Is it that different?
Chances are that you’ve had a run-in with gearscore if you’ve been joining PUG groups in the last few months. Gearscore is an addon which calculates a number based upon the gear you’re wearing. It displays this information in the tooltip, and can query other people using the addon for their gearscore, adding it to the LFG interface.
The problem is that on many servers, people are becoming gearscore snobs. They refuse to invite someone to a PUG unless they have an unreasonably high gearscore. This makes it hard for anyone who hasn’t upgraded their gear to around the tier 8.5 level to get into groups.
There has been the expected level of outrage on the forums, with Blizzard being asked to ban the addon (which only goes to show that people don’t understand what it’s doing under the hood). Blizzard has acknowledged the problem, with Ghostcrawler even joking that they were going to put an easily obtainable epic shirt in the game with an item level of 300 just to poison the data this addon and others like it use.
Today, I’d like to talk about what GearScore is, what it isn’t, remind people of what the various scores correlate to in terms of content, and look at how useful GearScore is with regards to recruiting and other guild decisions.
The Addon
The GearScore addon can be downloaded here. There’s also a “lite” version here. The full version remembers the gearscore of people you mouseover or encounter, and so over time will take up more an more memory on your system. It also communicates with people in LFG who have the addon, displaying their gearscore for you. The lite version by comparison only does the calculation on mouseover and then forgets about it, trading higher CPU requirements for lower memory usage. Which you use is up to you.
The Score
The thing to remember is that GearScore is just a calculation. You feed numbers about each of your pieces of equipped gear, it adds them up and spits them out again. There are a few changes to the calculation to account for things like Titan’s Grip warriors (it averages the two weapons rather than adding them together) and classes that prioritize a specific slot (like Hunters), but for the most part it’s just adding up the result of a function whose input is the item quality (green / blue /purple) and item level.
Gearscore does not:
- consider gems / enchants
- consider achivements
- consider talents / glyphs
It’s just a measure of the item level of the gear you’re wearning.
What’s worse is that the GearScore addon does not use the same formula as some of the other armory-driven websites that list a gear score. GearScore gives my paladin’s DPS gear a 4300 score, but WoW Heroes gives the same gear a score of 2240, even though it still calls the value a “Gear Score”. Be Imba gives me 487.14, calling it a “PvE gear score”.
Just because GearScore gives bigger numbers doesn’t mean that it’s a better measure. Psychologically, we like big numbers. But the numbers only have meaning when placed in context. If I tell you that a place is “about 5 away”, you don’t know if I’m talking in terms of miles, kilometers, minutes or hours. Likewise, if I tell you that my gear scores 487.14 but you think I’m giving you the value from the GearScore addon, you’d expect me to be clad in level 45 quest greens.
When asking, giving or judging a gear score you have to know what measure you’re using.
