what is the need for enrage?

Nope, It's definitely not exclusive to WoW. FFXI has had enrage timers for quite some time. Their reasoning for adding them was different though.

Why should you have to bring DPS? Good point.

While they are at it, come up with a way that I can run an instance without heals or a tank and it will be just gravy!

If they didn't have enrage timers people would just 4 man them.

It's entirely different. Without an enrage timer the ONLY thing that matters is if you have enough healers to keep up with the incoming damage. There is NO burden on dps or tanks whatsoever. You could even bring 0 dps 1 tank and the rest healers and down it with no problems whatsoever if you "put in the time" to do it.

The fact of the matter is in order for the fight to be even slightly challenging and take time to complete, which gives devs time to create more content, they needs things like enrage timers. Otherwise every group that stacked even slightly competent healers would faceroll content the day it came out.

This is part of my point of why Enrage is not a very good mechanic to have. Re-speccing to DPS constantly is a horrible requirement for players who typically don't run in a DPS spec, or do content other than raiding as well. It does get annoying to have to go from a tank build to a DPS build, and back every day.

In addition, what is wrong with a guild that has 3 healers, 4 tanks, and 1 dps being able to do raid content? The only argument that I've seen for Enrage is the absolute end of the spectrum scenario of 15 healers, 1 tank, which is not practical. Even then, it's not a guarantee that the raid wins. The players still have to perform their job at the right time, and move around depending on the event within the raid or group.

So those people finish the raid, and get their loot -- grats to them; it doesn't flood the game with gear or overpowered players or anything. They can't hand that raid gear out to others. Game balance doesn't change. But I guarantee a lot more people will be having fun, able to at least attempt the raid content without knowing they will fail unless they have 75% of their team as DPS classes that have the resources to continually re-spec.

If the game was well designed (an entirely different subject that can be debated, btw), the importance of DPS would be emphasized in its own way. Innately, all players want the fights to end as quickly as possible, because there is less time to have things go wrong. The challenge of a game shouldn't be to put together a team with only DPS classes; the challenge should be to complete the raid, utilizing everything you have available to counter everything they throw at you, WITH THE TEAM YOU HAVE AVAILABLE. Sometimes DPS classes aren't available in your particular pool of available players. For example, if you want to place importance on DPS, have adds spawn throughout the fight, so the raid can either go heavy DPS and obliterate the adds, or go heavy tank and offtank the adds -- or the raid gets overrun. Don't throw in some 2 second feature that guarantees the defeat if you can't find enough of the classes available at any given time.

I'm not saying to copy what other games do, but I'll give you an example of a boss fight that emphasizes DPS, but doesn't require it. The Lord of the Rings Online Wraith King fight (yes, I know you're awesome at the game and can beat that fight blindfolded!). The fight starts with his pet placing poisonous pools around the fighting area at specific time intervals until he reaches a specific health. The faster you DPS it, the less pools you are faced with. The optimal group would consist of 75% DPS classes. However, if you bring all healers, you will end up with a ton of pools, which will make a healers job harder as the team has to avoid more pools. The fight goes on..... My point is that both can lead to victory, but your class composition choices directly affects how well the classes you chose must perform to overcome your decision. If you go the DPS route, and DPS classes don't do their best to maximize DPS, you'll get more pools than your few healers can deal with. If you go the healer/tank route, you'll definitely have more pools to deal with, but healers will have to step up their game to help last longer.

Every boss I've faced in SWTOR is a simple DPS race. That's it. IMO, it's boring, and lazy programming. Throw in challenges that are actually achievable, and more importantly CHALLENGING, by any class composition the raid has.

That's because the devs can't design tough fights without a combat log for people to use as a tool to make themselves better. Tight enrages are one of the only mechanics they have available to them because it's an easy thing to recognize. Did the boss hit enrage? Yea? Ok then dps need to pick it up.

You're contradicting yourself too, you want challenge but you want to remove enrage timers. You say that it's a boring mechanic but can you imagine how boring it would be if every fight was cheesable by stacking healers and just outlasting the boss?

If people were able to utilize combat logs/meters you wouldn't see enrages come into play as often, I can guarantee that.

In your example from LOtR yea thats cool they were able to add a mechanic that could be handled multiple ways but not even the top devs in the industry are going to be able to come up with designs like that constantly and eventually you'll see the same mechanics recycled over and over.

The only way you're ever gonna to be able to bring whatever comp you have avaiable to you is if all classes were hybrids, capable of tanking, healing and dps'ing in any scenario. You could design it so that everyone is in charge of being their own primary healer and dps'ing when they can but then you're getting into homogenizing classes, which wouldn't be any fun, the differences between classes are important.

Enrage timers do 2 things. They are a gear check and a competency check. Do yuo have the gear to be doing this? Does your DPS know thier rotations and not stand in the fire?

If you fail one of those you will wipe.

Enrage timers are a design borrowed from World of Warcraft and implamented into other MMOs that forces a certain activity from DPS in order to defeat a boss.

This was likely implamented because raiders were so fine tuned that they whined about challenges and threatened to leave unless they were satisfied.

Many players, especially the hard core ones cannot see the trade off as the already existing penalty for bringing too many healers and not enough dps

Too many healers/tanks
Pro: Not likely if ever to lose main tank or die
Con: Fights will last a long long time

Balance of healers, dps, tank
Pro: Fights will take a much shorter time
Cons: Possiblity of having a wipe, having to start the fight over.

This is not enough for some. Conformity is the only answer to them.

What is so hard for people on this thread to understand?

You can't have boss fights be automatic kills based on group comp. No matter how long the fights take people will stack healers just to guarantee a kill. There will never be any competition for server/world firsts and clearing an operation will no longer be an accomplishment.

Either way, with enough healer, tanking and DPS, Enrage timer or not, the fights are guaranteed wins, as long as the players perform properly. Enrage timers do not force anything except class composition.