No, higher overall dps is better than low consistent dps.
Being alive is also better than being dead.
Unless you are the one unccing adds or taking frogs on a trip around the room 
Eggsactly
An alarming number of people don’t seem capable of grasping this.
1 Like
Settling for one and not striving for both is cope.
Both is what makes you good at your class.
But zero DPS is low and consistent.
1 Like
Then you aren’t doing any content that is high enough.
Five, but that’s five in addition to the logistic costs of death, which are a lot more than that, especially in pugs where “release & run back” is still frequently expected behavior.
(Speaking of which, I’ve never failed to see how ironic this is: in WoW, you are just as a matter of culture expected to release and run back, full stop - to the point that in basically all pug formats that lack a timer, it’s more or less grounds for a kick to fail to do so, at least outside of active boss fights that lock the ability to release - despite the fact that there’s no inherent penalty for being rezzed. Meanwhile, over in FFXIV-land, people usually rez folks at the first opportunity as virtually a reflex, even though there’s a 25%, stacking up to 50% damage debuff for having recently been rezzed that could be avoided if the fellow had only released and ran back like it was WoW 
)
So, a death is five seconds plus the time to release, plus the time to get back to where the party was, which is a heckuva lot longer than five more seconds (especially in today’s modern dungeoneering environment where many seasons feature dungeons where it’s expected to execute delicate mob skips in order to save time, and the hapless player will have to negotiate all of those again - thank goodness Rogues are out of vogue since so often those skips used to rely on shrouds, huh?).
Slow DPS doesn’t really compare, and let’s remember, M+ is also a format where you regress on a failure, so yeah, it’s a bad idea all around to take extra risks unless you’re really pushing the limits and every last drop of output is needed (in which case either being slow or dying is going to scotch the timer anyways).
Which still doesn’t excuse not taking the time to learn one’s class kit, of course (there are, mind you, those proc-heavy specs that are at the mercy of RNG for the most part. Like frost mage where you don’t really wanna mash 1, but sometimes it seems like that’s all you’re given LOL … I suppose there’s not much to be done in those cases but perhaps begrudgingly apply some level of gear elitism after all?).
It should also be noted that final fantasy caps out difficulty wise somewhere around the first three bosses of heroic raids and mythic 0 dungeons on its its highest difficulty.
That isn’t a knock against it but without a pressure to perform you get a more accepting community.