So let me lay down the situation for you guys. I have a friend that's been playing WoW since the start of TBC. He's always been a casual player, in the sense that he plays a lot but he's never been big into hardcore raiding or PvP. Recently he and I rerolled to a new server and we're getting into raiding. This is nothing new to me as I've always been a hardcore raider myself, but ToT marks the first time for him doing current raiding content.
As it stands he's 515 ilevel. He had been struggling with the way things work in normal mode raids but has adapted pretty well. He's been putting A LOT of effort into his Priest in the last couple weeks, researching his class, getting the appropriate weakuaras set up, etc etc. Trust me when I say he's really been trying to improve himself.
So we join this guild, they're newly formed, a break off of another guild. We've raided with them for two weeks now. When we joined, he was a 510 ilevel and since then he's up to 515. In the first week, we were having to pug 3 people each night, so we only made it to Dark Animus. This week, we made it to Lei Shen and got some decent attempts on him but we realized too late that we weren't properly executing the strategy, hopefully we'll have him down this week.
On the Lei Shen attempts, at the start of the fight he spikes up to about 110k DPS, and then it tapers off. He usually ends the fight when we wipe at around 70k DPS. We've been wiping in the first transition phase, again, we were using an incorrect strategy.
Now here's the problem I'm having. Our guild/raid leader is complaining that my Priest friend has to "dramatically increase his DPS". Let me throw down some information for you, because to me I'm kind of at a loss as to what to say to him. For our raid, our DPS looks like this:
Hunter: 525 ilevel, LMG, x2 ToT trinket, 2 piece tier
Warrior: 523 ilevel, LMG, x1 ToT trinket, 2 piece tier
Warlock: 520 ilevel, x1 ToT trinket, 4 piece tier
Our switch hitter (healer/DPS) Priest, for his shadow set: 515 ilevel, LMG, x1 ToT trinket, 4 piece tier
SPriest (my friend): 515 ilevel, no LMG, no tier, no ToT trinkets (he's using the valor trinket and the LFR Light of the Cosmos)
So, my SPriest friend is finishing fights at 65-70k DPS on Lei Shen attempts. When we dropped to 2 healers, and had our Disc Priest go Shadow, even with LMG, ToT trinket, and 4 pc, he was only doing 10k more DPS than my SPriest friend.
I don't know where our GM/raid leader thinks my buddy will get a "dramatic increase" in DPS beyond getting his tier bonuses and a ToT trinket. The other Priest in the guild who plays half the fights shadow, half the fights Disc, is main spec Shadow, the same ilevel as my friend, but having the LMG, 4pc, and ToT trinket over him, only does 10k more DPS on Lei Shen.
So my question is...what do? When I tried explaining the massive gear disadvantage my friend has when compared to the rest of the DPS, and said that it has to be accepted that his numbers will be lower because of this disadvantage I was told "Well, we don't have to accept that, we can just have him sit out until he picks up the tier and trinket from LFR". When I was told this I was blown away because the group knew coming into it that myself (Resto Druid) and my friend were both only a 510 ilevel, and that my friend had never experienced normal mode raiding. It's like they're trying to pin our lack of success completely on my SPriest friend, when in reality NONE of our DPS are pulling what they "should" be on him, except the Hunter, and our wipes aren't to a lack of DPS but rather to poor execution of strategy in transition phase. However the GM/Raid leader seems pretty new to leading a group, and because we've "hit a wall" he's looking for someone to blame.
I want my buddy to have a good experience with his first time doing normal modes, and not feel like he's a piece of shit because our misguided raid leader has a hard on for playing the blame game. Maybe my friend is bad, I don't know, but without getting some of the things the other DPS have (ToT trinket, tier bonuses, LMG) I don't see him pulling ahead like the raid leader expects. And even with those things the other SPriest in our group doesn't do that much better anyway.
I've done some research and I see that pretty much Shadow Priests are one of the worst single target DPS, especially when there's a lot of movement and no additional targets to dot (aka Lei Shen). Our Hunter and Warlock don't suffer from the same movement penalties he does because their classes by design allow for much more fluid DPS while moving.
So what do I do? What do I say to our raid leader? Am I wrong? Is he? I'm kind of at a loss, I enjoy the raid group and would really like to stick it out with them, but it sounds like they have unreal expectations and a very narrow mindset on top of a lack of understanding for class mechanics beyond the class they themselves play. It's like the raid leader looks at things in a vacuum. It almost seems like his thought process is "He's a DPS, I'm a DPS, he doesn't do as much DPS as me, that's a problem". He's our Fury Warrior, and it feels like that's the extent of his understanding on DPS classes.
Any help is appreciated, and thanks in advance for reading, sorry for the long post.
Edit: I felt like I should add, the last attempt of the night the numbers for Lei Shen looked like this:
Hunter: 135k DPS
Warrior: 116k DPS
Warlock: 105k DPS
Switch hitter SPriest: 78k DPS
SPriest (my friend): 75k DPS
The overall average from the nights 16 attempts on Lei Shen:
Hunter: 126k DPS
Warrior: 99k DPS
Warlock: 97k DPS
SPriest (my friend): 72k DPS
I didn't bother listing the overall average for our disc/shadow priest since he only DPS'd 5 attempts so it would be skewed, and I also didn't bother listing the DPS from the pug Rogue we brought in.