Wait, before the chorus of “boos” come in, just give me a chance to explain!
I understand that gear is not indicative of skill. Most of us who have played the game long enough know this. However, gear does indicate the maximum ability of a character. For example, a Naxx level geared holy priest may not be able withstand the demands of Trial of the Grand Crusader. What this addon does is apply a gear score rating on a character. The higher the score, the better the quality of gear they’re wearing.
In the right hands, it can help weed through the woefully inadequate.
In the wrong hands, it can instill steep requirements that none but the most accomplished players can match.
For example, you don’t need a 5000 gear score to do Heroic Halls of Lightning. Anyway, do with it what you will.
Download it or get the lite version
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Found a cool addon? Want to share a UI tip? In the mood to contribute a guest post? Have some ideas for future posts? Feel free to 
Inc spam lol
The biggest issue I’ve got with GearScore is the amount of crap it spams around the place. We have banned the addon in our guild lol
Upyursh´s last blog ..Healing Assigns: Search Public Assigns
Same, this addon causes more latency issues than its worth.. we’ve banned it for guild runs.
I’m a grad student in statistics. If I could get a set of data with Gear Scores and HPS for various people, I could find out just how much the 2 numbers correlate.
[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Matticus , No Stock UI. No Stock UI said: The Gearscore Addon: Wait, before the chorus of “boos” come in, just give me a chance to explain! I understand.. http://bit.ly/22B4CS [...]
Boo! Hiss!
*snicker*
It’s one of those epeen addon’s for the children.
Dude tekkub, you never call, you never write :(.
Pfft, sure I do, you’re just missing the comments.
@Tekkub: I miss the long conversations we used to have where you’d make fun of me for using some random inefficient and obscure addon.
Speaking of which, do you know of a diagnostic addon that shows what’s slowing load times and such that’s updated for 3.2?
Oh in that case…
I hate addons like this. Yes, I understand the value of getting a summary of the player’s gear, but addons should never “score” gear. Give a nice fuzzy raid tier, an average iLvl, and maybe the overall “type” of gear the user has on. For example, maybe you just picked up a boomkin, but on inspect you’d like to know that he’s in Naxx/Uld melee gear. Or that the priest you got is in mostly ToC caster gear.
Arbitrary “scores” suck, give an average iLevel, what raids that corresponds to, and the general gear type (melee/tank/caster/healer). Oh, and make sure everything’s enchanted… but I already wrote Bimbo to do that :)
My old Warmup still works as far as I’m aware. I’d just switch to AddonLoader if I were you… if you’re already using all my addons like you should, they’ll use it.
@Tekkub: I don’t know if I’ll ever see the day where my addon folder will contain nothing but Tekkub created addons. I’ll try Warmup again or AddonLoader. I wasn’t sure if it would work properly since it didn’t seem to be updated recently.
Hrm… lets see here… 159 addons… 25 are the blizzy “addons”… ~30 are other developers addons… the rest are mine…
And I’ve run out of things in the default UI that I feel I need to fix.
Re: Network spam — see the link below. I received about 300k of traffic from one guildie’s GearScore queries to me over the course of 30 minutes. (See Fubar_AddonSpamFu.)
http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?topicId=20143779109&sid=1&pageNo=1
Also, Examiner has a much lighter footprint and shows iLevel on each item, but no summary. Combine it with with ClassLoot, which shows the source of each item, and you have another way to assess where that player has been.
And….back to you guys!
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Its out of date now, theres a broker and a fubar addon called epic average, u can get it with the curse client, just search “epic” it tells you your item lvl average, it can also scan your target, your party or your whole raid.
I origianlly came across it because i hating healing kids in BGs who couldnt get a kill. So now i scan people. I like to know going into a raid too, if in carrying grp or the carried grp.
It takes nearly no memory usage, as oppossed to gearscore which i have seen above my recount from time to time.
The latest version of GearScore fixes the communications issues mentioned here. The author did a nice writeup of his changes on his website:
http://gearscore.blogspot.com/2009/10/communications-reduction.html
Do you think one liners are in vogue ? ,
I’d love to see a guest article from Tekkub that talks about the NON-Tekkub addons he uses. :)
I still feel that gearscore simply didn’t go far enough. Give me the gear score and modify it by taking commonly accepted stat scales( such as the ones at wowhead.com/?compare ) and produce a number based on the stats the character has. Let me know that even if they have gotten gear from the top level of raiding that they have a brain in their head.
I’m sorry, but I keep seeing high gearscores on Holy Paladins sporting Spirit, Hunter’s with Expertise, and Melee DPS with Spellpower cloaks that happen to have +Hit on them. Those things would get scaled as negatives and show up as glaring data points. Gear score encourages people to take gear based on ilvl and -not- on correctly balancing the stats for their character.
@Alamein http://gist.github.com/217099 … Don’t see much to write about there really.
@Scott… I don’t think the addon should be “judging” the gear for you, but something that simply highlights items that don’t fit the rest would be good. For example, if the player is wearing mostly melee gear, draw attention to that caster cloak. If you look at items on the PTR/beta before they’ve gotten names, they always fall into a simple pattern… melee, tank, caster, heal. Judging the exact stats is never going to work because everyone has different opinions on them, but boiling them down into those 4 roles will work, and can be done much more easily based on the stats that are present. It’s hard to say an item with int is better than an item with spellpower, but you can certainly tell that they’re both caster items if they have hit.
