Was Gearscore a helpful addon for it's time?

[Airlick]

No, it was the scummiest add on around and deserved to be buried. And this is coming from someone who had LK 10 HC on farm and a fair few LK 25 man hc kills, not someone salty because they couldn't get into a group

Not a very big achievement... Every half dedicated raider had at least 11/12 25HC done. I was also organizing a lot of pugs on alts in addition to that (going for some 7 bosses usually) and I'd cut myself if I had to gear check every pugger, I'd cut myself - assuming I wasn't cut earlier by the people who joined my groups and had to wait for me.

There's a reason we have a built-in Gearscore for 3 x-pacs now. It helps. It speeds organizing pugs up. And if you only raid with your guild, you won't have any issue with people demanding higher ilvl than you have.

[Stanislav]

You know people see the highest ilvl possible, right? No one sees your equipped ilvl.

So yeah, when you invited at 915 guy, he was probably 909 or some shit.

you know that isnt true right? your max equippable ilvl is showing, depending on what legenderies and gear you got in those slots you can game it for 2-3 ilvl gain, thats not the problem tho, the biggest problem is people putting on shitty high ilvl gear and its up to 10ilvl, pvp trinkets with vers for example.

[McNeil]

The addon was fine, its the community that completely misused it.

[ONCHEhap]

Why would anyone with 900+ want to bother with EN? That raid is shit and only drops shitty looking gear, so transmog isn't a valid reason either.

Titanforged BiS trinkets

[Kanegasi]

It was good for personal use, so you can easily see what enchants and gems you need, but the epeen portion was terrible. AMR basically fulfills GearScore's role now, just without the score.

[A dot Ham]

On the rare occasion I pug it / go on alts, I set a base line of 875-880, usually get a few 900+ then I take a handful of people who are 865+ ish.

I never ask for curve, I just point blank ask them to be honest and tell me their experience, if they've said they've cleared it, I believe them. If they say they've done some of it, or read up on it I believe them. I have three PUG rules,

1) If you're a dick to someone, you get booted
2) If you're not sure what to do ask, I'd rather take 5 minutes to explain it before an encounter than for someone to cause a wipe for having a debuff and fucking up etc.
3) You have two strikes, if you pull for a tank twice, you're out.

I've been running EN, TOV normal + hc for months and most weeks NH normal, I've only ever had one group wipe on anything and that was Drakes HC with a group of mostly 900s+ pulling everything and fucking up their debuffs thinking they are the the shit. I actually get less shit in groups when it's closer to the raid avg loot drops than over geared groups.

Regardless of all that,

Gearscore was a nightmare, the creators set their own biased score on to gear and tried to pass it off as official / accurate / best way of doing it. The scores were insanely high to what the ilvl were (which could be viewed on a web browser). Trinkets and Weps were given stupidly large scores in ratio to drop rates / what was available per reset. When the first Shadowmourne appeared on the servers the avg required to enter also shot up.

You also need to take into account availability of gear, in wrath if you only did ICC 10 man normal or 25 man normal, you were stuck at 251. There was a few piece of gear you could get from vendors, but no titanforging, no valor upgrades, no worldquests infact no quests which rewarded gear. Essentially, if you didn't start raiding before that add on came out, you were screwed.

And I'm not throwing the entirety of the blame on the add on, the community can take some shit as well, frankly they abused that add on. Asking for stupidly high requirements to enter, then belittling those who asked to come on alts. Hell, I remember setting up a fair few groups and potential members asked me what was the GS requirement, I'd say I don't use that and they'd point blank refused to join regardless people had achis or I amoury checked them.

Bummer. I was going to try and paint you as ridiculous and unreasonable for requiring 925 for normal... carry on.

[TickTickTick]

Well, it was nice for me to have to brag out about my GS compared to others (our guild was the first on ally side on my server) and getting the whispers about it, but other than that... Its not like pugs were super popular back then, if you werent in a guild you just did trash runs or first wing on 25 norm at most... So I guess back then its sole purpose was to brag out how good gear you have, but since there wasnt transmo yet, it was already visible by your visuals, so...

Yeah, fuck gearscore in the end.

[Kagdar]

It did the same thing that ilvl currently does. i.e. make people who create pugs not invite new fresh lvl max characters.

It didn't tell if the players where any good just like ilvl currently doesn't tell either.

I pugged a raid with my hunter and i was like 3 points below the gearscore the leader was asking, told him i had cleared the raid in heroic mode on my main. Managed to out dps the 2 other hunters that were way highter gearscore than me. Same stuff happen all the time now too with ilvl. Problem now is that you can get titanforged procs just doing quests and be super high ilvl without knowing how to raid/mythic+

[McFuu]

No.
It helped ruin the game, while giving us a useful metric. It's not Blizz's or the Addon creator's fault though. They couldn't know what they were showing the wow population would turn into full blown cancer for a couple of expansions.

Like the idiots who want 900 ilvl for say normal Tomb of Sargeras (I guarantee you will see this). When TOS drops ilvl 900 gear. So then you ask them if the chicken or the egg came first, but then you find out the chicken was a chupacabra and the egg hatched a raptor.

People have relaxed a little bit off of ilvl recently I noticed. Probably because raiding is dependent on how many people enter the raid. Where as before it was a clear cut hardcap of possible damage to get over.

[Deleted]

You see ilvl in the group finder, which is the only place you really need to see it. If someone is standing in front of you, all you really need to do is inspect them and glance at their artifact ilvl, which should give you a quick idea of their progression. Of course, there's rarely ever a reason to take the ilvl of someone standing next to you.

