Do you believe in a skill cap?

[Daedius]

It was removed many expansions ago! I got the "Did somebody order a knuckle sandwich" achievement 8 years ago...

[MoanaLisa]

It's true that everyone isn't the same with the same abilities, but WoW isn't olympic swimming or something. Variances in natural ability really shouldn't amount to much on their own. Sure, if you're naturally better at focusing through distractions, you might be able to squeeze a couple percent more DPS out while managing raid mechanics versus the guy that drops their rotation entirely for the second that they're moving, but that's about the extent of it.

This is all true, no argument there.

A story though from the long misty past: When I was raiding, back in ancient times when DBM was nonexistent or just barely useful you could tell right away who had situational awareness and who didn't. Those that didn't rarely learned it through practice. I'm not an expert on why that would be but people would eventually learn where to be and know not to stand in things but next encounter or raid they would have to go through it all again while others just internalized all of that and...knew.

Anecdotal but I would think that anyone that raided for a long time would have seen something like this. That's difficult to measure in some ways and doing a rotation was sometimes less important than doing crowd control or any number of other things (as DPS) not to mention watching your threat (I said this was a while ago). Some players just seem to know exactly what to do and when and others try really hard to get it and never do. That was long before the stacked mechanic-fest that raiding is now. Just thinking that it's a bit more than distractions but some players can only easily handle a certain number of things coming at them at once before getting overwhelmed. It's one of those things that contributes a lot to a player's skill cap but which may not be entirely obvious to all.

[Wingspan]

There's nothing in WoW that has a skill requirement so high that a typical person can't reach it. Generally the only thing that can actually hold you back is unwillingness to change or learn.

The problem here is that WoW has a pretty good number of atypical people that play it, so there are plenty that will never be all that good at it no matter how hard they try.

A friend of mine's mother played for years. She was fine at questing and bad-to-marginal at early WotLK heroic dungeons. We coached her out a bit when she was bad, and she did improve to a certain point. As a retired teacher she had no trouble grasping any concept we threw at her, but her 65+ year old reflexes would just never allow her to be a truly good player.

Age aside, there are a lot more people who are skill-capped below even Normal raiding than you would believe. Some people are old or debilitated in some way but some people just truly suck, lack virtual awareness, or the ability to think or react quickly or whatever.

[Svisalith]

A glass ceiling. Sometimes I feel like no matter how much research and practice I do, Ill never be able to clear a Mythic 15, or top those charts in a heroic raid. I feel like even though Ive been playing video games my whole life, I still actually kind of suck at them. Sometimes I wonder if I just lack a certain something that will always keep me from being a great player, no matter what game Im playing, not just WoW. Gets me down sometimes because I want to be that high end mythic raider but it seems like all the time I pour into it, I never seem to get better than I am now.

This might come across as venting but Im actually interested to see what other people think about a supposed skill cap, the belief that you can't always be super amazing at something no matter how hard you try.

You need to learn how to learn. Playtime isn't actually correlated that strongly to skill even in games that are centered around competition, a lot of people play for many hours without significant improvement.

If you don't have a good idea of how to improve then ask stronger players - the skills that you need to recognise the inefficiencies in your play are the same ones that allow you to play better.. it's easy to get stuck without people to lean on.

[SirCowdog]

Something I didn't really see mentioned yet in this threadis the possibility of information overload. No matter what class you are, you don't necessarily need to know every so single nuance of every role of every fight.

For instance, I see a lot of encounter guides listing what each role shouldbe doing at any given stage of the fight. But you only need to know and focus on one role.

Sure, it can be useful to know everything if you can wrap your head around it all. But don't try it if you're pushing the upper limits of your progression. Start with nailing ypur job first. Be the best tank, healer, or DPS you can be. Limit your focus to that at the expense of all else, and let the rest of the group worry about themselves. If you're doing your job right, then that's all anyone can ask.

[Rorke]

People don't know what the mastery curve is so they think they've hit the glass ceiling when they just plateaued at a point where it'll take a really long time to see any improvement.

A lot of people give up too soon as soon as they see no immediate improvement and therefore they just settle with wherever they are because they've convinced themselves that they've reached their peak when they haven't.

[Lumineus]

I think that in general, people are more likely to run up against the potential cap of their spec than they are a skill cap, at least in PvE. Although I will agree that certain habits tend to hold a number of people back; most often you see this with caster DPS playing reactively and losing to movement while also failing to chain spells and losing more to latency, then nonsensically claiming melee is OP at times when the meta is "go Mage or go home."

Unless it's something like Feral where the way it's played when compared to similar classes is counter-intuitive, then you can make an argument for the player to "git gud," although frankly it just means the rotation needs to be overhauled so you don't have to study a third party website to perform adequately.

[Deleted]

Some players just seem to know exactly what to do and when and others try really hard to get it and never do.

Yes this is undeniable, BUT the main reason for this is people having bad habits in the game, and not having good ones, only at the very end of a long list the skill cap is to blame.
I am 45, i raided as a clicker in MOP, i could carry my own weight in the raiding we did, but i clearly noticed there was a HUGE room for improvement there, in using keybindings, in learning how to use weak auras, and not just copy paste other people´s auras, and in getting better in filtering info when raiding or doing a dungeon.
I bought a MMO mouse with 12 buttons on the side, and start practicing while leveling all the chars, it took time but muscle memory finally arrived to the rescue.
Same thing with WA, until i managed to use the addon to do the auras I needed/wanted, and also doing a ton of dungeons while leveling and trying to take care of as many things as possible while doing those dungeons, including being aware of my group needs while doing those dungeons.
Yeah, this was not something i did over a week, it took a lot of time, but it was so entertaining, and it did pay off sooo much.
It is only now that i can have an idea of where my skill cap is, and still there are other factors to consider, time invested and tries, that are not related to skill cap.

[unbound]

There will always be someone better than you.

Furthermore, half of the people are below average. However, nobody believes they are below average; this is called the Dunning-Kruger effect.



It could very well be that you are doing as well as you will ever be able to do. If everyone was able to grow their skill cap to some kind of max, then everyone would be average at that point.