Gearscore, great addon or evil software?

Recently we have seen the Gearscore add-on gain popularity and widespread use. On the face of it this add-on give a player a score based on their equipment. So when you mouseover someone its puts a score in their tooltip. This allows you at a glance to see how well geared a player is, and therefore makes it allot easier putting a pug together as you dont need to me an expert in all classes to know if their gear is any good.

However, there are some bad points to Gearscore, that should make you think twice before using it!


What's your value?
Sadly people have stated to use gear score to rate the player, not just the gear. If you have under 4k you are considered a noob! This add-on allows people with little knowledge of other classes to think they know if someon is well equiped or not. Having a high gearscore is not always an indication of a well performing player. For example, earlier this week I was in VOA25 on my elemental shaman, my GS was about 4,100 and there was another ele shaman there with a 5,200 gear score. He was in full arena gear, I did more dps than him. GEARSCORE FAIL!!!!


Feeling a little slow?
Early on in the game Blizzard introduced a hidden chat channel for add-ons to communication to each other. Some add-ons are well written and use the minimal amount of information on this channel, some add-ons however are very poorly written and send massive amounts information which could be simplified if the add-on writer actually knew what he was doing.

So, what is the effect of this? Well you slow down, your game has to process every single one of these messages, even if you dont have the add-on your game still needs to read them to find out if it needs them or not. So Gearscore and other poorly written mods have a significant slowing effect on your game. If you want to see how much your add-ons and guildies add-ons are using then install spamFU, it details how much information yours and other players add-ons are sending vie the hidden channel.


It's all fair right?
Well no actually its not. There are hidden algorithms that apply handicaps to certain classes. For example hunters get a 30% nerf, so a hunters gearscore is actually only 70% of what it should be. That blows right? Well it gets worse. You also get heavily penalised if you are not wearing the maximum armour class for you character. Take my ele shaman for example, I wear spell caster gear, and there isn't a huge difference between some cloth, leather and mail items. However if I equip cloth or leather my gear score is penalised, because the half whit that wrote the add-on thinks that armour class is important. Since at least half my gear in either cloth of leather I take a massive hit on my gear score.




So to summarise, Gearscore is a handy add-on to get a quick reference to someone's overall gear level. It is NOT fair, balanced or accurate, so dont put too much faith in its results. At most you should only use this add-on to get an idea weather a player is in poor, good or great gear, trying to use it any more accurately than that is a mistake.

I use raid ready check addon, it only checks the item levels nothing else. Ofcourse you have the thing with PvP items.

Im always for inspecting. Epic archis or item lvls can be easily obtained by slacking in battlegrounds for some days. I see many pugs fail cause of ppl who gets invite by their pvp epics. Also some items have lower lvl but much better then some higher lvl ones (darkmoon card greatness which has 200 item lvl is much better than 245 item lvl triumph vendor one for me)