Gear.

Paolo has already written on this subject, but something just happened which incensed me to the point where I had to add to this, from something of an opposite end of the spectrum, but firing at the same point. The point is that "Gear is not everything". But the premise this time, instead of being about skilled people in low gear, is unskilled people in Naxx gear.

I'm going to just say this bluntly, because I feel like it. Stop blaming bad DPS on your gear.

In my Simcrafting, I ran a simulation of a Patchwerk fight, with the gear template being this set. This is a set of gear that I am actively collecting, to prove a point, but for now, I will work off the following information to build a reasonable hypothesis:

Simcraft gave my Blue gear a DPS potential of 4.3k DPS.
On a target dummy, I determined that I work at a 92.5% rate of efficiency with respect to mess ups in rotation, crit variance, and the like. So, on Patchwerk, I would be able to pull 4k DPS in my blue gear.

Let me say that again: A skilled Shadow Priest can pull 4k DPS in heroic blues, given full raid buffs and less than 500ms of latency.

This is also a continuation of The Greedy Goblin's foray into Ulduar10 wearing gear sets rather similar to the one that I have created. In another post, though I believe it is on the same blog, Gevlon states that high-level gear only accounts for around a 40% DPS increase in current casual content -- i.e., if someone in iLvl 200 epics does 4k DPS, that same person on the same fight with iLvl232 epics will do 5.6k DPS.

Now, when a class is said to have "scaling problems", either positive or negative, this is because their gear is either contributing too much or too little a proportion to this DPS gain (I.e., it's either above or below 40%) -- and I know that you can throw a tonne of examples at me about why the 40% figure is arbitrary, such as melee classes scaling better with their weapons than any other part of their gear, or X class pulling 200% of the DPS in Ilvl245 gear that they pulled in iLvl200 gear, but my point still remains solid through all the minutiae: Player skill is far more important than gear.

I won't rant for long about the incident itself, but, to summarise: Someone in VoA25 pulled 3k DPS and apologised for it. In their apologetic sentence, they said they "Needed better gear". They were in iLvl200-213 epics. I called them out on it. They then fell back on "This is my offspec."

You know what? It's fine to do badly in your offspec. Make that the core of your apology for why you only pull 3k DPS. Don't blame it on your gear. If you blame it on your gear, it carries with it the implication that you have this false belief that, with a full complement of ToC epics, you will magically transform into an awesome raider.

And don't put me on ignore when I'm about to link you to my shadow priest guide. You want to improve? Listen to me.