Not sure how you could know whether I am "accomplished" or not.
I'm sorry if it looked like it was a dig on your specifically - that was not my intent. I was mostly speaking in general. In any case, I think we mixed two different things now - quality of gear, and existence of immunity stripping. Immunity stripping aside, current raid gear is unquestionably better than regular gear, mostly because of the crit damage and debuffs that you simply can't find on "regular" gear, so it's the game's reality right now, for better or worse. Whether everyone gets or loses immunity stripping, that will remain the case. So yeah, if you don't have access to it then you'll have to limit your expectations a bit as far as running the highest difficulties solo goes. And by "you" I mean "anyone".
I don't raid all that much, but never the less I stand by the comment that you should be able to build a caster that does R7+ DPS without having a raid item in practically every slot.
It depends - do you mean in a group or solo?
If solo, we can argue about what the exact threshold should be (r6? r7? r8?), but I think it's reasonable to expect that you'd need to have close to the best gear to be able to run the highest difficulties solo (technically, it should not even be possible to solo r8-10, but I guess that ship has sailed, at least till we get a dock upgrade
).
But in a group I absolutely agree and I think this is already the case. You can run the higher difficulties in a group without raid gear, and I don't think getting rid of immunity stripping would change that much, because people will adapt to the new reality. Maybe everyone will need to drop the difficulty down a skull, but other than that it should be fine. Will it be harder to gear overall? Of course - but it will be harder for everyone, and mostly for those who right now only have to gear for one element. Those who already have to slot more than one element because they don't have immunity stripping will be less affected, if at all, everything else remaining the same. That's why I say it should equalize the DPS among casters more than the way it is now.
Anyway, when it comes to soloing ability the biggest hurdles, in my view, are knowledge of the quests and damage mitigation/avoidance - DPS is not the most important thing. The latest nerf to caster damage for the most part only made soloing r8-10 take more time - if you can already survive a boss fight for, say, 2 minutes while you take him down, then you'll likely be able to survive him for 3 minutes instead. I doubt it affected the ability of people who already ran on such difficulties to still complete most of the quests - I avoid running quests above r8 for the most part because it takes a lot longer, not because it is substantialy harder.
In the end, I still think people get too hung up on kill counts and overall, individual performance in what is essentially a co-op game. I don't care if you kill more or less mobs than I do when we're playing together, as long as we're having fun. Most of my competitive spirit is directed towards myself - I push soloing r8-10 right now because it's where I stand as far as feeling challenged, but I was perfectly happy when all I could run was r1, and that was not very long ago (I started playing reaper difficulty - and raids - about 3 years ago, so it was a somewhat slow climb). As long as I can keep pushing myself to do better and still have room to grow I'll be happy.
Cheers,
NH