Originally Posted by Elakuan
As for damage meters...I've always found them far less reliable than math in predicting damage. Meters can be tweaked in any number of ways. Armories cannot. I would think that here, at EJ we could stick to the math. Cries for 'SS or it didn't happen' are the kind of response I'd expect back on wow forums...followed by responses of 'well, your clothies must suck'.
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Damage meters can,
along with math, explain a great deal. Especially the ones that give extremely detailed information, both in terms of abilities used, but also stuff like mana gained, etc.
Of course, logs aren't always relevant, depending on the nature of the post.
Dismissing them completely, though, is, in my opinion, foolish. To get accurate predictions, you need to base them on real data somewhere along the line. A good combat log parse is a highly valuable tool.
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As for the group composition...I've always found that when you are a 'top 5' dps'r REGARDLESS of your class, intelligent raid leaders will work to maximize your output.
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This is not optimal.
What's optimal is seeing which people (not necessarily by class, due to varying skills) gain the most.
Arbitrary values ahead: Let's say you're in the top 5 DPS. As a result, you get put into 'uber group 1'. This boosts you with a 100 DPS.
Mr. X is ~10th in damage. Boosting him through optimal grouping might boost his DPS by 150.
If everything else is identical, the optimal choice of an intelligent raid leader is
not to maximize your damage, even though you might be consistantly higher.
This isn't to say that you should get the aforementioned buffs, I'm just going against the blanket statement "If I'm in top 5 DPS, the best thing to do is to boost me higher".
While, yes, opting for slightly non-intuitive gear choices might be the optimal for certain specs (at least more so than for others), this is, as mentioned, not groundbreaking research.
As you said in your opening post, these forums cater much more to the math and theorycrafting people than your average WoW forum, hence we're much more likely to try and optimize (and thus discuss) things that aren't as obvious to average Hunters.