Now, if you’re saying that you’re upset because you have to farm up a DPS pvp set in order to play DPS in PvP, then I have little sympathy for you.

If you cluster up, you’ll get butchered, but the enrage timer should only be an issue if someone’s derping on the interrupts.

You are right that an extra 8k DPS from the tank is great – on top of him/her already successfully completing their primary task – but the margins are way different. I’m not talking about a rogue that never uses Slice N’ Dice, but a rogue that spaces out for 10 seconds or whatever and lets it fall off. Or doesn’t pop a cooldown until 10 seconds into a Heroism. That same poor performance can be compensated by, say, the tank. It doesn’t work the other way around; ending a fight sooner with good DPS helps the healers, not the tanks.

And as far as tank dps goes, I don’t disagree, but tank classes in WoW are not balanced around their dps. So what does it mean if one tank class can do several thousand more dps than another? Is the raid stupid for bringing the class that will make things harder? (As a warrior tank, this came up a lot for me, my raid never minded but I felt bad.) It’s also very demoralising when class balance is off on some secondary but important aspect, because however hard you work, you know that rerolling the other class would be more effective.

As an example, and I go back to WoW for this, because we can actually see our output there, I, as a protection paladin, do over 20k DPS on Ultraxion, I’m not decked out in Heroic gear, as I’ve been extremely unlucky with loot (Still using the Nefarian normal shield after over 70 kills of bosses that drop better shields. I’m not bitter about that. At all.) However, I’ll run DS in pug groups on my alts, and I see tank who are better geared than I am doing 8-12k DPS. Particularly in ten man raids, where tanks are a larger portion of the raid’s damage, the amount of damage being left on the table by tanks who are simply being lazy in their button pushing is a significant amount. What would you say to a hunter or rogue who was knowingly leaving 10k DPS on the table simply because they don’t want to tighten up their rotation?

Healers also benefited from raid gear in PvP, of course, but after healing a few times myself and experiencing the helpless panic of going OOM (and taking it as a personal failure regardless of whether people were taking unnecessary damage), I cut them some slack.

DPS though? Give me a break. As Simon Jones said, tanking is binary: you either hit your defensive cooldown during the uber attack, or you wipe. Letting Slice N’ Dice fall off for a few seconds? (Usually) Doesn’t matter; even when it does matter, someone else can cover for you.

In one-tank fights I always offered to let the OT take over so I could switch to Ret and relax while actually seeing gains for improvement in skill.