Yes, it's funny how quickly the bitching goes from "this game is a total rip-off of WoW!" to "this game isn't enough like WoW!" hehe
HEHEHE OH SHIT YOU'RE SO WITTY! Fucking pointless wow trolling, the GAME is the same as wow, the out of game tools available to players are not, and it's not a GOOD thing that it doesn't have the ability to actually figure anything out. That's like being proud that your car lacks standard features like airbags.
People somehow handled high end raiding in Everquest without recount, DBM, healbot, and raid performance graphs. The best players out there found a way to beat Molten Core, UBRS, and AQ without 2000 mods, elitist jerks, and pages of Excel spreadsheets.
What you are describing would be ok in an ideal world. The fact is, people exploit that information to ridicule other players, force people into playing 1 certain way, create a hostile community between players, and a hostile community between players and developers.
This is something very unique to the MMO genre, and its something that has really turned me off as the years go by. I don't know any other genre of game, that requires such extensive work outside the game, through the use of theorycrafting, 3rd party mods, graphs, and spreadsheets in order to be successful inside the game. I mean, we're not talking about taking a quick glance at gamefaqs to see how to beat the boss or find a cheat code. There are serious math nerds out there who build extensive websites and pour hundreds of man hours into building databases of information, building spreadsheets, and coming up with complex mathematical formulas in order to figure out how to beat these games.
You clearly never raided in Everquest, or early vanilla wow, or anything else, at any sort of level approaching 'high end'.
Everquest had combat logging, it had parsing, just like World of Logs. it couldn't parse in game in real time into a damage meter (actually...if you ran software on a linux box seperately that was packet sniffing, THAT could read it in real time, but I digress) and things were ABSOLUTELY analyzed at that level. The flipside of course is that DPSing in Everquest was not something you had to actively think about. My dps rotation as a monk at 50? Hitting Flying Kick every 10 seconds and making sure I didn't let the mob get out of my autoattack range. Apples to oranges here.
Vanilla wow? Sorry but that's where Theorycrafting was BORN. I played a rogue, prior to release and for a month or two after people all thought Seal Fate was the best spec (this was 30 points in Assassination), shortly after that someone with a little brainpower and some math behind their brain had a revelation! the best spec was 'combat' with 'daggers' and overnight rogues all changed to the best spec. Fights may not have been tightly tuned for a while (Not until some of BWL and then AQ40 first introduced hard berserk timers), but since we were actually, y'know, good at wow, we cared about how we performed. Molten Core was a snorefest, except for all of us with our DamageMeter addons (back when that's what it was called) and competing for top dps. We knew who sucked. It just didn't matter. If you didn't care and your guild didn't care, grats to you, but you're still being carried.
The lack of information about who is carrying who doesn't mean it's not happening, that kind of argument is the most head-in-the-sand bullshit I've ever heard. The only kind of game that can POSSIBLY exist that simply lets you hit whatever buttons you want to and not be punished for failure, is a game called "Hit any button you want and win!"
This is the equivilent of asking for Mario to reward you for being totally unable to hit the jump button and unwilling to learn. You are not operating the game correctly at a mechanical level, and yet you expect it to somehow not punish you for it. If you think it's dumb that classes and specs are super imbalanced, fine, go tell Bioware, I agree they should be closely balanced, but refusing to do what is best because you don't want to is something that deserves as little success as it cost in effort.
Pulling their weight to what? It's not like doing bare minimum is difficult, bare minimum is all that's required for most heroic shit in WoW these days, yet some of the encounters are as hard and fun as ever.
If the ops are gear checks and not skill checks than the problem is the ops, not the players. When was there ever a 50% dps drop in anything ever? People freak the fuck out over 500-1k dps these days and that culture has to stop before it gets started.
The fucking dumbest fight in BC was Mu'ru, because it's just a DPS race. Boring.
The 'bare minimum' in what regard? Every fight is different. I don't know about you, but I actually fought M'uru, which it doesn't sound like you did, let alone any other DPS check boss. 500-1k dps spread accross your entire group is the equivilent of having an entire extra player in your raid. That's effing huge. If you're nto going to do it, we're going to find someone that will. The fact that YOU burden the group with your unwillingness to do what is best is just flat out selfish in a game that is about playing with others, and you can't blame them for not wanting to play with you when you pull that shit.
I think you've helped me understand this viewpoint, the "WAHH NO COMBAT LOGS, NO WAY TO SEE WHO DOES WELL OR DOES POORLY" crowd is basically the MMO divide that showcases people who still think the world revolves around them and caters to them. Single player games can do that all they want, but in a Multiplayer game you can't force people to want to play with you when you're not doing anything beneficial for them.