Character effectiveness in WoW: what's the player skill: gear ratio?

Came into say the same thing as http://ask.metafilter.com/253908/Character-effectiveness-in-WoW-whats-the-player-skill-gear-ratio#3688874: the most important skill is not dying. When you get to endgame, all of the raids will have some sort of mechanic(s) that will either take individual players out as you go along, or set a timer on the encounter such that the boss enrages and blows up the raid. Think of it as a mini-game. In a raid encounter, you have to competently do whatever your class is supposed to do (tank, dps, heal) and you have to do whatever the mini-game is for that particular encounter without making a mistake.

Gear vs. skill is also a kind of...not silly, but specific argument. Gear sets are mathematically optimized about 10 minutes after the gear stats are mentioned. Will anyone but the top 1% ever have that gear set in current content? Naaaaah. But in that 1%? Assume everyone has functionally the same gear and it is ENTIRELY skill based (and at the top, top levels, tiny adjustments and milliseconds count...it ain't easy to be a top guild with 25 moving parts). The argument breaks down when you look at the other 99%. There is your group near the top 10-15% that does their gear optimization as best they can, and it generally follows that they will be skill based as well, since they will eventually be running heroic-level content, just not in the first week. There, class, skill, and familiarity will be king, but it varies with class. Mage right now? The rotation isn't hard, so the difference between 496 and 522 geared people will be gear based. Feral is the hardest rotation in the game (at least, that is commonly said), so a great 496 vs. a meh 522? Probably going to be a lot closer together, since it will be hard for a nubcake to balance all those DoTs. Then you just see the rest fall into place pretty randomly as you get into people who do nothing but run LFR, and don't have a consistent raid team. So, that all is for DPS. Healers and tanks overall rely on more "soft skills". Tanks are rated on how little damage they take and overall leadership qualities. If a tank is very good at cooldown usage, they will be way better rated than even the best geared numbskull who forgets they have cooldowns. If they take charge very well and smoothly can lead a raid through CC, fight explanation, tank switches, adds, raid callouts, ready checks, and all the rest - even a squishier tank can be well regarded. (Tanking is my jam, ask if you wanna know more about the role. XD) Healers....if the raid is alive at the end and your healer buddy doesn't want to cut your throat, gear doesn't matter.

It depends some on the class and the content. For example, in a straightforward fight against a single enemy, most DPS classes just run through the same cycle of abilities over and over. It's pretty close to autopilot, so long as they don't pull aggro. In that case, gear level will dominate. Compare that to, say, a healer in a fight involving multiple enemies or an enemy that threatens the whole party. Then they have to keep tabs on multiple players and make sure their healing keeps pace with the damage being dealt while staying efficient enough not to run out of mana. Skill is pretty important there. Gear can help a lot, but it can't make up for using mana-inefficient spells or simply failing to keep people healed.

Yeah, to be blunt, if your guildmates think one tier of ilvls is more significant than player skill, then your guildmates are probably not top performers themselves, and you're going to be fine just collecting the gear and playing along with them. It's well out of date, but the guy at http://greedygoblin.blogspot.com/ used to rant about this all the time, and he formed a team called https://www.google.com/search?q=greedy+goblin+ungeared to pull off stunts like http://wow.joystiq.com/2009/09/02/yogg-saron-in-blues/3 and http://www.mmo-champion.com/threads/718860-Raiding-in-blues-The-lt-Undergeared-gt-Chronicles in blue gear (i.e. gear not intended to last beyond the first raid instance). It's not the hardest game, but you still might be surprised at the optimizations and quick reactions involved in peak performance. This is also out of date, but it's an http://wow.joystiq.com/2009/03/28/orangemarmalades-1-vs-2-comeback-explained/ that gives you some idea of what's possible. WoW is an extremely easy game to feel successful at, but there's also plenty to master.

