Quote Originally Posted by MerlinCross View Post
And thus do the ffloggers, elites, and number crunchers would find another way to hold sway over the average players. Don't have this talent set up? You are bad and shouldn't be playing this game. Everyone should follow this set up because it is the meta. Anything that isn't meta get out of the party and go respec.

Yeah this is why adding Talents is a bad idea. There's no choice, there's either; do it 'right' or mess up.
The "elitists" you're talking about are also aware of how much impact different factors have and how long they take to correct. Your jumping off cliffs, wearing last expansions' gear, and breaking your own combos will come well before any discussion of talents.

And it's not the actual number crunchers who tend to enforce meta comps, probably because they look less at the classes and more at... the number. They don't need to oversimplify situations in the absence of numeric values; they have the values, and often enjoy the testing and experimentation that surrounds those numbers as produced by new ideas.
Number crunchers were the first to add BLM back in alongside SMN and make use of all-physical Monk parties despite the NIN/DRG/MCH/BRD meta, because when one actually paid attention to what they're doing the numbers were just as high (and eventually just barely eclipsed double-Ranged).

Who did insist on meta comps? (1) People who couldn't clear without every advantage of ease of damage, (2) people who obsessed over their pDPS numbers but had no idea what tDPS was, and (3) farm parties for whom conventional setups could at least also suggest conventional knowledge, a sort of tangential proof for you knowing what you're doing.
None of those communities were the direct result of actual number crunching.