Could I increase my own personal dps if i droped replenishment – Yes
Would it benefit the raid overall – No

Would JC/BS be a better combo than Enchanting/LW – Yes
Would I stay in/join a guild who expected me to respec – No

Am i going to pop a Mana pot in a heroic – when
hell freezes over

There are many casual players out there that have no interest in spending a lot of additional time and effort learning how to play well. They just want to have fun, sometimes they want to figure out for themselves what works, and that’s really their right. Some people even gear based strictly on aesthetic reasons and not practical ones. When creating a group you can choose whether to have a policy to not bring folks like this into your groups, but depending on the content you’re doing it often won’t severely hurt your chances.

When doing LFG groups, you will meet lots of these people, but as much as there is an implied contract when they join the group to make an effort (one of the reasons why there is a vote kick feature) there is also a certain ridiculousness in freaking out over someone’s performance if the content is going smoothly in spite of it. I was in a group today where there was a ret paladin doing 800dps using a 1h weapon and shield. Everything died quickly so it really didn’t matter, but the group healer kept spamming the dps meter at him and making him feel bad. In my opinon there’s also a moral imperative that if you have an objection to someone’s performance you should offer constructive criticism before transitioning to a stage of outright rudeness. Sometimes folk won’t learn, but trying to help someone is far better for the common good than just telling someone they’re terrible. People should also keep in mind that heroics are meant to be a place to have fun and gear up and not everyone in them will already be an overgeared expert in their class.

That being said, if you are in a progression guild which expects performance of players, or if you join a PUG raid that has specifically requested experience and performance when recruiting, you do have an imperative to represent your skills and commitment with a reasonable level of accuracy and to make an effort to improve where you can.

Anytime you group with people you have an effect on how good a time everyone else has and how well things go. This doesn’t just apply to skill and boss research but also things like inopportune afks, paying attention to assignments, being considerate to the other people in the raid, etc. This social contract in my opinion is at least as important in my opinion as that of min-maxing.

The moral obligation of raiding, however, comes in when we’re looking at things like whether to use expensive agility food and pots. I would say that all raiders have a moral obligation to not rely on the increased performance of others who do use these expensive consumables without sharing the cost and using them themselves.

The problem that arises is as always there is far more dps (under geared and otherwise) than there are tanks and heals. The discussion here about random pugs is that it seems way to often there is at least one dps that doesn’t pull his weight because of gear/bad rotations/not knowing class/pure laziness. This causes the tanks and healers undue stress, but usually doesn’t negatively affect the ability of the group to run a heroic since often you have one dps that is so good that it doesn’t even matter what the other two do. On the other hand if the tank or heals are not up to the increase stress, they are labeled as “fail”, and must be replaced.

The down fall of the whole thing will be when the majority of raiding tanks, healers, and dps no longer feel the need to farm the badges with the LFG tool anymore, and there will be mostly non-raid geared people in there. That’s when the whole group is going to have to stick to that contract and actually work a bit harder to accomplish the goal of the group. The problem then will be it will be either people who are not used to min/maxing, or alts of raiders. The alt people will not be happy when others are not doing what they consider normal, and this is where the bad feelings arise.

As far as raiding, it’s ridiculous to even think about doing harder raids with out min/maxing. ToC is an exception, my guild runs an alt raid of that where we just bring in whatever and clear the whole thing and none of us are fully enchanted or geared for it. ToC has spoiled a lot of people that never raided before, and took a lot of fun out of the game in trying get your toon to do the best performance possible. My hunter still has a green or two, very few enchants, and a couple of blue pvp crafted items and he has the achievement for ToC 10. Yet, I wouldn’t take him into Ulduar or Icecrown because I respect the people I raid with too much to force them to carry me when I obviously have not put in the time on that toon to make him as good as possible. I’m still using BM spec for goodness sakes.

I feel that if others continue to fail to perform this contract, they will eventually be killed by lightning or kicked out of the raid. And when they do, they’ll remember who performed the job right.

As for the cross-server thing, I never pull out all the stops for the daily random. No real need to, I feel. I never get any competition in them anyway. ‘cept a Dk, once, with that ilevel 264 axe. They beat me, but not by much.

I view my “contract” as being to the run and or everyone, not just a single person. I know for myself, and maybe it matters since i am a guild leader/raid leader, there is a certain amount that i know i can cover another person or persons deficiencies whether they are intentionally slacking or just undergeared, by myself min maxing. I know i will never be standing in fires, getting charged by icehowl, etc. There is a selfish side of it as well where i like coming into a raid that has wiped repeatedly on a boss just for it to be downed the first time once im there.

So i guess what i am saying, is a single person can change a runs attitude so it may be worth going full bore at all times. There does have to be a limit though right, where too much is just too much?!