Board Thread:Online Discussion/@comment-1600847-20140220175959/@comment-16047389-20140220191645

Zippertrain85 wrote: Draevan13 wrote: Zippertrain85 wrote: He's not completely a tank. So DPS :P I don't know, what is a "role" anyway? A role is mostly the position that you play during a group based battle. This usually simplifies down to:


 * Tank - The tougher more durable player that draws attention away from the other two roles to increase overall group survivability


 * DPS - The main damage dealers of the group who are responsible for killing enemies as quickly as possible


 * Healers - The players who keep the tanks and DPS alive as long as possible so they can fufill their roles.

The most important of the roles is the DPS, since the main goal of a battle is to kill the enemy before they kill you. But since they are usually less armored or have less self-sustaining abilities, they are usually completely dependant upon the tank and healer to ensure their survival.

The idea of games like ESO is to make the individual player more flexible in their capabilities to allow them to fulfill multiple roles without needing to specialize in one particular skill set (such as World of Warcraft that has 4 classes that can only fulfill DPS roles and nothing else).