I’ve got a GearScore… It’s somewhere between 1 and 5000. I know it was 4554 a week or so ago.
A friend looked me up while he snowman danced with me, otherwise I would have no idea.
I did some Ulduar
Off tangent for a moment, I’ll bring it back on course I promise.
Back a day or so before appearing on TNB, I did a couple of bosses in Ulduar. We only got Flame Leviathan and XT down, wiped on Razorscale and chucked it in. It was a late night, spur of the moment thing so no wucking furries.
Can you heal Ulduar10 hardmode?
I was in LookingForRaid when I got the whisper. I said I doubted it, but if it was normal I’d be ok.
He asked for GearScore and Achievements and I foolishly said yes.
- Foolishly because I passed up 3 other raid offers waiting for their invite.
- Foolishly because… Well I’ll get to that…
My issue with GearScore and Achievement Checking.
The person demanding it is covering their butt, not yours. They want to make sure their run is successful, not gaurantee yours.
I guess I’m going down with the sinking ship…
Finally I get an invite and we head to FL. I get told to get away from the chopper, they it’s use is explained in detail like it’s the most important vehicle in the joint… No word on the others.
We got FL down… Thanks largely to me. The others were hardly on the meters… Whatever, I guess people can screw up… Somehow… Don’t know how, but they must be able to.
Maybe they didn’t throw Pyrite… We certainly never shot any down…
Deconstructing!
On to XT, my 1st real opportunity to see what this uber GearScore and Achievement needing raid was like…
After 15 odd minutes of terrible instructions the tank charged in…
STOP, STOP, STOP!
Luckily the one comment he read of mine was to stop.
Everyone had ignored my comments about the adds on either side of the room, but now the tank listened and charged off. The OT nearly ran in the opposite direction, stopping just before body pulling…
Mmm not a good sign.
We engaged XT
We wiped.
Pretty dismally really. Apparently the DPS didn’t want to be troubled with bursting down the bomb bots because the boss was bigger or something…
The Heals just aren’t good enough…
It was the healers fault of course, well not the MT healer cause she managed to keep the tank at 20% the whole time… Mmmm
Healers reassigned. I am no longer solely on the OT (who didn’t take any damage until the non-dps’d bomb bot exploded in his face. I had been raid healing because the 3rd healer would have let everyone die.
So the new healing assignment is well, same as before except now I am officially healing the raid and 75% of the off tank.
They couldn’t tell me which 75%, so I decided I’d look after the top 75% of his health bar… After that it was the other healers problem.
We did much better this time, it was another wipe… but quicker and less painful.
Taking out the raid rubbish
The raid leader steps up and announces that he’s kicking the crap DPS, which draws my attention to Recount.
I was a bit confused… There was no DPS above 2,500 and only two above 2,000. The raid leader wasn’t one of them!
So what was he going to do, kick everyone including himself?
Someone left, or was kicked, and while they looked for another DPS the raid leader said something smart in vent about how disappointed he would be if they didn’t get it this time… My response:
If this fails I will be reasonably pissed… get gear checked and can’t even down 2nd boss…
The response…
Don’t get pissed at us. Get pissed at our stupid 10 year old main tank, who left cuz her sister wanted to play hello kitty
I wonder why?
Sensible Raid member selection
They got their replacement, an apparently awesomely geared and experienced healer…
HEALER?!?!
WTF!
- 2 tanks,
- 4 healers, and
- 4 DPS that can’t crack 2,500 DPS
Squidly the Patient
Now I’m a patient guy, so I stuck around. I just had to see how 4 healers were going to save the raid.
- We engaged…
- We wiped…
- I said Thanks for the invite!
- I dropped group…
What a bunch of tossers!
Straight after this fail group I joined a quick Noth job for the weekly raid quest… it was the complete opposite, quick professional lots of DPS.
Gnomer and Out, Squidly and Stout!
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.
http://gnomeaggedon.net/2010/01/07/you-can-shove-your-gearscore-right-up-your-gnomehole/
This just in: Gear has nothing to do with skill, which is what intelligent people have been saying since the idiot who made the add-on made it.
More at 11. 😛
He’s hardly an idiot. It’s a useful addon. I suppose we could get into a philosophical argument about responsibility for misuse of a product, but it’s not as if he made GS and advertised is as Skill Score.
Agreed.. let’s face it.. in TBC we were asking for DPS… not a whole lot of difference.. in fact that’s what people were asking for at the beginning of WoLK as well.
The tool itself is ok per se.. it’s uses can be questionable.
The one thing I find it more questionable for than weeding out new/undergeared people, it using it to pad out your crappy raid group, without giving indication that you group shouldn’t be allowed out of Naxx10
Amen to that! GearScore is probably the most misused tool around these days.
