Funny you say that, in my experience people with 900+ ilvl and 54 traits are almost always better than people without either of those things. People with better gear and more traits generally play the game more and also do harder content more often in order to get higher ilvl. On the flip side people with below 900 ilvl dont play the game as much or if they do they arent trying very hard or pushing high lvl content. These people arent the exception, they are the norm. The exceptions are people who are 900+ and still suck at the game, or people who are below 900 ilvl and are actually pretty damn good. Judging people based on their hp isnt smart for a few reasons, but thinking someone with shit gear is going to be an amazing player is way more stupid.
Obviously you can't judge an intangible aspect based on a single number.
There is a critical mass to HP where you can infer they are 900+ equipped with 54 traits and that's around 3.4mil+. Its a good place to start and it infers they have invested in that spec and have run enough content to get mythic gear or lucky titanforged gear to have a good chance of knowing what they are doing.
There's always a chance that the person is a degenerate who's going to pull sub 300k dps. There's nothing you can do to decrease the chance of this to 0.
So Im going to add something that I don't think has been mentioned yet... use your friends list. By this I mean that if you do find a good player, see if they usually are open to runs and friend them. Do enough of this and you PUG from a pool of people who you know are good vs starting from zero all of the time. Dont just add a single tank, add 3 or 4 or 5 because some will quit, others won't be up for a M+ next time (but might be the time after that), etc.
If it's a +10 through +12 most people are semi-competent enough to get through them, even if it's only a +1/+2 chest. 880 iLvl is more than enough. I require PUGs to at minimum join our discord server for runs, as honestly- weeding out people that won't join discord eliminates most shitters right from the start.
For my weekly +15, I either run with an established group of people I've met and added to battle swag, or with people in my guild.
Keystone Master is only relevant if it was earned before Nighthold opened, when there was a bit of challenge involved. So if someone links me Keystone Master with a November date, I'll invite them straight away. If it's in February or some other nonsense, I ask for relative raid/pvp achieves. Kind of sad this achieve has gone the way of AOTC, but I guess players at this point have more gold than sense anyway.
The only deceptive thing about using wowprogress is, you could be trimming your lists short because someone name changed/server transferred and lost all their progress. I have 600ish M+ ran any my page looks like this
When Mythic+ opened, I started doing this, because I'm a DPS and understand that there's 40 DPS at any time trying to join groups (having PUG mythic dungeons in WoD all xpac for those damn trinket boes)- if you stumble across a good healer, a solid tank or exceptional dps, add them to battleswag, it makes the process next week just a matter of sending out a 'who wants to run my +19 DHT?' broadcast.
Last edited by Mercane; 2017-03-20 at 10:46 PM.
There are so many +10 through +12 pugs, and it's such a push-over nowadays, that I'm not sure how you find people willing to join discord for that. Unless you advertise it as "push to 20" or something. Even then, I find that the "push" groups that start from lower pluses are very random, and it's generally not worth assuming that they are superior.
Also, are you playing on US? If you're playing on EU, then there's a language barrier. Just about anyone will agree to use voice communications for raids, since they will nearly never be required to speak. In smaller setting (5-mans) you can't really avoid it, and many players would not feel comfortable with that.
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Mythic+ logs don't really mean anything. Because very few people upload their logs for mythic+ runs. I do it all the time (unlisted) and I constantly see reminders of this. For example, a destruction lock in my random EoA+17 pug just a moment ago scored a 72% damage ranking because his parse is 2nd best out of 7 total. Not very informative.
The logs tell you even less about healers, since most quality runs will produce low healing rankings. Whereas many of my close-to-100% rankings come from very messy pugs where either someone kept on triple ass-pulling packs of mobs, or a tank could not figure his itemization choices and also forgot to bind most of his abilities. I mean, sure, I really enjoy such runs, and I also get nice rankings; but unfortunately it's hard to find the low-quality pug groups like those.
Yeah I'm on the US side of the pond, typically most decent players will expect discord at this point- I'm not super selective any more because I hardly ever PUG anything other than a random DPS here and there. There's only 2 dungeons that could drop an upgrade for me, so pushing anything higher than 17-18 isn't something I'm super interested in.
It can't stress enough how amazing it is to just talk to your pugs, recognize good players, thank them for not being shitters and add them to your battlenet friends. It makes filling spots super easy, and it's always nice to have a pool of good players if you feel like grinding AP on alts.
I look at, in no specific order:
- realm, region (no Russians, trying to avoid Outland EU players as well)
- ilvl
- class
- name (no harambe, kappa, -qt etc. Usually nerdraging tryhards)
@Teldorei I rather browse raid logs for m+ then the actual m+ logs themselves.
Easily the best method. Not to be a jerk, but Mythic Raiders tend to get priority also .
Those saying WoWProgress, I never understood how to gauge that properly, it only shows traits for one spec for example. Often times they can't look at the spec I'm currently apping for. Seems like more of a shortcut. Logs are certainly better.
Depends on what is is but generally for up to 15's I just look on wowprogress with a checklist.
[] 54 Traits
[] Ten or more +15's completed in time
[] Gear check (4 piece with at least one respectable legendary, gems+enchants)
[] Heroic Gul'dan or better (or whatever is the most recent content)
Thats actually a limit of the APi itself. It can only scan the first hundreds of dungeon by time for each key level.
That means of you make bad timers on 15+ or deplete the key there's a good chance the du geon wont count. And thats actually fine for judging a PUG.
wowprogress also give a mythic+ score. You can take 1400+ for a +15 without thinking twice. 1500+ if you want to multi chest it.
If every group was "link achievement" , or needed x amount of mythic runs, eventually no groups will be left.
Also I feel it's super easy to carry a healer and often don't vet them at all. If your tank is good and DPS is high enough things should die before healing becomes an issue.
I don't think I've ever pugged a tank though, not for a run where I'm going for the timer at least. Not unless my key is getting carried by a guild or something.