Gear Score – Worth Our Time?
Simple Answer, NO!
I have one of the highest gear scores on our server, so I consistenly get spammed with tells from other priests who want to know my stats (HPS, Spirit, Haste, etc).
To be honest, gear score has NOTHING to do with the quality of the player. All gear score tells you is where you’re getting your loot from & what encounters you are able to “handle”. Even this is misleading to an extent.
My max gear score is 5200 roughly atm. But, I’ll guarantee you that I don’t wear all my MAX pieces in holy or disc or any spec/style. I’m a hodge-podge of gear right now. Some of the best items in the game may have a 200 ilvl (trinkets in particular). So b/c someone’s using a 200 lvl trink, does this mean they’re worse or a poorer player than someone wearing a 245 trink? OF course not!
Ultimately, don’t rely on gear score for anything other than it will tell you if someone’s getting NEW gear. Other than that, it doesn’t matter. Skills determine a player, gear helps make that player more efficient.
BobTurkey said,
September 10, 2009 at 7:46 pm
Very true.
Its a general indicator of the gear level of the player only.
Gobble gobble.
Simo said,
September 27, 2009 at 6:55 am
Gear score can be very useful to check, especially tanks absolutely need enough gear for raids, no amount of skill will help for ever if they get hit too hard.
healingbuddy said,
September 27, 2009 at 11:41 pm
I never said gear score isn’t useful, I’m merely stating that it isn’t everything. Obviously tanks need to have certain gear, just as dps & healers do too, to successfully complete an instance. But a perfect example happened to my alt in a pug for 25-man ony. We had an alt in the guild who’s gear score was 3.9k. The raid leader thought this was TOO low for him to be fighting ony (lvl 80). They invited the dude (dk btw) anyway, he goes in there & is 3rd on melee dmg/dps. He beat out 2 other dks that had almost 500 more pts in gearscore than him, neither of which were tanks…
Ultimately, you need the gear to be in a certain instance you encounter, but it’s not ALL about the score. One of the best librams for paly tanks right now is a 219 libram, not the 245 from TOC… Still to this day, one of our best trinkets is from Sarth 2/3D… Another perfect example is for Anub HM 25, it’s been suggested that tanks pick up specific pieces from Naxx & Ulduar (NOT TOC) to do the fight because of the item quality, not number.
Again, as I stated in the original post… gear score merely looks at the total number of ilvl pieces. It doesn’t look at what the pieces bring to the table as far as your “job” in a raid. So while someone may have a 5.2k gear score, if they’re mixing dps/healing gear, they could be hurting themselves more. Gear score is a good read on where the person’s been and what they’re available to do. It should never be used to determine skill – that’s what my post was originally stating.
If you go in to Ulduar/TOC with some greens, it doesn’t mean instant fail, it just means you need to be more skilled about what you do. Of course you will be a bit lower than others who have some Ulduar/TOC gear, but it’s not impossible (my alt mage is a perfect example).
I hope this has clarified some things for you, if not, ignore my ramblings