That notion to me was killed when they made battlegrounds x-server, before that I used to know the names and the gear progression of all the allies.
Back in Vanilla I started playing weeks after my friends did so I was always under level. This coupled with the fact that I was in school then meaning I could only play a fraction of the time they could meant they out leveled me even quicker. Eventually by the time I reached 60 they'd joined a top progression guild that raided 6 days a week for 4+ hours a night. Me in my blues, I wasn't even allowed into the guild, let alone to raid with them, so I just did 5 mans, then leveled an alt (which has since been my main). After BC with the shorter raids I joined a casual guild that did raid, but by then my family and work life had changed so that if I was called I needed to get up from the computer pretty much right away. So it has been a conscious decision to NOT put my friends/guild mates in a situation where one of the team suddenly goes afk in the middle of a fight. However, I have no qualms about doing this in LFR as it's pretty much built into the system that some people are doing sweet fuck all.
It doesn't alter game files, just memory. But yes, there is a danger involved in using it. But, they've known about it for a long time and nobody has been banned for it.
The downside of that was not being able to do Battlegrounds at all on off-peak hours, on servers with low populations, or on servers with imbalanced populations. Cross server BGs have way more pros than cons.
It's the same with every game, stuff that was broken or imba sticks in people's minds.
They scale poorly with gear, and as they reach better levels of it their dps starts to drop off in relation to other classes. They are awesome until other classes start reaching gear somewhere near them, then I think you'll just get frustrated. They do superbly at the beginning of the expansion since Cata, since they can do more with less.
I'm amazed D3 is still selling that well. Blizz doesn't appear to be hurting but I'm curious what their strategy will be to try and keep some of their sinking NA sub numbers.