First, that because the latest content (which I have not played as I am not even close to max level) is gated by item level, there's no real way to see if an undergeared but highly skilled player can be as effective as a lousy player with great gear. While it's true that my i496 priest can't hit the last raids of the game, the higher ilvl players can and do run the lower raids (this is all LFR), so you can make comparisons. I've run with people who have astounding gear but even after 90 levels of every mechanic imaginable, have absolutely NO common sense. They're blowing mana on big heals when it's not necessary, they're not moving out of fire, they don't get that when the boss pulls you in, you should -- 9 times out of 10 -- run back out. That common sense is the equalizer. Personally, I don't like running dungeons/heroics/raids until I have slightly outgeared it (doable through rep grinds/world bosses, etc) because the extra gear gives me extra confidence when I don't know the mechanics yet.

I haven't played since WotLK and I was never in any top raiding guilds. I always took raiding very seriously but I just couldn't put in 4 days a week for raiding, so I was always in guilds who tried their best for 3 nights a week. I've played warlock and hunter at different points and have always been top or near top DPS in whatever guild I was in. Looking at guides on the gear, it seems like it makes a significant difference. I found this website http://www.noxxic.com/wow/dps-rankings and it looks like there's almost a 25% difference between the maximum dps for 496 gear and 522 gear. That being said, I don't know if I would necessarily call it skill as much as I would say that there's a big difference due to preparation and dedication. As others have said, not dying is the biggest boost to your DPS, but the little things do add up. For every second you're out of position and moving to get where you need to be, that's a second you're not DPSing. Having the right gems, consumables, enchantments, talents, glyphs or whatever they have now all contribute. For another example of big differences due to little things, one time there was another hunter in my guild who had nearly identical gear to me, but I was killing him in DPS. We went to the training dummies to find out what was going on. Turns out it was because I was constantly mashing the next button in my DPS rotation so it would fire immediately. He was waiting until the previous skill was done and then pushing the button. That 200ms of human reaction time was probably dropping his DPS by 20%. Same class, same gear, same rotation, etc, but a huge difference just from how you push buttons. I think the important thing is to learn as much about your class and the fights and be a heads up player. Gear will come when you're raiding with people who you trust and who can rely on you in return.

Mechanics are mechanics and you have to really, really, outclass the fight to be able to ignore mechanics - and even then sometimes you can't ignore the mechanics. I remember in Cataclysm, or maybe it was WotLK, a random group of us got together to run AQ40 because why not? We had completed the expansion's quests and were looking for something to do. So, why not just roll through some old content? We didn't have 40 members, but we weren't really worried, we were close enough. Remember, when Burning Crusade first came out, the gear you immediately got from quests were so far and beyond the gear in Vanilla. And this trend tends to continue throughout the expansions. So, even though we were lacking in numbers, we were obviously outclassing what AQ was designed for. Yet, we couldn't for the life of us defeat the Twins. Despite the huge advantages we had, we just didn't have enough synergy to actually complete the boss mechanics. I think after a number of tries we just gave up.

Gear is only greater than skill if you've mastered the essential skill of not dying.* Simple numbers example: If I do 100 damage per second, and am alive for the entirety of a 1-minute fight, I've now done 6000 damage to the boss. If my gear is better, so I can maybe do a colossal 150 damage per second, but I die halfway through and am only fighting for 30 seconds, I only do 4500 damage. Personally, I've never had the highest gearscore in my raid groups, but I always keep up on the meters by maximizing my uptime (% of time actually doing damage.) *not dying includes defensive cooldowns (deterrence, ice block, divine protection, etc.) as well as mobility cooldowns (sprint, disengage, blink) to get out of bad faster. All of this gear/skill/rotation min-max stuff really only comes into play if you're alive and on the boss. Master those skills first. (Not that the game gives you much chance to do so before max level due to old content nerfs. But try!)

Skill also includes knowing the fights in advance, having your gear correctly gemmed, reforged and enchanted, bringing the right consumables, being able to pay attention for moderately long periods and being a team player.