I think his argument is flawed. I have never seen anyone in a top guild seriously argue that the gear is a massive advantage (well an officer or the like, plenty of top tier players are smack talking rtards). In fact I remember guilds doing alt Tier5-6 runs back in BC with Alts in blues and greens. The reason they won't look at most under geared applicants is because if your most geared toon is in blues you probably don't have the raid experience. They aren't interested in teaching people the fights and filtering out the bads, they aren't worrying about gearing people up (which has been ridiculously easy since BC).

And his arguments that potential top players can't be bothered doing "boring" content to get the gear is frankly stupid. Being in a top raiding guild is one of the most boring and grindy things you can possibly do in game. It is very hard to keep your enthusiasm up when you wipe on a boss for four hours, so if you can't even do a couple of boring PUG runs you aren't top tier material.

His example classes are also not very gear bound. My enhancement Shaman went from barely pulling 2k to pulling nearly 5k with a couple of weapon upgrades. Not every class scales based on raw stats like casters do (and even there he is comparing raw healing, not longevity).

Knowing the fights has always been more important than gear. If you have perfect synergy and no mistakes you can do some crazy stuff. But gear gives you a buffer.

He is 100% right though that large segments of the WoW population use "I am undergeared" as a cover for the fact they suck. My shaman was doing 1500 DPS at 75, and could do 2000 as a fresh 80. Yet I still often see people in Naxx+ gear who can't break 2000 DPS.

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