There are a few things that got me thinking about this topic, so bear with me as I go through my reasoning as to why focusing on dps so much is actually bad for the game:
1) Healers have been complaining for a while that they do not feel needed, and indeed running with a group composition of 1 tank/3 DDs is the preferred way by many players for a lot of the 4-human content. The reason is two–fold: for earlier content, healers are not needed, because the combination of dps having increased and red CP being very powerful, means players can get through fights with not much healing required; for recent content, most of the attacks that are actually dangerous are a one-shot, so again healers cannot help. This brings me to the second point:
2) Newer fights involve basically just a lot of damage thrown onto players, perhaps as way to make healers feel needed again. This was very obvious to me in the case of CR as well as BRP (in which the 4th stage is simply a repeat of all previous mechanics, a very lazy design, imo). The only example I found of recent content with smart and fun mechanics would be Frostvault —and even the much awaited full trial, Sunspire, is mostly a case of stack-and-burn, again with lots of damage thrown at players, and nowhere near the cleverness of the mechanics seen at MOL, for instance. It’s a full trial that feels as tedious as mini trials.
3) The fact that mechanics involve one-shots or mitigating great damage, means the more dps, the shorter the fight, and the less chances of wiping. Of course that’s true of all content, and dps has always been important; having high damage is a safeguard against sloppy execution of mechanics, but I think that lately there is an excessive reliance on it, with content and group participation being locked behind parsing thresholds, and so on. Usually, a good DD is also a good overall player, but I’ve been seeing more and more cases were groups are composed of people pulling great numbers, but wiping to mechanics. I was in a group for vMOL HM pre-Elswyer, all composed of very decent DDs, that was close, though not quite, to a pad 5 burn, but insisted on trying wipe after wipe. Finally, the lead decided on a pad 7 burn, yet we failed again. Someone joked we should try when necros are levelled so we have the safety net of the rez ulti. And that moment it got me thinking: we are all decent players, but we are wiping because we don’t know how to do execute these mechanics consistently, and we’d rather wait get to get a rez ulti feature than go through the mechanics; groups were able to beat vMOL HM years ago when 25k dps was the ceiling and CP were much lower, so can it be that focusing on dps so much has made people lazy about mechanics, thinking: ‘yes, we can burn it before it kills us’, rather than go and do the mechanic. The thing is if we learn the mechanic, we can beat the fight every time, without having to rely on a burn, and isn't that more logical?
4) Support roles catering increasingly to dps: the new Yolo tanking set involves a direct boost to damage (putting healers in the awkward position of having to wear Torug’s) is yet another way of the game honing in on damage, and Alkosh has been a meta set for a long time now. But support roles have other tasks as well; debuffing the boss, buffing and warding allies, providing resources, but in most groups the only thing discussed are the DD cmx parses (so things like minor beserk –which only now has become a point of discussion again- crushing and weakening uptimes not really discussed, and they have taken a blow since the enchant nerfs).
So I’m wondering: has this pre-occupation with dps and with maximizing damage made us overlook other means by which a group performance can be optimized, and indeed made us lazy where learning and doing mechanics is concerned, resulting in every fight being regarded only as ideal if there is just stack-and-burn involved? Does anyone else feel this will make the game boring? I'm interested to see what other people think, thanks for reading my musings.
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