"New Player" notification or not, I always ask... "Does everyone know what to do?" If people speak up, I'll go out of my way to explain. I've seen people with relics who play terribly and people in AF who play very well. I once saw a Garuda where one tank had some AFv2 pieces and their +1 relic, so they insisted they should main tank... But then the group kept wiping because the main tank was doing really silly stuff you're not supposed to do, such as facing the mob toward the party. It ended up turning into the offtank having to take over as maintank, even though his gear wasn't very good. You can't judge an adventurer by their armor. ;P

By the way... on the topic of 'arbitrary' gear checks... In fights like Titan, the vitality boost from DL and damage increase for heart phase is nice... but in runs like AK? I saw some dude shouting the other night that he had full DL and a relic+1... he was asking for an AK group. That is totally unnecessary and makes the place out to be much harder than it actually is. Back when people did speed runs, the tank needed to be decently geared to make it through the 'gauntlet' of mobs, but this was when people were doing AK in an unintended way and it shouldn't have mattered. Meeting the necessary "DPS check" to get past demon wall before you get completely shoved in the purple juice is easy enough in ok gear.