style="">You know what they
say about the size of your gear score…
The
great gear debate of World
of Warcraft marches on. Anyone
who has finished Wintergrasp after a
win
knows the routine in general chat: “4k DPS, 4800 gear score
lfg
25 VOA” or
something along those lines. If you don’t know what your gear
score is or what
the term refers to, read up on the
href="http://www.wowwiki.com/Gear_score">WoWwiki
and you’ll see the different flavors of gear scores. This
article
isn’t about
which gear scores are more accurate, it’s about the fact that
gear scores have
become the defacto noob-meter.
src="/image/view/74977">
As
pointed out in our previous articles;
href="http://www.tentonhammer.com/node/74471">
style="">Raiding Isn’t Everything,
and
href="http://www.tentonhammer.com/node/74471">
style="">Overgeared
and Underskilled,
good gear
is now easier to get than at any time in the history of the game. As
both a
blessing and curse, the ways to evaluate skill and or game knowledge is
muddied
even further than it once was. Without putting too much thought into
roles (I
know a tank with a 3k gear score can’t tank hard mode TotC),
but
for
conversation sake, which is more valuable to your raid:
style="">
style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; font-size: 7pt; line-height: normal; font-size-adjust: none; font-stretch: normal;">
- A player who has cleared
hard modes
in Ulduar
and TotC on his/her main but is now on an alt with a gear of 3,800, or -
style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">A player
who has played solo in
Battlegrounds
and run daily heroics to get a gear score of 4,200, or - Your beer drinking buddy
The
obvious answer is #3, and if you pick anyone
else then
you are playing the game for the wrong reason! Seriously though, in
today’s
game #2 will be chosen over #1 almost every time. Even though
it’s not a fair
representation of a person’s skill or knowledge, gear score
will
get you places
– in the real world we call it the SAT or ACT test.
style="">It don’t mean a thing
if it ain’t got that bling.
Gear
scoring was always lingering on the fringes
until
Blizzard made it a requirement. The Flame Leviathan fight in Ulduar
makes gear
scoring mandatory. For the uninitiated, this
fight puts players into
vehicles,
and the vehicles strength/health scale with the gear score of the
player
driving. This means that players in the fight put on their best gear
score
items, regardless of spec (a healer may put on a DPS belt because it
has a
higher iLevel and thus a better gear score). In the blink of an eye
gear
scoring addons/mods and raid-wide gear scoring became yet another tool
for
puffing out your chest or hanging your head in shame –
“hey, are you even
wearing any gear, I’ve never seen a score that low, and about
that DPS…”
style="width: 504px; height: 128px;" alt="Gear Scores"
src="/image/view/74978">
Whether
they meant to or not, another ancillary
score has
been added to the game to be analyzed, scrutinized and theorized. Whole
websites are now teaming with logarithms to help players better
understand how
their gear stacks up against others, and where the best upgrade options
reside.
Some of the tools are quite useful, but other times it feels like
splitting
hairs, “hey I need to run ABC dungeon for the Hammer of Much
Coolness so my
gear score will go up 2 points.”
style="">Gear Scoring, the new
attunement system
Gear
scores are nothing more than the latest in
attunements
albeit player created. You must have gear score of
“X” to
get into this raid,
hence this dungeon. It’s pretty smart on Blizzard’s
part
because now they don’t
have to police attunements and other hurdles to keep under geared
people from
attempting instances.
src="/image/view/74976"> class="MsoNormal">Well that's simple
enough. Think I'll start an alt.
style="">Adding to the Bartle
Battle
I know
that
href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bartle_Test">Bartle
says there
are four
types of gamers (Hunter, Killer, Explorer and Achievers), but
I’d
add a
corollary to his theory and say that in addition to the type of gamer,
people
are either math people or not. I’m sure you could weave that
into
his
descriptions, but I’ve noticed quite a few players who can
recite
their top
DPS, average DPS and required Raid DPS for various bosses (I wonder if
they
know their significant other’s birthday?). There are also
those
who try and
play the best they can, but won’t put the time in to
understand
the nuances of
cooldowns and rotations for maximizing output. Each of these types of
players
could have the exact same gear score and achievements.
href="http://www.gamerdna.com/quizzes/bartle-test-of-gamer-psychology">
style="border: 0px solid ; width: 371px; height: 290px;"
alt="Bartle Test"
src="/image/view/74975">
So who
do you take to the raid? How can you
reasonably
determine who is better? If WoW has taught me anything, it’s
that
persistence
rewards more than performance. If you really care about the player and
not the
character, find out a better method to assess their ability.
I’m
sure a few
questions asked in the right manner can yield answers that will provide
enough
information for raid leaders to make a decision.
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