Not in the mood for a lengthy rant, so I’ll just add my voice to the many and point out that this guest post on World of Matticus is complete and utter bullshit, from the first to the last sentence. Shame on you, Matticus, for even allowing it to be posted on your portal. As for the author, he is either an idiot with a very limited and tunnel-visioned grasp of the game (yes, I just publicly called someone an idiot – for calling members of his team “meat in the room”, “a dime a dozen” and so on. Deal with it), or cunningly sparking controversy for the sake of clicks to his own blog. For my part, I decided to never again click on a link leading to We Fly Spitfires. Sir, you are blacklisted.
Kind regards,
Rem
a tank
Do Not Try This At Home 
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It’s interesting to go re-read that article now that we are well into the brave new world of Cataclysm. A lot has changed. Having competent dps in heroics matters again, though it’s hard to say for how long.
That said, I think it’d be hard not to acknowledge that heroics became pretty screwy by the time ICC was released. I was tanking in almost all DPS gear and was frequently #1 on the damage meter. It was bizarre that a good tank could do as much damage as a full group prior to Ulduar. Under those conditions, it’s no wonder that the value of dps had depreciated so much; their presence in the run didn’t affect the outcome and barely affected the duration.
I think the current tier of raids are doing a lot to re-establish the value of good dps. They can make or break your group’s chances for success.
Competent and motivated damage dealers have always been making things easier. You’re quite right though, in the ICC-era “easier” was (with regards to heroics) entirely irrelevant, because due to ridiculous over-gearing, in most cases there was no room for things to become even easier.
I always felt wrong tanking in DPS gear, so I was tanking heroics in my full raid-tanking gear. And still sometimes ended up not only #1 (as a mater of fact, I had a relatively long lasting streak of consecutive #1 damage meter placements while tanking, broken only on a run with in-guild damage dealers), but doing more than 50% of the total damage, and it didn’t matter. Except, you know, in HoR. We had a group there once time, my healer friend and I, where I was doing as much damage as everyone else combined. I ended up shaking with tension and she had to throw hurricanes to help us get through the last part. If things are not trivial, damage dealers make a difference, just like everyone else.
It is this disrespect and the failure to recognise the efforts of good (and outstanding) damage dealers and this bald faced self-glorification that incensed me so much about that article, even though I was a tank with no ambitions of being anything but a tank in any foreseeable future back then.