Group finder shows you total Ilv its can be cheated
Personally i use ERT to scan players in my group. If they have this addon too i can see anything including their Artefact traits and relics

[Archmage Alodi]

It was much better than iLvl since weapons and trinkets gave more GS.

[nekobaka]

I would still armory many in particular those at the lower end or if pushing stuff for bosses the average guild could not do. I would take players bellow the advertised threshold based on the armory. The addon was a convenient tool that made group forming easier and faster which lead to less dropped players during forming which would prolong the forming of the group and with it increase the chances for more players to leave along with more time actually raiding.

Prior to GS, group leaders inspected and armoried players. Restrictive groups based on gear have always existed.

[Exac]

Just wanting to get some opinions on this matter. Do you think Gearscore was a useful addon for when it was used in Wrath mostly?

Yes. It enabled us to get dungeons done without noobs.

[Kokolums]

The correct way to play is the opposite of gearscore / ilvl / parses.

[Ortus]

No it wasnt it just started the cancerus "X ILVL REQUIRED FOR RAIDING"-mentality
(pro tip: neither gearscore nor ilevel tells you how well a player plays his toon)

Because the persistent meme that being undergeared is somehow more likely to produce exceptional players is entirely based in fact.

The idea that average skill level would somehow inversely correlate with playtime and gear level is the most ridiculous thing that still gets parroted in this community.

TL DR the number of idiots is constant with gear, so take the one where the floor is higher, duh?

[Deleted]

GS alone never worked (like ilvl today). Most "only GS" groups were not very successful, usually never finished the whole raid or it took ages with a lot of player switches. Like nowadays its quite impossible to pug new hc content in the first 2/3/4/5 weeks while in a usual guild it takes a few attempts on day one.

The GS tool was an addon for tryharders without any kind of knowledge about the game but the mood to start a self-running raid. In most cases the raid opener didnt matched his own GS requirements and usually had no idea about a proper raid setup and boss mechanics.

[Kokolums]

Because the persistent meme that being undergeared is somehow more likely to produce exceptional players is entirely based in fact.

The idea that average skill level would somehow inversely correlate with playtime and gear level is the most ridiculous thing that still gets parroted in this community.

TL DR the number of idiots is constant with gear, so take the one where the floor is higher, duh?

Bill Belichick has 5 Super Bowl rings with the Patriots. He's at the top of his profession. And he'd completely and utterly disagree with you.

The Patriots are one of the youngest teams in the NFL. They actually have very average talent. There are a lot more talented teams in the NFL. What really separates Belichick from everyone else is he TEACHES his players. He gets young, versatile players and teaches them how to perform. Most "leaders" don't teach. Most leaders in this world run something like a Gearscore system, where they recruit the guys with the top scores and toss them on the team and let them sink or swim. That management style SUCKS. Belichick wins because he does it the correct way. He gets young hungry guys and teaches the crap out of them. Its a lost art.

If Belichick ran a WoW guild, he'd grab a group of 25 nobodies and organize them into teaching sessions to work on everyone's DPS or heals or tanking on a personal level until everyone could do it well. Then he'd set world firsts with a group of nobodies.

Today's WoW is so antisocial that the correct way to lead is pretty much unknown by any player.

Unfortunately, when you write what you did, you are telling everyone that you are untrained. You don't have a clue how to lead or manage a team.

[Gryphoon]

I don't invite anyone to my groups unless they have at bare minimum 900 ilvl. And thats for any content, even older raids like EN and NH.

And this is why it was bad, and still is with iLvl. People wanting to catch up gearwise before raids are designated to Broken Shore because people require you to outgear the place you are going to for some reason. Well, I guess the reason is because the leader is so bad he wants to get carried, which I see is 99% of the cases.

The biggest problem it did was make people equip gear that even had the wrong main stat or PvP gear to boost the iLvl so they got invited, then dragged the raid down because their itemization was pure shit. If I were to actually equip my highest iLvl gear I'd lose DPS since Int is such a horrible scaling factor to Mage. Having wrong subs is detrimental.

[Deleted]

It was extremely helpful, that's why such an enormous number of people used it to the extent its effectively built into the game today, in a sense its actually better than current average ilvl cause I believe gearscore gave weightings to different gearslots. It was a godsend for quickly picking up pugs for content.

All that aside the tantrums people would throw when I jokingly asked for 6k gearscore for Naxx and Eye made the addon worth it alone.

[Ortus]

Bill Belichick has 5 Super Bowl rings with the Patriots. He's at the top of his profession. And he'd completely and utterly disagree with you.

The Patriots are one of the youngest teams in the NFL. They actually have very average talent. There are a lot more talented teams in the NFL. What really separates Belichick from everyone else is he TEACHES his players. He gets young, versatile players and teaches them how to perform. Most "leaders" don't teach. Most leaders in this world run something like a Gearscore system, where they recruit the guys with the top scores and toss them on the team and let them sink or swim. That management style SUCKS. Belichick wins because he does it the correct way. He gets young hungry guys and teaches the crap out of them. Its a lost art.

If Belichick ran a WoW guild, he'd grab a group of 25 nobodies and organize them into teaching sessions to work on everyone's DPS or heals or tanking on a personal level until everyone could do it well. Then he'd set world firsts with a group of nobodies.

Today's WoW is so antisocial that the correct way to lead is pretty much unknown by any player.

Unfortunately, when you write what you did, you are telling everyone that you are untrained. You don't have a clue how to lead or manage a team.

It has nothing to do with teamwork because you're collecting players that are a certain skill level and expecting them to operate at the same skill level, not grooming a bunch of unskilled idiots over a long period of time.

Obviously you can turn anyone into a Mythic raider given enough time, but an NH pug runs for an hour, why are you trying to argue that people will get better after hundreds of hours of training?