I've thought about this quite a bit since Rab opened up and I think part of it is to do with the players participating in it today compared to on it's first day/week/etc.


That first day I wiped once to Hashmal and had a near wipe on Mateus. The run was more or less blind, there was one DRK who had completed it before and the only advice he offered was "pay more attention to mechanics than your dps, these guys don't have enrage timers if you perform the mechanics correctly" which, in retrospect, is great advice. Not that they ever have actual enrage timers but the built-in dps checks are 100% clearable if you just have your group up and doing damage.

That being said the quality of player on day one (on average) was considerably higher than the quality of player today. These people took that much longer to unlock and participate in this content and they're generally further down the casual ladder than those in before it gave you a 340 weapon.

In short I think sometimes we underestimate the gap between the higher casual/midcore area where many of us forum users float and the actual bottom of the barrel. I think in many cases it would be a more reasonable comparison to compare one of us to a world's first progger than to compare someone who is really on the very bottom in terms of skill and knowledge to any remotely active forum poster.

tl;dr - the average is not where we think it is, it's considerably lower and dropping all the time. People play poorly more often than they play well. Hashmal is an easy encounter to separate someone who knows the basics of gameplay from someone who doesn't care to.