Quote Originally Posted by RuleofThree View Post
snip
When I posted that comment, I really was just checking to see if my deleted posts were a precursor to something else...had not been expecting a large reply, if I could be honest. I don't know about others, but from my experiences, nobody really cares so long as you have some basic competence in stuff like dungeons. From the many players that I have played with, parsing becomes a factor in endgame because what you are doing matters there a lot. With people still pushing towards ilvl400, a single DPS right now can be the difference between clearing and a wipe. For previous SB raids, a good portion of the players that you'll run into doing this content out-gear the fights.

And yes, I'll add some to your ending sentence - while parse tools are nice to see where you are at and how you are doing, I find them useful only when it comes to endgame, because that's where it matters the most, in my opinion. If I didn't raid, I generally would not care about numbers - I'm somewhere around average, maybe slightly less than average, but still competent enough in whatever job I happen to be on at the time.