Elitist Group is an addon that tries to outdo GearScore by being more realistic in the information it provides to raid leaders. It skips scanning everyone around you to save on resources and ditches the “one number” holy grail that people are accustomed to. Instead it’s an addon that contains ratings, notes, and an overall view of each member’s gear.

The addon simply requires you to type in /eg at which point you’ll see a list of everyone within range’s gear in your current group or raid. It will rate each player based on their average gear level (the average level of all of their gear), show if they have any bad enchants and if they’re wearing gear that’s not for their spec. This way you can easily tell if they’re a competent enough player in decent gear or if they’re total fail and need the boot.

Additionally, it searches achievements and gives you a list what they have experienced before. While not necessarily ground breaking stuff, it does provide an easy way to know if someone is new to raiding or if someone is really a pro.

So what do we think about this addon? Keep reading to find out.

Mod Name: Elitist Group
Category: Raid Tool
Author: Shadowed
Version Reviewed:1.7.2
Homepage: Click Here!

Elitist Group Review

The interface is a bit lacking, but gets the job done

The first thing that you have to understand is that Elitist Group (EG) is not GearScore (GS). It doesn’t give you a single number based off of the ilvl of everyone’s gear and it doesn’t take up a ton of resources as it scans everyone standing around you. EG simply takes your group/raid and tells you if people are gemmed/enchanted properly, if they’re wearing the right gear, the average ilvl of the gear they’re wearing, and any saved notes you or someone you’ve traded notes with have made.

Which is better? Well with GS you get a simple number and an advanced screen if you want to pull it up. You can easily tell if someone is wearing nothing or if they’re in really good gear. However, it doesn’t tell you much more than that. With the amount of welfare gear out there and the ability to easily faceroll parts of ICC gear doesn’t tell you anything. So when forming a PUG all that GS will do is answer the question “are they wearing decent gear” at which point it’ll tell you yes or no. GS also is more of an e-peen measuring tool where you try to get a number as high as possible to brag about. On the other hand, EG is a raid leader’s tool designed to filter out the terrible players and keep the good ones around..

You type /eg and then are presented with a list of everyone inside of your group/raid. You can click down the list and see if a player has properly enchanted/gemmed their gear, if they’re wearing stuff for their spec, and what the average ilvl is. Then a judgment based on their gear on what they should run. Based on all of this you can determine if they’re a total scrub (for example, by stacking attack power on a healer) or if they’re someone worth bringing along. To me this seems like a good way to deal with it, but I don’t think it’s perfect.

As an additional feature, you can also take notes on individual players. This was a feature I found to be somewhat lacking because I personally don’t want to take down notes on players. That seems a bit obsessive, but I could see how it’d be helpful if you ran a ton of PUGs and wanted to blacklist that guy who was leveling up his weapon skills then died in a fire. You can trade notes, but that requires effort. I am not a huge fan of effort to gain utility from an addon.

I honestly don’t see EG as a replacement for GearScore because it’s not a judge-o-tron. It doesn’t just judge a player when you hover over them and tell you an arbitrary number. It tells you the simple facts about players in the raid. That part of the tool I can truly respect. However, to use it you have to type /eg, find your raid member, then look over the data. If you want to make a note then you have to use your keyboard and type stuff up. This to me is more effort because I don’t generally care enough to type notes about players.

On the other hand, GearScore requires no effort. Just a hover of the mouse and it tells you absolutely nothing at all beyond a base number. EG unfortunately doesn’t provide that same degree of simple interaction. So I would say that for a raid leader out there, the best solution is to combine both GS and EG. If you see someone with a low GearScore, then you may want to load up EG and look ‘em over to gain more insight as to what their score means. If their gear is really terrible then it may be time to kick ‘em out.

There is often a debate about these mods and a lot of people who either love or hate them. I personally don’t see a problem with PUG raid leaders using mods to help determine if someone is going to fail or not. It doesn’t hurt my feelings if they don’t want me because they want some super high number or whatever because I can usually do anything inside of my guild, but for those without that liberty it can be a frustrating experience. To that, I say, start your own raids and run ‘em the way you want. If people want to use mods then let them. After all, it’s tough trying to get together a group of people to do content that most guilds do together.

With that said I think that Elitist Group is a great mod and does exactly what it promises. It requires a bit too much effort though, which is something I dislike when using mods, and it’s not going to save your raid every single time. It does give you an idea if someone isn’t in the right gear, if someone is gemming wrong, which is a pretty good alternative to arbitrary ratings, but it certainly isn’t perfect. So if you lead raids a lot or want to see how a lot of PUG raid leaders see you then this is a good mod to have. Otherwise you can just forget about it and it wouldn’t be that huge of a loss.