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His characters in both games are very advanced, meaning he needed to play a lot to get to that point. Anyone that plays that much knows how to play the game very well. Because Elon doesn't play the game well it is a safe bet that he didn't advance his characters but instead he paid someone to advance them for him.
Just as the most glaring example, he offhandedly mentions his staff is "not very good" because its item level is 30 lower that his character level and that he "should find a better staff, y'know, over 30 levels". There is a grand total of 1 staff with better damage per second than Elon's on the trading website (where most players "find" better items, because creating them with crafting orbs is a matter of being rich and lucky, and finding them on the floor is a matter of being go-play-the-lottery lucky). 5 total quarterstaffs in the same ballpark of damage.
He then hovers over his Hands of Wisdom and Action (a unique item, the modifiers of which are unaffected by item level at all) and similarly dismisses it for its item level (even though it's an item likely crucial to his build).
If he had concerned himself even briefly with the gear system of PoE2, he would know that. It goes beyond glossing over the complexities of the game "for the laymen watching", the man playing the game on stream straight-up is not aware of what makes his decked-out character good.
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I don't think this is true. I used to be a pretty big World of Warcraft guy and encountered people with much, much more play time than I had and excellent gear that were straight up terrible players. It's interesting to consider why they were getting carried in raids, but they pretty obviously were, because you'd bump into guys with much better gear that you could easily smash on damage meters anyway. In contrast, a buddy of mine that posted top 100 world parses on healing meters for some difficult bosses didn't actually play all that much. Beyond some necessary amount of time to learn a game well, people just kind of get capped out on their skills and stop improving.
If the point is that they're making incredibly basic mistakes... yeah, the above still applies. You could look at damage logs after and see highly geared players doing things like failing to keep DoTs on targets, letting their own buffs fall off for significant chunks of fights, and other egregiously incompetent play.
Healing parses are different from damage though, because you get your best healing parses on the first kill or two, the other players take less damage on later kills and you are also capped by the skill, classes and quantities of the other healers around you.
<-- World top ten Disc priest on one kill one time 15 years ago in "Heroic" SOO (would be called mythic now).
I definitely agree with this. And there are (were) a lot of personality hires in any raid group.
This kind of analysis was my favorite thing about raid leading. Making me nostalgic (I haven't played a video game with others in 8 years).
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I've described elsewhere in the thread how Elon doesn't just make basic distracted-like mechanical mistakes, he literally doesn't know what his items do and how good they are (despite having had to craft them or more likely search for those specific items from the trading website). It's like if you met a top-level raider in WoW and he said his (best in slot for his class) items are "not very good" because they don't look pretty, which is the best analogy I can come up with for WoW because I don't play it.
This is all on hardcore league also, so it's not only a lack of game knowledge - Elon would have had to spend dozens of hours grinding experience on his character to get to level 90 without dying once, in a game known to ruthlessly punish players for lacking game knowledge.
Gotcha. I was looking more at the skill part of things rather than the game knowledge part of things. Beyond a certain point, yeah, you wouldn't bump into anyone making that sort of basic error when it comes to understand itemization and game mechanics. Even if they couldn't exactly tell you why a certain trinket mathed out to being the best in slot item, they'd still know enough to go check Icy Veins, see that it's best in slot, and cheerfully equip it.
At the extreme end, there are players in PoE who just look for the items the build guide tells them to look for instead of bothering to understand itemization. But they'd still look at item modifiers, not item level. A max level base can (and most often does) drop with complete garbage bonuses that make it worse than a well-rolled item with a much lower level base.
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I played WoW circa 2008-2010, TBC-WOTLK era, and one thing you're discounting is that even back then there was a booming black market in selling characters online. Highly decked out characters were being sold online for thousands of dollars each. There were rumors of Chinese farmers, but i think the bigger source was just players who enjoyed grinding up to a high-ish level and then starting over. Which I can understand the appeal of!
Or they enjoyed it more than getting a real job. Definitely lots of people with a lot of free time selling their characters then and pissing off their raid by expecting to be regeared.
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Yeah, I actually looked at selling my character around that time because it was a pretty close to BiS Death Knight at their apex of overpoweredness and I wanted to go do other stuff. I think it was worth about $500 (which would be a bad ROI, but good if you just didn't want to play more).
So, sure, that's a thing, but I also just bumped into quite a few people that just didn't seem all that interested in game mechanics but were willing to play a lot. I know these weren't purchased accounts because some of them were people that I'd hop on Discord or Vent with and they were nice enough guys, they just didn't care to go learn that that you always want to save Swiftmend for when Wild Growth is coming off of cooldown so you can maximize the healing boost on it, or that downtime on Flameshock is immensely costly because you'll wind up wasting free Lava Burst procs. These aren't exactly complicated mechanics, but if you don't know them then you don't know them, and if you don't really internalize them then you'll consistently fail at it under pressure. I ultimately just had to settle on the reality that I'm an obsessive nerd and that if I was going to heal for a casual raiding group (because I don't want to lock up four nights a week playing a game) then I have to tolerate playing with people that are going to put out shit damage and stand in fire. They're not bad guys, they're not even idiots, they're just bad at a game.
On the bright side, healing a mediocre group through difficult content with one of my best friends was one of the more entertaining things I've done in any game and the numbers on the parses wound up being world class precisely because people stand in fire and can't kill things fast.
I was that guy. I liked to make my gnome warlock spam cool spells and send my pet to attack things because it was fun. I think I understood some of the basics of how skills worked together, but I definitely hadn't optimized my DPS. I was pretty good at not standing in fire, though. Thanks for being nice to us normies.
As Flintlocke's Guide to Azeroth once phrased it, "I mostly just picked my talents because the icons looked cool".
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