The Lessons Not Learned.

[SannaR]

It wasn't simply "huhuhu NA meta brain" but simple pragmatism to lock out specific jobs. You had a better chance of clearing, especially with the inconsistencies of party finder, if you insisted on near meta comp even if people playing those meta jobs were only average at best. In fact, I'll use myself for the example here. I logged a 47% on Dark Knight when I switched for door boss. This was less than 150 DPS off the top tanked Warrior and Paladin at the time of our respective clears. In other words, a barely average Dark Knight had near the same damage output as the best Warrior and Paladin. And you wonder why PF was locking out jobs? Tank balance was (and still is) awful.

So no, locking out non-meta jobs and insisting on mechanic skips are nothing alike to using a non-optimal but same ilvl equipment piece.

Sure, that's week one clear type of stuff, but what about when a raid tier is old and people are still using the same excuses and reasons to do fights a certain way or to exclude certain jobs? You know when most people have the gear? How many times does the community still insist on using week one comps or strategies even during the last week it's going to be current or the week after a new tier comes out? I know skill can make up far more than gear, but are you seriously going to tell me that people shouldn't adjust?

You are right in that most people won't look at how gear is melded as most raiders won't look at a person's gear. Heck even non raiders won't look at people's gear. It's how and why people used to and occasionally still do albeit normally at lower levels do stuff with wrong gear or would do roulettes wearing crafting and gathering gear in order to spirit bond. I look at people's gear more often then not as I want to see what I'm dealing with. Especially since I tend to get the kind of people who haven't updated their crap in ages or are at a low enough level where a dps can be wearing tank stuff and vice-versa. I know that at least in the past people did lock out those or kick those that had stuff melded wrong. Even then it was a minority of players who would actually take the time to look and see if someone had appropriate melds. That's because most people tend to not care about that as the need to be properly melded just so you can squeeze in a fraction of a % more has over the years not mattered as much as it has in the past. Cause when it did matter a lot more people looked at that more.