Never posted before, but some things need to be said....

I am a DPS that is all I have ever played! I have to say I am sorry but I disagree, I as a DPS have always shown proper respect to the other roles. If they do their jobs the raid goes well, if not the raid fails, dps are a dime a dozen and can be swapped out on a whim but having to find another troll, healer or tank can kill a run. Now it seams to me that you like playing your troll but don't like the preset role that trolls have in raids/alerts, seriously if you are a troll and don't like feeding power choose another role, if you are a healer and don't like healing choose another role, and if you are a tank and don't like holding aggro choose another role! It is just like the post comparing it to a football game, and it sounds like you are a blocker complaining that you want to score more touchdowns.......THAT IS NOT YOUR JOB! If you want to score more touchdowns then you need to play offense not defense........ie: each role has a job, and it seams you do not like your job, but somehow love your role......yeah sounds stupid that's because it is. It is like a DPS saying I don't want to do more damage but give power or heal the raid and or hold the bosses aggro, but I want to do all this in DPS role. What you are asking for is for there to be no roles anymore and for everyone to be able to do everything, my advice to you, just keep playing solo!

Congratulations. You missed the entire fracking point.

I tend to get "wordy " at times, so to explain a bit of "what is clarifying in my head right now, In any scenario it is obvious what DPS's role and action is going to be (*ZAAAP*), but outside of providing a cheering section and being utilities for the DPS - what exactly is the "Tankie, Controlly, Healy" thing we have to do that anyone can measure? If we fail in the observed role the effect is obvious (*wipe*, MOAH POWAH, ****..I am dead), but what "else" can we do that is "meaningful", necessary, that only Heroes of our caliber and construction can possibly accomplish. "This is a job for....Superman!" anyone?

I love the tank love!

Just perfect. I don't know also what can be done for solving a problem like this.

Collector, you have missed the point. But i will explain. The mis-perception that "my role" in raids/groups/raids is simply to stand out of the way and spam my "power dump" power is way off base...or it should be. Yes, Controllers are "green bar healers" but that is at best half the character (or should be). Healers are "blue bar healers", but again that should only account for half their capacity and function. Tanks are high defense "designated targets" that draw targets into clusters, localize them and keep them from eating the rest of our squishy butts...but is holding block for 20 minutes off and on all the time any fun? Truth is, as I stated at the beginning, I run trolls..all of them, and I love playing them for their versatility in any given situation. That is also why I really like my Earth tank and my Celestial and Sorcery healers, versatility and array of useful powers to get really creative with....not 1 or 2 powers/abilities to re-drudge over and over and over...while the Green Lantern (example FOtM DPS - not a stab) dude gets to toss all these cool pretty thingies and combo stuff and run about, and yell at me when I don't behave myself. I pay to play this game..not watch it.

As a fire DPS I need the mobs and bosses to ignore me so I can do my fiery magic! Tanks do that. Luvs me sum tanks!

Lol I like it. And my main role is dps lol.

Einsam Wilk - My thinking is the only way out of this hole, is the same way we go into it. Content. It starts at the Dev level, with what they present, how they present it. Defining "victory conditions" beyond kill the monster, get the treasure, move on down the road. I don't think any player or role is "the evil empire" as some would sound in these threads, I think the dynamics we see in our player base as players and our game as a whole to be directly related to those points. Adding in things like "1-shot kills", invulnerable targets (and I mean more than just to damage), uber - unkillables, does NOT increase difficulty, it increases frustration; which breeds discontentment, which leads to the "blame game". The designers designed the roles to do the jobs they do, just questionably or completely. If they spent as much time on balancing out things like "stuns, encases, debuffs, buffs" as they have spent and will spend on dmg powers and weapon maneuvers, all of this conversation would be moot. I am trouble now, which inspired me to speak finally by the trend I see coming from that end of the game. They tossed in a few 8 man raids, folks beat them out of hand due to the players being better with their characters than anyone thought, so they "patched in" "increased difficulty band aids (rage timer, permanent immunity to power types, defense ignorers, armor piecers, etc), artificial responses to say the least and they have left a huge scar on the player/character base. Frustration does not promote fun, it promotes hostility, defensiveness, impatience and desperation. Extreme circumstances require extreme responses. Players don't play a game to lose and they WILL figure out a way to beat it, by hook or by crook. (More often by crooks when they feel the game environment is unjust, imbalanced or unfair).

