Community seems to have a serious misconception about skill and “being good” including people on the higher end at times.
Multiple times in the forums, discords and WoW related places there have been people who quite clearly implied that copying meta makes you “good”, “knowledgeable”, “means you research and spend effort therefore good”, “pulling your own weight” etc
The opposite also happens, people have been clearly implying that not copying meta makes you “bad”, “a noob”, “lazy”, “a drag to your team”, “a carry” etc
These statements are wrong, factually, it is wrong and cannot be defended
Skill and knowledge in games has very little to do with copying or even playing meta, WoW is not such a ridiculously complicated game to require guides to teach players their rotation and class (Especially when rotations can change via talents) , most can get a feel of it by just playing the class for a while, I am not saying people shouldnt use guides to assist them, but they should never depend on them and the end goal is to learn your class, not copy what it said, get in game and “win”
Then how do you identify skill? Often times an easy way would be if they are consistently good performers, know their class well obviously and know how multiple builds works and of course dont fail mechanics often.
There’s of course a far easier mathematical way to show this:
Let’s say you have a player who sims their character at 85k and they do consistently 80k on live environment.*
Let’s say you have another player who sims their character at 120k yet they do consistently 90k on live environment.
Based on that the player who does 80k is by far the more skilled player than the person who does 90k and I would much rather have them in my team because if they are that skilled in their spec they are often skilled in the rest of the game aka know how to deal with mechanics, know their class indepth and therefore know how changes in talents affects them and how nothing is set in stone.
Meanwhile often time that person doing 90k doesnt have that much understanding of their class as they just read a guide and followed it like a mantra that is set in stone without personally understanding a spec.
There is also a strong amount of toxicity in that group as exactly because they dont understand the game, they cannot understand why people wipe, do less dps or even when they die, and because of that their instinct is to blame others since “they read the guide, they did their part” in their mind. Once again showing that such blind reliance on guides isnt good, especially since guides are also often wrong if you change a single talent that makes some specs play very differently.
An analogy, a person who is told to use a lever every 5 seconds as work will be less skilled and have inferior result to a person who knows how the internal machine works therefore knows how often to use said level for maximum efficiency
"* Reminder that there are some discrepancies in specs/talents etc since some get far more affected by movement than others which is why minor movement sim are often more accurate since you almost never freecast all the time.
I am sure there are people who are gonna go “I am still gonna choose the guy that does 90k over the guy that does 80k”, and that is their choice that they will pay at times as both of those numbers are enough to clear content, yet the 90k guy has higher chance of failing mechanics.
Then there’s also class skill level differences, for example we know Feral is one of the hardest specs to play well. (Yet not rewarded for it with better damage than simple spec)
A feral you might sim 100k and does 95k is clearly a far more skilled player than a demon hunter that might seem 100k and does 95k since the skill required to play feral on that level is far higher than it is for a DH.
This factually proves that skill and class knowledge are not related to the meta in any way, playing meta doesnt make you good or skilled.
in b4 someone tries to sim a lvl 1 character, spamming one button in order to achieve the same dps to pretend he didnt understand what I was saying.