPS

[Elkanah]

.

The more damage you deal, the faster it dies. 200% of all Videogame that deal in combat

[CVXIV]

i like big crit

even in single player games I enjoy min/maxing because it's fun seeing how strong you can make your characters

Is it required to beat the game? Of course not, though it can help with superbosses in certain games
In the context of 14 though, you need to worry about DPS to an extent when fighting certain bosses in order to not wipe to their enrage.

There's been plenty of moments when I was farming Diamond EX back in Shadowbringers where my party would finally survive flood rays only to not deal enough damage and the fight would have to start all over again

I think it also comes down to the materia situation
iirc you don't really see Tenacity or Piety used much

[Dulcia]

I know this isn't only FFXIV but MMOs as a genre,

But why? I play video games from many other genres that doesn't have this problem and I it is more competitive than any MMO out there.

As someone who comes from PvE and PvP games both I never encounter a game that so obsessed with DPS meter and balance like FFXIV.

Even though I don't believe in balance in FFXIV or other games.

DPS,HPS is the only 2 factors in the game that will make X job a better instead of having a good gameplay and fun experience trying different new things even if it feels troll.

It doesn't make me feel comfortable really, If I quit raiding it is because of this.

Gamers solve problems and puzzles, and in FFXIV the most common problem to solve is the hit points of your enemies and the answer is damage per second, or in otherwords, doing the most damage in the least amount of time.

[Hypnotic13371337]

Cause if you don't then you wont clear the fight???

[Colt47]

I mean... I agree with you, but is it really the players who are obsessed, or the game itself is obsessed and forces players to only care about dps?

Basically this. My hot take on the entire thing is that the need to keep producing profits and justify server + development costs forces these games into simplifying themselves too much. If I never played FFXIV before and I came and tried it out right now, I'd probably play it for a bit for the story and then just put the game down never to come back. There's just too many games out there that can do things or give better experiences long term than FFXIV.

[Vyrerus]

Conceptually in any game that involves combat, the faster you can kill your opposition, the easier of a time you have.

In order to make things that aren't raw damage matter more, the opposition has to be capable of extremely bad for business kinds of moves. But they also have to be vulnerable to non-damage oriented techniques that actually prevent the bad for business kinds of moves.

And that wades us into the weeds of, "How much damage do we have to deal and how fast in order to ignore that sort of meta?" Because humans like to simplify things that take effort, you will find even in deeply strategic games that there is the, "zerg" strategy. Which is basically, "How often can I succeed just by throwing enough standard fighters armed to the teeth at it?"

As a history lesson for SE and their prior MMO FFXI, FFXI started out very unbalanced.

In the original Japanese client only game, the level cap was 50, and enemies were so difficult that people would team up to fight monsters several levels below everyone in the party, because it was more time efficient to kill weak monsters for low gains than it was to fight strong monsters for big gains. Easier monsters were also more susceptible to melee hits over magic, requiring less accuracy and physically buffed melees.

And even so, magic was the ultimate form of power in early FFXI for several years, all of the way until the Treasures of Aht Urhgan expansion, really, where for the first time the bosses started to be resistant to not only enfeeblement, but magical damage as well. And the "ideal" EXP mobs could parrot spells back at the party. In addition to the addition of a second buffing job. They course corrected the game towards melee oriented jobs then, because mages had become the de facto always in demand jobs, while melees were sitting with their thumbs up their butts because of a great desire by players to play the jobs that were in the game and were the majority of jobs in the game.

Flash forward to the most recent full expansion, and they added in another buffing job that was magically oriented along with a tank that was oriented towards defending against magic and magical enfeeblement. Both of these jobs reflected a desire and need to rebalance so that magical jobs could come back into prominence along with the acknowledgement that there was no other way to deal with a lot of fights other than to "zerg" them down with fully buffed melees, as players largely had no way to defend a group from multiple unavoidable debuffs and magic.

So the meta now revolves around having a party that always contains all 3 buffing jobs in addition to a tank of appropriate damage protection typing, a healer, and then a really strong melee. Sometimes a second melee over the tank, if the tank oriented jobs are too weak damage wise.

Which is this really twisted spiralling skein of a staircase of a way to land us back in the same boat we were in when the game was new, in that most people want to play melees because most of the jobs are melees, but the actual gameplay demands the buffing jobs.

All a very long winded way to say that people follow whatever the contraints of the meta are, whatever will allow the execution of bosses the fastest, because there are failure states. If the meta revolved around enfeeblement, then those jobs would take priority, but once you satisfied the minimum enfeeblement criteria, damage would be the next most important thing. Cause you can't win without depleting your enemy's life.

[ReynTime]

Because this game's combat is focused exclusively on DPS, and every damn job is just a DPS with flavor. Even Healers.

[Rolder50]

When I said other genres I mean also PVE cooperative games like monster hunter, granblue fantasy and dauntless are PvE cooperative games that succeeded to have other things that as important as DPS.

this problem is in FFXIV and other MMOs which is it is one dimensional view that is DPS and only DPS.

PvE games that I mentioned even in high end content there is much more things that is important more than DPS, even DPS has a different variation of it, crit, weak-points and elemental damage and weapon type.
FFXIV doesn't have these things or at least it is not as important as it seems.

Players who plays FFXIV and players who is playing other PvE games are all humans, it is a design choice that lead us to be in this extreme narrow view.

It isn't all MMOs, just FFXIV (as far as I know, I certainly haven't played every single MMO).

Take WoW for example. There is a boss in the latest tier that summons all kinds of adds that NEED to be crowd controlled and interrupted or else they will destroy the group. Consequently, crowd control is valued much higher then other bosses. FFXIV can't do things like this because of the strict dance design of the fights.