I see what is going on… he was stringent about gear checking people in an effort to compensate for his own shitty gear/ability!
yeah.. or more to the point, the whole raid’s
I like the, “is he def capped?” “don’t think so”
That made me cringe and be very glad I was not there.
And they wanted hard modes?
yeah I was in way deep by then.. Hard Modes.. the only hard mode they were likely to experience was if we managed to pull it off…
I ended up in a debate with my guild on this. Most of them arguing that if someone can get a 5k+ gs that they are skilled, or at least know how to play.
/disagree entirely. Much like achievements, people can be carried to gear.
/pine for the days of tbc where you asked for stats and hoped that the skill matched them somewhat. not really though.
yep gearscore =/= skill.. especially now where you can get carried through the randoms and come out looking like a seasoned raider.
Yeah we need some bog standard measurable fights…
The problem is they tend to favor one class or another and be affected by the class makeup (and skill) of the other people in the raid.
I used to cry when people spoke of their 3k+ DPS, when all I could muster in 5 mans was 1800-2k.
Then I did a 10 man raid and realized the 2k 5man = 3k+ 10 man
Then did a 25man and realized 2k 5man = 3k+ 10 man = 4k+ 25man..
Yes, yes, all old numbers… even Gnomeaggedon can pull 4k in an instance these days.
bummer 😦
What a huge fail raid leader.
At least you got the weekly raid quest.
Yeah.. my only issue with the weekly raid quests is… well I want to do more… sure it’s nice to drop in a down 1 boss… but I hate to admit it.. I miss Naxx…
Belmann hit the nail right on the head. To say GearScore is a fantastic tool for determining if someone do well in a raid is like saying a Sledgehammer is a good tool to put up a finishing nail to hang a picture.
GearScore does just that… looks at iLvl and assigns a value to that. Nothing more and nothing less. It just says, “Hey, this toon has high level gear.” Kinda useless if the person you’re looking at is a week or two old 80 that has run eleventy billion five mans a day to outfit themselves in T9 but has never seen a raid boss outside of the weekly.
What would be awesome is if an addon could give you an in-game report like imba.hu does on their site. It would give you a gear score, warnings (like missing or bad chants/gems/etc), and a quick overview of that toons experience. It would be a MUCH better tool for a raid lead to have over just a number.
Meh… my point is Gearscore is a tool. If the tool is used improperly (like thinking score = skill) it’s not the tools fault. Keep that logic up and next thing you know you’ll be blaming pens for spelling errors.
When I think back to be.imba and the raft of other tools pre-gearscore, they could be fooled in the same way.
iLvl is really only useful for mechanical fights and [EPIC] achievements
I use Gearscore, mostly so I know whether or not to talk to any given pug. I’m only at 4500 (I haven’t run any ICC since it came out really, been doing other stuff) but if some guy says he wants 5k gearscore to run H VH, I can know that he’s a idiot and I don’t want to run with him.
lol… I was worried for a second there, but then you brought it around and gave me a huge smile…
Thank you so very much for this post. I’m having a stupid, stupid day at work and to read about the Hello Kitty excuse (which you should TM, by the way) made me laugh – a nice change to smashing my head against my desk in frustration! Kudos!!
I think the Hello Kitty excuse was trademarked a long time ago… but I am glad it brought a smile to your face… It made me snort.. then cry.. then.. well write about it
Gear will only take you so far without skill.
Skill will only take you so far without gear.
If only more people we pug with could realize this. ^_^
and fail pugs are only survivable through excessive use of alcohol…
How did you know my secret?!?
I use the same survival techniques!
Wait a minute, you mean gearscore doesn’t translate directly to skill?! My mind is blown!!!
I’m also really amused by your instructions to 75% of the OT. I think that means you heal everything except his ears, those are somebody else’s problem…
Chas speculates that you heal the damage from every 4th attack…
it had me a bit confused as well… why not just say… heal OT + whatever raid you can manage…
I was always going to assume the damage he had taken was the other guys problem…
Please keep GearScore away from my GnomeHole. Thanks. 🙂
removing gearscore as we speak… 😉
I’d love to respond properly, but I am currently camping on the southern tip of the Aussie mainland… Wison’s Prom
absolutely awe inspiring… Wish you were here… Bloody glad I am!
Well I might be sunburnt and knackered… but between Wilson’s Prom & the Mornington Peninsula, I couldn’t have asked for 4 better days.. weather wise and experience wise…
@Zymurg: There is an addon called “Elitist Group” on curse that does just that. It is similar to Gearscore, but will also warn of unenchented/ungemmed items or items who does not belong to the players spec.