[...] requirements for heroics = bad! What if I just use the Gearscore mod to help me inspect people? Unlike my good friend Mattycus, I believe the mod is just as bad as the gearscore phenomenon, if not worse. Why is Gearscore the [...]
I’d just like to point out one legitimately handy use for a gear scoring/averaging addon: Flame Leviathan.
It could be used to assign the highest scorers to driving or it could be used to make sure somebody very low on the list doesn’t push out a much higher ranked player. Obviously, people unable to avoid the lights & fire shouldn’t be driving no matter how high their score.
[...] WoW: Gear Score addon. [...]
So, basically the largest issue most people have with the gearscore addon (bandwidth issues aside) is the name, it would seem.
Why don’t we just do this:
When you hover over a person, all you get is that little bar (ala wow heroes) that has the instance / raid icons and the green / yellow / red colors to indicate where they should be. Then, we add in the warnings from be.imba.hu and BAM!
We could also have an “average ilvl” magic number somewhere in there, however we have to be very careful not to call it “gearscore”.
be imba has the same issue though, it doesn’t just give a general “this is what level of gear the player has”… it critiques the player’s choice of gems and enchants and talents. Bringing attention to a piece of gear that doesn’t match the other stuff the player is wearing is one thing, saying “they shouldn’t be using stat X” is something completely different.
Check out my addon Bimbo, it’s basically what I feel be.imba should be doing with enchants and gems. I’ve not put in a avg ilevel/raid tier because, well, I never lead groups so I don’t need it.
@Tekkub
Bimbo: helping newbs enchant their offset gloves since ’09.
Thanks again!
Another option if you just want to see average item level for youself, target or group is AvgItemLevel:
http://www.wowinterface.com/downloads/info14078-AvgItemLevel.html
The problem is, it really tells you nothing about what they’re skilled enough for – which is the key, *especially* if they’re a tank or healer! They could be in full 219 and 226 epics from emblems of conquest they got from running heroic instances, or they could be in full 219 and 226 epics from having Ulduar10 and 25 on farm. Which shows more skill?
This is why I’m ticked about the whole “free epix for every1 lol” that’s happened since 3.2. It makes it stupid easy for everyone to flex their e-peen because of their gearscores and still know nothing about how to play their class. I’ve seen dps with scores of 4500+ that do 1k dps. Or, and this is my favorite, tanks who are geared in full emblem gear but aren’t at def cap because they don’t know what it is. /facepalm
@Sara
While this does occur, it seems to be more of an exception. Fortunately for us all, players can still be removed from the party or raid if they fail to perform their role adequately.
This is my biggest argument for folks that always spout off about gear =/= skill. While correct, it has nothing to do with the reason gear score type things are developed. These addons are developed because it alleviates, or at least partially so, one of the aspects of finding suitable players when you are putting a group together, the aspect of determining if a player has the appropriate gear to perform well in the encounter.
Scenario 1 (leader with no use for gearscore). Invites players who say “invite”. Checks everyone on the armory or inspects them all. Kicks the people who don’t understand what their gear is appropriate for. Finds new players. Checks them. Gets everyone to the encounter. Finds out one player who, although geared, is a complete butthead and needs to be replaced. Finds a replacement. Has to check them.
Scenario 2. (leader who stipulates must be xxxx score to participate) Invites the people who meet the criteria. Finds an obvious liar, replaces them. Gets everyone to the encounter. Finds out one player who, although geared, is a complete butthead and needs to be replaced. Finds a replacement.
Which scenario is shorter?
It’s never been about replacing skill expectations with the score. It’s about replacing repeated trips to the armory. Forgive me if I like to play the devil’s advocate here, but I still have a hard time riding on the gear score bandwagon of hatred. I still think if we named it “Gear Coefficient” people would complain a whole lot less.
You know they have a Lite version of it with no network traffic or anything
[...] Unlike my good friend Matticus, I believe the mod is just as bad as the gearscore phenomenon, if not worse. Why is Gearscore the mod so horrifically bad? Let’s talk about how mods work. [...]
The only reason why I use gearscores at all is when I get an app who asks me what gearscore I’m looking for. I then immediately know he is not the kind of player I want in my guild, so I look up our best geared raider for that class, up the score and tell the guy to meet or exceed that number.
Oddly enough, they go away with the mindset to actually do just that.
The downside is that quite a few give me regular bulletins as to how they are doing and I’m too nice to tell them to go away. However, they never seem to be able to get to that gearscore bar I set for them.
@Dyna
Your scenario 2 is off a bit. It should be:
Scenario 2. (leader who stipulates must be xxxx score to participate) Invites the people who meet the criteria. Finds an obvious liar, replaces them. Gets everyone to the encounter. Discovers one player who, while sporting a high GearScore, has equipped gear that isn’t itemized even remortely properly for their class. Returns to Dalaran to replace said person. Everyone goes back to the encounter. Finds out one player who, although geared, has no idea what they are doing and needs to be replaced. Finds a replacement.
Personally I would support an addon that gives me a rough ilvl of their gear (or a score) IF it happened to let me know of any glaring gearing mistakes. Bonus points if it let me know about their spec too. I can’t tell you how many people I come across that are gearing extremely improperly for their spec. I’m not talking armor penetration on unholy death knights, I’m talking spell power on rogues and armor penetration on shadow priests.