Gear Score Lamentations

Friday, March 12, 2010

Yes this is another gear score rant. Like so many others out there, Svenn decries gear score as one of the pervading evils of our time. His reasoning however, differs some from the main complaints- it doesn’t tell you if they can play or not, if they are specced/ gemmed wrong, etc. Those are all true, but that is not what Svenn has a problem with.

In a time before gear score, Svenn assumed that if he performed poorly on the meters he needed more gear. Likewise, he assumed as much of others as well. Occasionally he would inspect other toons to see just what their gear was like to help explain an especially bad performance, but by and large, he too accepted that performance was a function of gear.
Gear score shatters that illusion. There is no way to hide from the little popup box with numbers, be they Red, Orange, Purple, or Blue. Sure Svenn could uninstall the addon, but others would still run it, others who may not be as considerate in their feedback.

The true tragedy is not the mindless “LFM Uld10 must have 5k gear score” spam (though it is completely stupid). No, it lies in the good players who manage their way into a raid with a low gear score, outperform everyone else there relative to their gear score, yet get no recognition. It lies in the quantification of a toon’s worth based on a sum of items assigned values arbitrarily according to lvl. It lies in the loss of innocence we once had, and assigning everyone the benefit of the doubt. That being said…



Mr. Awesome DK lolz Tank,
Thanks for bailing on my group because the gear scores were to low. I would have been the best heals you ever had. The 3.5k gearscore hunter in some ToC/craftable epics and quest blues (Hanka) does ~3K DPS! We finished the run in 16minutes with the next tank in the que. Everyone to include the healer (me) did over 1.5K DPS. I hope your next run went smoothly and took less than a 60 seconds, considering your 15 minute deserter debuff.

With Bubbles and Renews,
Ottar


Penance is for DPSing and last minute saves when I tab back in from /4chan. Silly tank :)

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Anonymous said...

I recently trollified my previous Draenei shaman (gasp, I know) and transferred her to a server where my buddy plays Horde because it's nice to be able to go and hang out without "Oh boy, let's keep leveling now!" She was never a much-played character, but I've pugged with her a litle bit since transferring.

Nobody has called me out for 'bad gear score' but there have been generalized complaints. "Let's pick this up and go faster guys," etc. as well as random tank and healer quits without a word. The funniest thing is that these tanks/and or healers leave...pretty much right before the last boss of an instance. (In Nexus, before the tree guy when he was the last boss we had. In Utgarde Pinnacle, after Skadi). Our replacements actually said "Your tank and healer ditched you? Why would they leave right then, that doesn't make any sense." I can only surmise the group wasn't "leet" enough for them. I was having a hard time beating the paladin tank's damage. My shaman is about geared enough for Ulduar 10-ToC 10 maybe (smattering of 226, 219, 200 epics) so it isn't like she's wearing greens and blues. I can do just shy of 3K DPS. Sure, it's not like my boomkin who can do about 5K with ICC gear but... she's not exactly doing 800 or something. There's nothing drastically WRONG. She's just a bit newer. Except that people seem to have no patience for people being newer. Even when "new" in this case is an alt more or less geared for the mid-tier of raiding rather than geared to the teeth with 251 and 261 stuff.

March 14, 2010 at 8:21 AM

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