
In my last article, a comment led me to another blog post which in turn led me to a recently released addon called Experience. The idea behind the addon is that when you target someone, it queries their character statistics to see how many times they have killed the bosses of each instance in the game, converting that to a measure of how much of the game they have experienced.
Like GearScore, this is just a tool to provide quick insight into another player. The graphic above is of a 5-man group I ran CoS heroic with last night: as you can see, most of them were very inexperienced, but we breezed through the timed run only slightly slower than my personal best (5 minutes remaining instead of 8). We then followed that up with a heroic Trial of the Champion run that featured none of the deaths or “stupid” moments that are a hallmark of PUG runs in that place.
On it’s own, this mod gives a useful but far from complete view of players. It has a few rough edges:
- outside of combat, the boxes above appear every time you target someone. I really don’t care about seeing experience for people I’m not grouped with, so I use the LDB toggle to disable it except when I first join a group, but the LDB launcher defaults to “on” and doesn’t remember the setting from session to session.
- the total experience value isn’t very useful for people who do 10 or 25 person raids exclusively.
- the default setting is to require you to kill a boss 3 times to get 100% experience. For example, I’ve only killed Malygos-25 once, so I get a 33.3% rating. You can change this via a slider – I find 2 kills to be more useful.
- it doesn’t appear to count Onyxia. As the addon was only came out on Oct 20th I’m not sure if this is an oversight or intentional.
- As Malevica pointed out, not having the statistics be account-wide doesn’t tell me anything about the player. I doubt that all the members of the above group were new 80s based upon their performance.
GearScore No More
I’ve decided to ditch GearScore and use Experience for a few weeks to see if it gives me a better view of what to look out for when doing pickup groups.
Even just from testing it last night, there were some moments when the experience value didn’t match performance. The member with 9.2% total experience was pushing 4.5k DPS on bosses, which is more than you might expect from someone who had only done heroics (and even then not all of them). In his case, he had been farming both EoC and EoT gear since the last patch, as he was sporting mostly tier 8.5 / 9 gear and obviously knew his class well.
As a tool for guild recruiting, I would be more comfortable using either Experience on its own or in conjunction with Gearscore to set a minimum bar for applicants. I would probably set the threshold to one, just to see which instances an applicant had run to completion rather than using the default of three.
I don’t want to spend this entire post talking about this addon. What I really want to discuss is the concept of experience, not just in terms of the content you’ve completed but how experienced you are at WoW in general.
(more) How Inexperienced are You?...




