Gearscore? Gearscore! GEARSCORE!?!?!

Oh GearScore....how I loathe you...no, I don't loathe GearScore, I love it, no I hate it...I, I'm undecided.

As anyone who's played WoW in the past few months knows GearScore (and others of it's ilk) is a handy little mod that will, at best application, give a smart player and guilds an idea of what level of content a given character will work best in based on their current gear(score). At worstest it's a tool for tools to be elitist jerks (and not the cool spreadsheet type of EJ either). It lends weight to the myth among 'bads' that gear=quality of performance (not going to say skill per se as bads don't know what skill is, skillz? yes, skill, no). One problem with 'raw' GearScore (checking score without checking the actual gear) is it's based on ILevel and not the actual gear so much. I could put on a caster ring that's Ilevel 258 and it would give a healthy bump to my GS. As long as no one inspected me in great detail, they'd never know. I've had people in my guild joke about gettin inappropriate gear for their class just to increase their GS (at least I think they were joking...it was Punx).

Despite the abuse of GearScore, I like it for almost the same reasons. I like having an in-game mod that says, yes, you are ready for ToC raids, at least 10 man content. It does bother me that I let it affect my gear choices. When I switched from Cryptfiend's Bite to dual Rondels I was able to switch out my hit trinket to a crit trinket and my GearScore dropped. I checked the numbers on femaledwarf and the change to the daggers and crit trinket was a noticeable increase, but the slight decrease in my GearScore bothered me needlessly.

I beleive players have embraced GearScore due to Blizzard's removal of 'gating' for progression. In 'Vanilla' WoW the paths to MC, Onyxia, BWL, AQ and Naxxramas were a series of attunement quests that involved a guild working together to get at least 40 members ready to just walk through the front door to begin raiding, to say nothing of minimum gear for raiding. Gear itemization in pre-BC was horrendous and really only a consideration at endgame levels. The same was true of Burning Crusade's early raid content, a rather simplistic quest series for Karazhan, that just meant running a few instances. And a series of raids and quests for Black Temple that was so complicated an actual flow chart was needed to follow it. But all of these were removed at some point near the end of BC and there are none in Wrath content at all. So with a lack of gating imposed by the devs, players have found third-party mods and in-game tools to create their own gating. If GearScore isn't enough of an indication of preparedness, and it's not, raid leaders will demand linked Achievements that prove that the player has at least attended the raid to a full clear at least once.

Some players complain that the whole thing smacks of elitism, and it does, but in the case of a successful raid environment, some elitism is required. But the system isn't perfect, myself and other guildies have been in plenty of scenarios where a person with an 'indicative' GS (a GS that suggest that the player would do well in the current content) fails in the reality of a raid. A Naxx 10 pug raid my friend was healing on his Druid where the average GS on the DPS (mostly hunters and mages) was around 4000, high enough for Ulduar and ToC 10. The highest DPS was around 1500. They wiped on Patchwerk when he enraged with 40% health remaining, the raid quickly disbanded after that. Players with a GearScore just under 4K should be able to produce at least 2500 dps, with the proper talents and rotations (read that as knowledge and skill).

I love GearScore, I hate GearScore, I think GearScore is filling in a gap that Blizzard left when they removed gating from the raid experience, I have to stop including GearScore as a stat when I'm itemizing!