Is anyone else bothered by the lack of incentive for mediocre players to improve?

[Viridiana]

"Not easy" is a impossible barrier for pugs and DF groups, so what is the point of bringing it up and pretending that the people asking for higher are unreasonable. It's not easy to run a marathon but I'm not going to go to McDonald's and ask some random customers to do it.

Don't get me wrong. I don't think the people asking for higher as a precaution are being unreasonable. PF and DF are luck of the draw, and there's way more bad out there than good. But to say that the fight is straight up impossible at the minimum level is something I take issue with.

[Alistaire]

Don't get me wrong. I don't think the people asking for higher as a precaution are being unreasonable. PF and DF are luck of the draw, and there's way more bad out there than good. But to say that the fight is straight up impossible at the minimum level is something I take issue with.

Why? There are DPS checks in a lot of fights: You have to deal a certain # of damage in a certain # of time. If your #s aren't up to par with what's needed, you lose, end of story. Dodging is a seperate issue, but there are still plenty of fights where it's at least partly a numbers game (welcome to RPGs).

[Viridiana]

Why? There are DPS checks in a lot of fights: You have to deal a certain # of damage in a certain # of time. If your #s aren't up to par with what's needed, you lose, end of story. Dodging is a seperate issue, but there are still plenty of fights where it's at least partly a numbers game (welcome to RPGs).

Everything you just said is true. What you're not accounting for, though, is that most of the time people aren't playing anywhere near optimally and on top of that are using strategies that assume higher-than-minimum levels of gear (in some cases much higher).

I'm not saying that people can go in with the minimum requirements and use the current strategies to win. It's probably not doable. I don't think I'm alone in saying that an ilvl 65 tank is going to have a hard time surviving 2xWW, especially with ilvl 65 heals. But, then, we know there are strategies that split the wheels apart so no one eats 2 of them. We know there are strategies where a DD tanks one mob, etc. Without seeing some people try, I'm not going to just assume that the devs picked a number out of a hat. Especially not when I know how much people over-estimate required gear.

As far as dps checks, a lot of people can't dps their way out of a wet paper bag. And yes, for those people, gear can help pull them through content they couldn't otherwise clear. But when the game flat out tells you "This is the minimum ilvl you can have to attempt this content," I assume that it's not trolling us and that the content is indeed beatable at that ilvl, even if it's not easy.