We are not DPS

Alright, here comes a serious rant. It started when Gevlon was posting about a new business strategy of tanks charging for LFG. I don't think that's a bad idea at all - I would pay to get in a dungeon faster on my mage. My problem is that he assumes that more than half of all DPS, nay half of all players are fail DPS.

Screw that. Don't link those failures to us. Those people are bad, regardless of what they do. If you had no information on the game whatsoever and all your skills said "do x damage," you would assume your job is to do damage.

Analogy Time: You give a completely unskilled person a pot and some ingredients. Naturally, they interpret that thinking they want me to cook, even though they could also clean the pans or eat the food. Those are things that come along with cooking, but aren't obvious based on what they're given. The unskilled person makes some horrible food, and now the whole world is saying that more than half of the cooks are terrible. Sounds ridiculous, right?

-Begin Rant-

I am tired of the damage specs being treated like second class citizens. Everyone thinks their role is special and they're a special snowflake. Doing damage well is not easy. People use comments like "lol, faceroll DPS" to belittle what we do. That's because we hang it all out to be judged. Think of us like politicians - every little thing we do is monitored and any mistake we make affects our dps. Everyone that posts a horror story about a DK doing 800 dps means they were looking at our DPS. I wasn't looking at your threat, I wasn't looking at your effective healing.

Tanks and healers are black and white. You can often tell how they're doing based off of success of the fight. Did anyone die? Tanks and healers did their jobs. Even when a healer is found underperforming, if others could cover for them leaders often choose to overlook it. It might hurt their feelings and then they'll have one less healer. This is special treatment.

Trust me, I respect good players of all specs and roles. But we, the damage roles, are ridiculed for being vain, selfish players. Even the name for our role, DPS, means Damage-Per-Second. That's because it's what you want us to be. We spam recount because we crave people to say "I appreciate what you do." We don't receive praise based on our placement in the meters - only punishment for being in the bottom. That's what we like to call negative reinforcement. So while the other classes are getting positive reinforcement or at least given the ability to slide by if successful, we are pitted against each other to stay away from the bottom of the meters.

Our role can always improve and we can always make things easier for everyone by doing more damage. Good damage roles will keep on the top of their game, no matter what. I keep hearing people say "A good tank and a good healer can carry trash DPS." First, that's true in heroics. But heroics are a joke. If you are creating a worldview based off heroics, you are doing it wrong. Strong DPS can carry undergeared healers and tanks with less survivability. We can make it easier for everyone. Can tanks and healers reduce the length of a fight? Unless they're throwing smites, I don't think so. This is why we theorycraft to get every last ounce of damage we can out of what we have.

I'm not saying this role is better than the other roles, that's ridiculous. I'm saying we're different. Our job is more intuitive, but doing it well is not. We are judged by harsh standards and even then we are normally not praised for our work and improvement. I have only once received a real attaboy when playing my mage, when I've been praised for my tanking many times. The last thing I need is someone telling me that playing my damage role makes me less skilled, less important, and that most of the people in my role are incompetent.

We're not a dime-a-dozen.
We're not failures.
We're not easier to play or any less important.
We're not even DPS.

We are the fucking OFFENSE, and you will address us as such.