I think if we can get that changed, it will have a wide spread impact that will likely resolve many of the other in-game issues. Especially between roles.

Sadly, a lot of people don't think the same way. I have never had the issue where players complain that I'm a tank. But then again, when I pug or whatever, I put the group together or a leaguemate does.

It's certainly an issue that the DPS role is starting to take over. I've been running with more and more 4 DPS raid groups. It's not fun to raid if my sole expected function is to try to keep damagers powered. Fortunately my leaguemates understand how power works and don't complain when they run out but it still doesn't feel good to see 8 empty powerbars for 90 percent of a raid.

Fixed


And yes I agree with you when it comes to pugs, you occasionally get a good one but it can be rare.
Which is largely why I will only do league runs. Id rather attempt to 5 man DOX with league buddies then 8 man it with a pack of idiots.

The only time I will respond to a pug in shout is when they get so desperate for a healer or tank that they start offering EXO's or Cash to whoever is willing to Tank / Heal them. I n which case I will always reply "keep whatever your offering i'll help you out", and I'm afraid my attitude has largely come from being on way to many PUG's that seem to suffer from a general social psychosis.

OP if you have been playing solo content from the start, and just want to be left alone, what is your your complaint with group composition changing ?

The overpowered stats from t5 opens up some interesting options for teams. I actually think more content is getting beat because you can do alternate lineups.
You have a lot more freedom and you don't need to wait for the classic setup to beat either alerts or raids.

That said I haven't been in a single raid where someone was insisting on pushing out the tank or insisted on a solo healer.
I always ask the group if I want to do an alternate lineup and I always ask the healer if he is okay with a solo run.

Cr exclusion is still going strong though.

It isn't that or whether I "want" to run only solo and left alone, Mary Bliss, but that I don't feel the need to expose myself to the rancor and negative stuff I get when I do/have. Apparently I am not alone in this feeling, even if the posts here are a small sampling of a closed player base. It is however, that I see all these situations as avoidable, addressable and fixable on some levels (without turning the game upside down) by making content, whether reworked old or only new (from here forward) more enticing in ways that aren't directly tied to dmg/out, power in/out, etc. These measurements are obvious and "easy" to figure out...simple if you will from a "game design" standpoint, but not very descriptive of all the dynamic that occurs in general in any "group combat activity". For instance,points were made earlier using a Football analogy, so I will continue that. When a team or coach is assessing a players "performance" he looks at many different factors and decides based on an overall picture. If they fired every player who didn't score X mount of points every game, they would run out of players fairly quickly. But they don't. They examine overall performance and ability to "get the job done" on the field. All the dynamics of every players "role" (big tough guy...can't throw for ****, little guy with ribs of tissue...runs like the wind), but all players are playing football..all the time..not just when they are soloing or "not in the group/league". They are playing football, and like all games and every player, there are vast amounts of things that each can do, be, function to varying degrees....beyond spamming one button from the sidelines. I think the best way to describe a (controllers) role in combat if they are spec'd, geared and play "right" is basically team Waterboy. Healers would be Chearleaders and Tanks tackle dummies. But everyone is playing their role...it seems.

Honestly, don't expect anything to change. They made this game for button mashing console players, that is their main target player. DPS is just that, the easiest role to play, just mush your buttons and PEW PEW. They are after as many subscribers as possible, so they design the game to cater to the lowest common denominator of player and design it so your only real choice in the end is to subscribe. If they change things so other roles are not just side kicks to the DPS then you will have a massive backlash from the majority of DPS whining. Yes you are going to get some decent people that play DPS, they will come on here and speak up that you have a point, but they are the minority. They are the players that can easily play the more complex roles, but the majority of DPSers are not able to do this because they only know how to PEW PEW. And we have to deal with this because that is who will bring SOE the most money and that is all they actual care about. The people that put the actual work into making the game might care about quality but their bosses do not.

I put the blame on the Developers mostly...They mistook, "We want hard content" with, "We want bosses with crazy high health and enrage timers!!!!!"

