However, given Blizzard’s stated dislike for the way players have treated gearscore, I doubt they’d ever expose it to us.  We’ve proven that we can’t have nice things.  :)

The addon calculated your score using the standard unit inspection API.  If you could inspect someone, you could see what gearscore the addon had calculated for you.

Thankfully, 3.3 seems to have killed the gearscore problem – for the most part.  You still see people asking for minimums in raids, but the dungeon finder doesn’t let you pick and choose – and once you’re faced with waiting 15 minutes to kick someone you think is undergeared vs just finishing the dungeon, most people choose the latter.

and when you join PUG   they will NEED to inspect  :)
and if you are ok (proper equpmnet, good soced )  you will have no problems  even if  you are  200-300GS under the requierments  ;)

On the other hand, a “good player” with still low-end (assuming he’s just about to level/farm/equip the character) equipment is unlikely to sign-up for a high-end raid instance, because he knows just that. However it’s still faster than Be Imba! or WoW-Heroes if you want to know only this for a start.

For my guild’s toc25 alt run where we pug 5-10 players, however, we do use wowheroes. The number is a starting point, and useful at that. I don’t care how skilled you are, if you are in sub-2000 gear, you won’t be able to pull your weight, and in our alt runs, we need you to pull your weight. On the other hand, someone in lfg has a score of 2200; now, what does their spec look like? Are they gemmed and enchanted properly? Do they have achievements? All these things can be examined easily, and I prefer it to armory.
Of course the first question we ask on vent is: Does anyone know a hunter named Sylvl? Are they any good? If so, we don’t bother with wow-heroes at all.

It’s also very very easy to gear up a toon in a very short period of time. I took my resto shammy out of mothballs with a 1900 WH score; two weeks later I’m at 2400, so there’s no need to drag someone along in low gear unless I know them and know they’re good.

Altough i must agree that people being picky about others gear levels in Heroics need a reality check.

Fact – You can do a CoT: The Culling of Stratholme timed run with the highest dps being the tank with and overall 1800dps/s and the other 3 being around 1200, 1500 and 1700. I think that should pretty much say it all about the difficulty level of heroics.

This whole gear-score thing seems to be more of a e-peen meter really. At least the only reason i use gear-score is to compare, how well geared of a warlock my main is compared to other’s on the realm, or how well my alt warrior tank is doing compared to others. (Wow-heroes then).

However be.imba.hu is a very nice tool, although not because of the total gear score numbers, but more for the times when you are lazy and want a nice overview of an applicants enchants and gemming options.

PS. Still a very nice blog, keep writing

Yay for anecdotal evidence and outliers

That said, I should probably refrain from commenting because I’m a healer and no one has explicitely rejected me for gear reasons. I will say though that people are often amazingly intolerant of wipes, blaming the tank or healer instantly and bailing on the group (much, much more so on my main’s server which is higher-pop and further-progressed) without stopping to think about what actually caused it (ninja-pulling 3 groups with Typhoon being my personal favourite). I understand wanting a hassle-free run, but a single hiccup makes people give up.

On-topic, I do use GearScore myself, not as a proxy for skill but to try and predict in advance who will be least tough, if the tank will need extra attention, or if I’ll need to go into mana-conservation mode for a long, drawn-out fight. It has its uses, and obviously abuses too.