Some kinda druid guy from my guild who thinks he's all big shot made some blogpost where he was cramping my style. I can't let shit like that fly, can I? With tounge planted firmly in cheek, here's my take on the subject.
First off, I need to do a short presentation of my preconceptions when starting my first character in WoW. I had basically no idea of the game, and almost went with warrior as my first class, since I felt that was "basic". The barbarian, the fighter, those classes from role-playing games were always just "Walk up to enemy. Apply trauma to face. Repeat." whilst the squishier caster classes were a bit more fiddly to learn to play. Cause they're squishy and all. Still, I went with shaman, since I didn't know if I wanted to heal, do DPS or tank. Yeah, they were actually considered offtanks back in the day - the enhancement tree had a shield specialization talent. I actually maintanked some instances in TBC and vanilla.
Anyway. I went with mage as my second alt since I wanted to try a fiddlier class, that needed more "skill". Frost spec meant I never let mobs touch me if I didn't want them to. Which I didn't. Frost requires insane micro in PvP, so I was sorta right about the fiddly part. Raiding and instances? Mash 3 until fingers bled. Not so fun. Then came Icelance, and some other stuff. The mage class got some attention. We did top DPS for a while. We scaled for shit in TBC, but hey, we only ever saw the inside of Tempest Keep and Serpentshrine cavern like, three times. I kept up with people even though I was "lol frost go pvp".
Then came Wrath, and boy, did I read up. "Reading up" even had a name - theorycraft - that made it sound important. And so I theorized. And I crafted. And I learned all the talents and how they interacted. I was gonna top the fucking meters. And why? I don't really need e-peen. I can dig attention, but when I've done something, I don't really like that attention, that awe, that some people give you. When someone whispers me "Nice gear!" in Dalaran, I feel a little bad. The answer lies with my inner gamer. When I buy a new game, it's because I want to be challenged. Wrath raiding content is challenging: we have yet to down Mimiron in ten man, although we are pretty damn close. I wanted to make sure I was on the guild team that got the guild firsts. I wanted to be the obvious choice to bring to a raid. I'm after the same single player experience I get from playing Halo or whatever.
I haven't really tried tanking to any large extent, but I have gotten a good enough taste of healing on a shaman and on a priest to say, that I am truly a DPS player at heart. The actual buttonpresses might be a rotation and not a list of priorities with mages although the Fire playstyle is close. That's not the point. Healing on a shammy is three buttons. DPS:ing on my mage is usually four. When a healer doesn't land that heal and the tank goes down, it's not much to do - you were probably spam healing and the only thing that'd saved the tank was if you'd have more haste. A tank let's a mob slip and it goes haywire in the raid, killing half the DPS team? QQ more, should have watched your threat. Maybe the tank had more important things to think about than to build threat on the mob you just decided to unleash your full arsenal on. Neglective tankers and healers don't really come into play here, cause I'm sort of basing this on people actually trying. There's not much analyzis to do for a tank or a healer when things go wrong. There are genuine mistakes, such as using a global cooldown to top off a DPS when no damage is expected in the near future, and in doing so, missing the window to heal the tank. To avoid the situation, you would have had to been psychic, or let that poor DPS think "isn't I'm not gonna get a heal soon? I might be dying to the next meteor!". I'm not trying to downplay the extremely critical effect a tank or healer mistake can have in causing a raid to wipe. I'm trying to open your eyes to the other perspective.
See, tank and healer performance is always binary. Either you built enough threat, or you didn't. Either the mob resisted your taunt, or it didn't. As a DPS, your performance is always fluctuating. More is always better, up until 129% of tank threat, assuming you are not in melee range. Wiped on that boss, and the boss had 60k health left? My fireballs hit for about 5k on average, that's 12 fireballs. They take about 2.5 seconds to cast, which means, that if I'd been able to squeeze out 30s of more DPS time, the boss had been down. Did I reapply Scorch when I really didn't need to? Did I let the Scorch stack fall off because I was reckless and didn't reapply it before Auriaya feared us? Could I have watched the Screech timer a bit more closely and dared stand still for a few more seconds each minute? Could I have stacked my cooldowns more efficiently? That's the kind of questions you face as a DPS. Those "60k wipe" moments are fairly rare though. That just means you did your job the other fights.
Cause, really, what is our job? Not topping the meters, even though it's fun - it's making sure the boss goes down fast enough, and to not stand in the fire too much, so that the healers and tanks have an easier job. I want to be on top of the meters. But there's always one person that I want to beat, and that is myself. You can see me as a perfectionist, but when I slack on the DPS on Naxxnight, I feel a little bad about it. I still perform decently, and we get the job done, maybe I'm 8th on meters instead of 4th. That doesn't irk me nearly as much as getting 2.6k DPS one night when I had 3.1k the other.
DPS, your job is not to have a e-peen measuring contest each fight. That's not why we are here. It's to make the healers and the tanks go "lol thx 4 throwin' firaballs n all but srsly, we r most imrpotant". I think we can afford to let them have that smug feeling of being the key part to raid success. While healing and tanking may be arts, DPS is science.
And science saves lives.
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