EG: If a boss requires 3k dps minimum to down him before he enrages/explodes/starts breaking wind, I can have 15 people churning out 3.1k dps and a single person doing 1.5k dps and down him easily. Sure, boss dies easily and everyone gets loot. But is the 1.5k dpser doing as well as he needs to be? I don't want to wait till we get to a boss where everyone needs to do 3k dps to win to start noticing the flawed player.

This applies to heals too. Sure, everyone lives, boss dies, but when 5 healers are working hard pressing emergency buttons every available CD because the last healer is suffering from cerebral palsy so everyone survives, I want to be able to identify that problem BEFORE the raid wipes because of it. There's no other tool that can help a raid leader in that. Used correctly, it's also all that's needed.

What I'm saying is, use meters in moderation and view the numbers from the correct perspective, taking into account class, spec and situation. If you're a healer, you should know – all fights are situational for healers. Some healers produce better numbers than others on some fights. Also, dedicated tank healers probably will display less numbers than raid healers overall. Therefore, meters cannot tell that A is better than B in healing, and never should be used that way. What I can do with the meters, however, is look at the meters, keep in mind the situation and class limitations and identify healers who are hindering the raid and causing stress for the rest.

In the hands of a raid leader who is aware of every class's ability and every fight's circumstance, meters are a good gauge of performance. Sure, it cannot show the rogue using expose armor or the ret paladin using lay on hands and bubbles to save others, but assuming they're good, their numbers still shouldn't drop to atrocious levels. Once again, I believe meters can be used within reason. No one should use it as a ranking system to determine who's a better player. But one shouldn't disregard the information it tells us too. It can save your next fight from becoming a wipe.

Incidentally, I dislike carrying under-performers in my raid ^^

Just wondering, though, do you have a warrior tank in your raid? Cos if you do…

They'll hate you for preventing them from using sunder armor on the boss ><

Just take the code in the code box and copy it into the relevant file in your latest version of Recount. Read some of the comments as well so you can marginally tweak the values so that whole numbers display, otherwise you get lot's of decimal places. This mod works for you and for you only. It presumes that you have 3/3 Divine Aegis and the Glyph of PW:S (a fair assumption for a raiding disc priest). It uses that as the basis to calculate the “healing” that PW:S and Divine Aegis does. As recount has now way of showing absorption it just lumps it in with the healing. It presumes that the entire shield is absorbed, which again is a very fair assumption if you are assigned to MT healing in which case the shields should be absorbed the whole time. The net result? We shoot up in the healing meters but only in ours….others in the raid will not see what we are seeing. It is good to link it and show them that you are actually doing your job and if absorption was counted as healing we take a massive leap up the meters. 250K extra “healing” from absorbed shields is a massive leap to take.

Take, for example, my rogue. When in a raid (and the tank is either a bear or a DK, which is normally the case in most raids I attend), I have a tendency to gimp my personal DPS by applying Expose Armor on the mob. That's 5 combo points I could have used for a 7.5-8k critical Eviscerate. Instead, over time, this debuff on the boss will allow everyone else that's smacking him about the head to down him that much faster. It's not about my personal damage done to the mob so much as it is about us being able to progress further in the raid.

If we win, we get purple loot. If not, we have hefty repair bills to cover. Personally, I'll set my ego aside for a chance at moving forward and not having to pay that 7-10g death bill, something too few people seem to understand.

But ignoring the individual performance of players is a luxury an officer can not afford. The goal is to make a team, not to have 10 lice on an elephant. That means it is the individual responsibility of every player to give their best contribution to the team and it is the leader's responsibility to check if they:
1) contribute their best
2) need help improving their best
Note that this is more a coaching role, and coaching is done as much outside the raid as it is during the raid. During the raid you need to work as a team, and to single out players is to break down the team. But outside the raid, singling out is unavoidable and should not be avoided. There simply are players that can't make it on their own. Identifying them isn't an easy task and meters may not be the best indicators… but they help.