They need to put out content that necessitates having 2 healers and/or 2 tanks and stop with the DPS show...DPS are more needed than Tanks or Healers because they need to fill up more spots...Why Tank or Heal when only 1 is needed for a raid?

You create content that requires you to run multiple of every role, you force players to learn theirs if they want to run content.

Which Greenman, is exactly what i have witnessed occur in other MMO's. If each role is "made to feel special" in some meaningful way, players will rise to become "the best" at it..if for no other reason than simply the challenge or spin (my personal reason for trolling, I like versatility). Al Mandrake has a serious, albeit, sad point. Although I will offer the counter position that, although you may be absolutely dead on on the prevalence and reasons why it is, about DPS, I personally believe that with that also comes a younger audience. Younger means less $$ available, unless Mom sleeps with her purse out. DPS is the role that everyone starts off with (sort of a mistake from the jump IMO), and since people are screaming through beginner levels to 30 then cranking through the tiers, little time is/can be spent to learn the other more advanced roles, and "why change?". Cutting corners and "fast advancement" is a common theme in all games. Finding that sweet spot between steady advancement, proper exposure to advancing game mechanics and "fun factor" is horribly difficult to achieve. Sort of like juggling cats...wet cats at that.

Well, I have nothing against DPS. It's not as easy to be a good a dps as you might think, and at the end of the day, they're the ones who actually kill stuff. In a sense, the rest of us are there to back them up. However...

Balance Problems:

The shift in OC was a really bad one. Most groups I see now are running one healer and many run 3 controllers. That's too much of a shift to the direction of dps dominance. I'd like to see thing head back to a 2-healer, 2-controller model, which is far more balanced.

The second problem is the lack of a need for a tank in most content. If you don't need a tank, then stuff isn't hitting hard enough. Just make it hit harder. That's again a balance issue.

Design Problems:

There are a couple of fundamentally bad design decisions that are a part of the problem. First, having an entire class whose primary role is to provide power to the other classes is absurd. The game should be balanced around the power people have, without generating entire classes whose role is producing power. That's just weird.

Second, groups are too small with 8. A raid should have ten. That enables a group to have two tanks and two healers, which are really necessary for putting together many complex fight designs. With a cap of eight and a class that isn't really doing anything but compensating for poor design, groups end up being too simple and the fights do, too.

At any rate, class balance is clearly a problem. However, there are a couple design issues that I'm not sure they have any way of fixing.

Joybird, thanks for the response. The group make ups are sort of out of whack, but if you look at them in their entirety, its not suprising. As I have said, players will adjust to prevailing winds. I think there are some intrinsic design flaws, true, but some of them could be fairly easily fixed/addressed with a little tuning. What we have right now is a player base only motivated basically by the mission being over - the actual reward is the sigh of relief (that its over) that echos thru their exit hall. Speed = DMG = DPS-centric, all others "stay back - I got this". My thinkging is along the lines of applying the "true natures" of each role better. Its fairly simple and we all know the definitions, Tanks - Taunt/Aggro/Def, Troll - Power/Debuff/trap, Healer - Heal, Buff, Defend, those aren't revolutionary concepts. I simply believe they are applied poorly in this game model and its poor implementation has brought on the impacts that prevail both in game content, player morale/attitudes and over-all "fun factor". I was talking to a guy a few weeks back who explained to me how all 3 roles worked, in comparison to DPS, along the lines of "Trolls? Yea they are sort of weak dps's that also give back power to everyone else", "Tanks can't DPS for nothing, but they get all sorts of defense boosts", "Healers heal and stay way in the back cuz their dmg out sucks". So, there we have a perfect example of the problem. It's two fold - First, the concept of all roles being greater than or less than DPS's in effect comparisons, Second - this is the concepts we are passing on to every new player that enters the game as the Prime Directives, which WILL bite us all in the *** at some point. For instance, assume that miraculously SOE decided to implement some of the concepts put forward in this very thread - Oh the hue and cry we would see on the boards and the chat boxes about unfair Nerf's and the like, even though they would be addressing things that probably shouldn't have been allowed to exist in the first place.

Wide receiver may,

Quarterback is the tank