Mad Priests on Madmortem

First to get it out of the way: Yes, gear is an important factor in WoW. Yes, I recognize that no matter how much skill ya got – the goode olde greens in black temple are a mite underpowered.

However, I am going to argue that skill has a more profound impact than many people seem to be currently thinking.

Just imagine the following situation:
You are doing an heroic instance (gotta get some badges for those nifty sunwell isle loots). Standard group lineup, 1 tank 1 healer 3 dds, 2 of them w/ major cc (hunter mage lock for example, the mage und the lock ccs are mutually exclusive for any group that does not sport both demons/elementals and humanoids, which except for magisters terrace seems quite rare to me will only be allowing either banish or sheep).
Now, everyone has read their tactics (or even better experienced them first hand) and nobody is hopping around in greens.
So, what happens is that your tank goes down.
What in my experience would usually happen is that either tank or priest would say “I am taking to much damage” or “I just cannot heal that”. Factoring out a few special tactical parts like the 40k pyroblast kil jaeden does, this is usually blamed on the gear of either tank or healer.

Now, in some cases this might be a valid point. I can imagine doing magisters terrace with only people who have just got their blues together is quite painful. Under most circumstances though, you have to remember one thing:
Everyone who started out w/ heroics in the earlier days of Burning Crusade did so in pure blues, no wellfare epics whatsoever – and that was before the nerfs!

So, maybe, just maybe there is more to the game than getting your epics equipped.
Maybe, just maybe, your priest should use such a random thing as casting greater heal instead of flash heal.
Maybe, just maybe, your tank should start using shield block.

Or an example for those of us who primarily raid:
If gear is 80% of the game, how comes that some dds do about halve the damage other similar equipped dds of their class do? Why in gods name does a mage end up doing even less damage than our feral tank, while offtanking gruul? The bear does not even get any rage in that fight!
This example is actually even weirder to me, because I cannot imagine that the “special tricks” a mage could employ would double their damage versus just chaincasting frobos/fireballs/whatevers…

Whatever you might think about skill and gear now – just remember that tip world of warcraft gives you while logging in:
“If you are nice to other players you might get invited to a group again!” (or some such)
So, even if you are raving internally and generally about people just not cutting it, give them the benefit of saying that of course their gear is the problem – after all there is no chance you could heal through steam vaults hc with only 4 or 5 epics, which have an itemlevel of 141+ each (yay, sunwell isle badge vendors!)