Why You are NOT a Top Player

Now, many people reading this will first say this to me, "Myl, I am one of the best (insert class here) and I play flawlessly and never mess up.  Now, how am I not a top player?"

Now, why this may seem simple to some, it doesn't to others.  Let me elaborate.

I came across this topic while raiding one night and had it came back up again only a week ago.  The first instance was when we had a brand new healer in our guild and we were working on Cho'gall.  Now, as a healer, when some one gets the debuff at 25 corruption, you cleanse it immediately.  Well, there were some of us that were a little slow at getting all of them and the new recruit was frustrated telling us all to cleanse faster.  I then, checked the logs to see where our biggest issue was, and he wasn't even on there.  I was shocked at first.  He was doing all of this complaining and not even contributing.  I confronted him later and he said, "I don't spec for dispel magic because the top Holy Pally for Paragon doesn't have it in his spec."

I was furious.  Almost lost it and could have really just let this guy have it.  But, I calmly explained to him these reason why he wasn't a Top Player:

1. The guys in Paragon usually are pushing much harder content than the rest of us in much lower gear levels.  For this reason, Paragon utilizes every little point they can get in a talent tree to make them better.  Not taking the Dispel Magic and only relying on priests to do it is actually a pretty common thing at that level of play.  These guys are pushing for world first every Patch and to do so in much less gear than they need, they need to get every single point out of their spec.
2. We are not all as good as these guys.  These guys have crazy fast reaction times while healing and very rarely find themselves fixed on one thing in particular.  In a case where you are in a normal guild, the other people that do your job may not be as fast or could possibly be focusing on their raid frames to notice something like this.  A healer usually will be focused on their frames so hard they don't even notice a magic effect until a couple of seconds to late.  This is why have a spec that has Dispel Magic is crucial for everyone that isn't in a Top Guild.  There is no telling how bad the lag could be for one of your healers or if an addon that they use for this isn't working.  Having that in your spec allows you to help make up for things down the road: less mana, how long the person lives, etc.  
3. Now, the next reason why you are not a Top Player is quite simple, you are not willing to respec per fight so that you have a 1-2 point difference in your talents.  While this relates to point 1, it is still quite different.  For example, hunters most of the time don't spec differently per fight, but, on the Cho'gall fight,  a number of the hunters in these Top Guilds would go and respec so that they had improved traps to stun the bloods.  While this is a nice added feature that hunters could do, it is not necessary.  These Top Guilds pushing that fight in particular would only have 4-5 people on the bloods while the rest of the dps just killed Cho.  That stun time would allow the the healers to conserve more mana so they could keep people alive faster in the burn phase.  Most of your guilds don't do that.  They primarily just have your ranged take care of it, but as I have said, your normal guild isn't pushing for World First.
4. Finally, you chose us.  Now, while my guild is progressing, we still find ourselves in that middle ground: not to slow but not on pace with Top Guilds.  This is probably the biggest reason that you aren't a Top Player.  Most of you reading this post are not in one of those Top Guilds that fights for World First every Patch.  The fact is, you chose to actually take time away from the game to do other things.  A lot of these Top Guilds will raid 25+ hours a week on this content while the majority of us barely scratch 10.  You chose to be in your respective guild for various reasons, but I'm pretty confidant that if you were willing to dedicate the time it took to be in a Top Guild, then your guild would have never came into view.  

As I said earlier, you are Not a Top Player.  While this doesn't mean that you are a Fantastic Player, you just don't have the drive to put most other things aside for multiple weeks every 5-6  months.  These guys are now clearing content in one night.  Most of us normal Guilds take a night to clear farm, then wipe for a while.  It is just how it is at this point.

To those guys who are Top Players that might read this, keep doing what your doing.  And to the rest of us, please understand that just because the Top Players are doing funky things in their spec, doesn't mean that you automatically need to.