It is still in beta so there are occasionally wrong alerts, but the author is quick to release new versions if you report any wrong things you see.
There have been a couple of reviews/guides about this in the last week… Nibuca at Mystic Chicanery and on TwistedNether Blog as well (from memory)
both blogs should b. In my ReadByGnome page (tab at top) if you want more info
I like the ability of wow-heroes & wowhead to point out bad/missing gems & enchants. I don’t care about the numbers… But then, I use itfor myself, not looking at others.
BUT, since the only in-game addon I’ve seen is GS, I’ll use it as a VERY basic metric for:
– am *I* geared enough for a given instance
– is the tank geared enough , or do I need to hold back
– is the healer geared enough, or do I need to be careful
– if I’m in an ICC 5 man, are the other DPS geared enough
As has been mentioned over & over, having the gear doesn’t mean anything about skill, but being TOO low can also mean that you simply can’t handle something, regardless of how skilled you are.
Other than that, my only “care” about GS is that I can mouse over folks doing laps in Dal, and if I see a high scored fellow Ret-Pal, I can review his gear to see if it’s anything I want to get. (an odd note: on my server, I’ve only run across a couple geared Rets. We seem rather rare)
As Thomas mentioned above Elisist group does a fair job of this, including it’s opinion on gemming etc…
I have GSlite installed. Primarily for my own self evaluation, but I do sometimes note others GearScore.
I noticed the healers GS in FoS the other night… Feared he might not be up to the task.
2 deaths before the 1st boss
2 wipes at the 1st boss
the healer was a little low for that place
Hey guys,
Ive got like 4 lvl 80s, and do a lot of pugs on the alts.
U cant believe the ammount of brainless people I see in raids.
One mage with 4/5 T9 (232) and all around avg gear was 226+ – Was doing 2k in totc 25.
and he got the achievement 4/5 totc 25 bosses, by most of the time being afk or dead.
Achievements are nothing.
Gear score is nothing.
There is a new Addon called ElitistGroup, that you should check out.
It tracks History of people , And u can make notes about pugs and store it. LIke there is a guy that does not understand english at all.. on my server its fatal..
Ouch…
Of course many of my best acheivements and boss kills were acheived while eating dirt…
Then there are folks like Brigwyn doing a catch up round with the guild.. 2, maybe 3 raids, geared to the teeth now and enjoyed from the lovely haze of death…
I joke Brig, I joke… I’d have you by my side any day, especially with that big … gun … you are so fond of stroking…
FYI some Achievements ofc matter
Herald of the titan
Dedicated instanity
Those where u cant be carried and need to put in some effort your self.
Why do achievements have any more significance than gears score?
A person can be carried equaly through a 25 man raid for example as they could through a 5 man heroic.
Thus meaning you can have a great gear score and no end of achievements and still be carried.
I agree that generally achievements are as irrelevant as GS, which is what Charly said in the 1st comment.
However there are some achievements that you would have to be damn lucky to be carried through if you are undergeared AND stupid (or ignorant of the strategy at the very least).
Actually that’s one of the things that is annoying me about the weekly raids.
If everyone is so overgeared and knowledgeable, why aren’t we going for Sarth3D achievements?
Or other weekly boss related achievements… might as well make it fun rather than just ZzzzzDPSZzzzDPS
[…] love post, I could find something fantastic to link to at Gnomer’s Place – but I found this story of a difficult Ulduar run absolutely hilarious. Okay, I probably wouldn’t if I’d been there but still… […]
The accepted method of standard Gearscore and achievement checking means nothing, or as you said it’s a way of something covering themselves in assuming you can perform in the raid. In my case a lot of times it means was that my guild carried me through it, whether it was heroics when I was a new 80 or ToC25 – I mean sure I finished it, but I had no idea what I was doing.
I think a realistic way to use both gearscore and achievements is:
1) What is required of this instance/raid (as in really required, not desired.. ICC in GS2,000 gear will be a stretch unless you are intentionally being carried and the rest of the raid are happy for you to enjoy the fight face down).
2) Does your gear score meet, or exceed this number (ie. you can’t come with 2,000… 4,500 is fine, 6,000 is overkill, but sure come along)
3) Achievements are a hard one. I have seen people advertising for x10 achievements ofr x25 raids – makes some sense, but it is difficult to link your main’s achievements when you are on an alt.
Likewise you may be as, if not more familiar than many people in the raid via your own research.
Now if GS had a 2-way arrangement, where when you supply your GS/Achievements, the party/raids was returned to you as a summary… then you would know if you were just being abused