I lived for DPS in WoW and I was great at it; enhance shaman felt like an extension of my body and my numbers in Mists and WoD showed it. But here? I'm having too much fun to care about DPS - this game has enough interesting content that I don't care about watching numbers go up incrementally week over week.

I don't sweat the mistakes because they don't matter: we still clear. I'd rather pride myself on my use of utility than squeezing a few more damage out anyway, it feels more impactful.

The retired raider in me is still curious though; I've looked up my character to see if I was in anyone's parses. Considering I don't eat food, was missing a lot of materia until recently, and am sitting on like 1500 unspent tomes, I expected to be gray, but I was like green/blue and I'm okay with that (especially considering I don't even know what the standard is). Combat and gear optimization isn't a priority for me anymore and it feels great.

All that said, I can definitely still relate to the sense of accomplishment that can come from topping meters, and I don't see anything wrong with players enjoying that as long as they're measuring themselves against the peers in their statics instead of trying to set and enforce their expectations on strangers in roulette.

Logs are a tool for self-improvement, not a standard to measure worth.