Tanking is about situational awareness and knowing when to use cooldowns.
Healing is about... I don't know, except that healers are clearly Gods of Patience, because damn, I cannot figure it out. Too stressful.
DPS is about numbers.
Clearly DPS has the lowest responsibility in low-end content in which enrage timers are soft and you're likely to be overgeared. Their gear can carry them. DPS can be complete noobs. Is this bad?
I think it's fair to say that the majority of players are somewhat lazy and uncaring. That's not a flaw of them as people, just a reflection that WoW is a game and to many people games are about a sort of mindless fun and socializing.
That leaves a minority of individuals for whom WoW is srs bns. They can be the very high end DPS who are pushing enrage timers and don't have time to overgear and in general are pushing the very edge of game possibility.
And there are those who desire responsibility. They can make tanks or healers. In a raid the ratios probably work out well, with an extreme minority of tanks, slightly more healers, and a lot of lazy DPS.
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If there was a way to make their low responsibility have 0 effect on the group, sure. However bad dps players are the ones who have their pets growl mobs away from the tank, or aggro a group we didn't want yet, or misdirect the wrong target, or death grip a caster away from the tank, or... you get the picture. Because as long as they are playing with 4 other people they need a modicum of ability.
Healing isn't that stressful, you can slack and get away with it because nobody ever looks at the healing meter.
They only time it's stressful is on progression content where you actually have to focus to keep people alive until they eventually learn that fire = bad. Or if the other healers are also as lazy as you are and you have to pick up the slack to prevent a wipe.
My feeling is that DPS, as a rule, is treated like shit, so I'm fine with reduced responsibility.
Where I can see it being a problem is in more serious guilds where everyone needs their "A" game, and having the DPS with reduced responsibility could be an issue.
But in gen-pop and PuGs? If I am "easily replaceable", and "don't matter", then I'd better be cock-a-block busy.
Either that, or go the other way and make DPS more visibly needed, so that we can stop taking all the bullshit from tanks & healers.
BTW, didn't you just use DPS as a noun? :P
*sigh*
"Better NOT" be cock-a-block busy.
I suck at life. :-/
@Analogue: You raise a good point: Power without responsibility is bad, so DPS would have to be stripped of utility, as they are already witht he nerfing of defensive dispels and spriest disease removal.
@Gittarius: If you are fortunate enough to not be rated purely by a healing meter, that is a sign of a good raid. Healing is enough or not enough, so there is no ability for healers overall to slack.
@SlikRX: The role isn't too hard and they're easy to find, so people can get away with abusing them, mostly. Reducing their responsibility might make this worse since the "good DPS" threashhold would be even lower. More enrage timers or add fights with a lot of burst DPS would make DPS more noticable. But do we really want that?
Maybe I did. Stupid and lazy, isn't it?
I don't think a responsibility shift is the issue here; I think it has more to do with blame. The cynic in me points out that the ultimate effect of an enrage timer isn't clarifying responsibility, it's clarifying blame (in the large majority of cases). So the shift to healers' mana bars being the determining factor simply clouds the blame issue, while who is responsible for the death of the boss ultimately remains the same.
Is it any wonder that, in general, dps don't like hard enrage timers and healers don't like fights without them?
@Vixsin: Blame, the purest form of PvP!
I said something about Tanks and Healers deserving bigger rewards a few months ago and got slaughtered by everyone on the Internet :D
Do you raid 25 or 10? Because my first thought reading this was "yes, this is absolutely true for 5-man lolheroics, but when we step into ICC the DPS have a ton of responsibility." Last night was Saurfang- if the ranged DPS screw up kiting and killing the blood beasts, we wipe. Then Fester- if the DPS don't listen to the guy in back calling out people who need to take a spore somewhere else, we wipe. Rotface- if they screw up slime sprays and kiting the little oozes to the ooze kiter, we wipe. Then Blood Princes- also known as 500 exciting ways for the DPS to wipe the raid.
The extent of my responsibility in most of these fights is knowing when to taunt off my co-tank and when to hold off on the AOE moves, which is loleasy as long as I'm geared to take the abuse. It may be more possible for them to slack on producing numbers, but if they slack on anything else we get nowhere. There's a reason I vastly prefer inviting lower DPS who can do things besides fellate the meters over high DPS who can only do that.
@weflyspitfires: perhaps since tanks and healers are intelligent, motivated individuals, they need fewer rewards. In contrast the shiftless and greedy dps need their candy.
@labrat: I've done 25 and I hate being dps. Too little to do outside of hardmodes, which I've not done. I'd rather tank, but the tank ratio for 25s is terrible. Keep in mind I'm suggesting that dps do less, not just claiming they do nothing.
Labrat, most the responsibility you're talking about there for dps applies to healers too. they're just mechanics everyone has to pay attention to. Most of the dps specific responsibility is beating the enrage timers.
Don't get me wrong, I prefer a challenge. Standing behind Saurfang pressing 3 buttons for the first 80% of a fight is boring, and getting a 4th button for the last 20% doesn't help much.
Fortunately that type of thing is rare.
I guess I was putting my sights on the toejam that loves to talk down to DPS as some worthless afterthought, hardly worthy of reseect or loot.
Solid DPS is a requirement of most newer content, and getting treated like we're a bunch of drooling retards by some gets tiresome.
If I *am* gonna get treated that way regardless of the skill my job takes, then make my job easy enough that I can ignore the flack and play World of Goo or something, while facreolling.
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