v3.3.5
Well I have to admit I haven’t been playing my priest much of late. The guild I was in for much of Wrath officially stopped raiding a couple of months back and it, combined with burn out, was a nice chance to try something different. Enter the druid.
Firstly let me say trees healing is fun but quite over-powered. Cat DPS is the best so far and more fun than Arms ‘proc-based’ DPS and Shadow’s DoT lead priority list. Bear tanking is a dull as can be 🙂 After warrior tanking the bears 1 button tanking in heroics (Swipe+Maul bound to my mouse wheel) is almost inane.
Anyway thats not why i’m posting. A couple of interesting things I have learned recently while in the process of gearing my druid and I thought I might share them with you.
Gear Score really does suck!
Probably one of the worst new fashions in WoW to date. As a priest in a stable raiding guild I was like “whatever” when people posted about GS before, but now i’m back to pugging, a lot, I hates it!
1) For example I sneak into an ICC25 run as cat dps and as we start pulling trash someone comments about the cat being the lowest GS in the raid. Lowest as in i’m about 5.1k GS. Not awesomely geared, but no a fresh 80 or anything. I of course ignore it. Anyway after the first few trash pulls I say in raid, “Cats not doing to bad DPS eh?”. I’m about 4th DPS on Skada, although AoE DPS with Swipe isn’t exactly rocket science.
So what happens..?
Kick!
I whisper the raid leader asking why I got kicked. To be honest I was about ready to punch him/her, but whatever. They reply, “GS too low”. I say “I was top 5 DPS!” and all they can reply is “Sorry”. I mean really?!?
2) Another time someone is looking for a druid healer for ICC10 going for 6/12 and they want 5.3 GS minimum. I whisper for an invite and link my Plague Wing achievement. I have 5.1k GS at this point. No dice. GS to low. I reply, “Your loss” and do the daily.
About 45 minutes later, after i’ve done a couple of instances and the same person is still trying to get a healer (any type now). I whisper and the conversation goes like this.
“I’m still here”
“Wut?”
“I’ll heal ICC10”
[pause]
“Sorry yur GS to low”
So the raid leader would rather waste lets say an hour of nine peoples time for the sake of 200 GS? That is just silly.
3) Last example. ICC 10 pug. Nice people half from a casual guild. We do Festerface and Rotface before it gets too late, but two things stick in my mind.
One, the almost entirely item level 264 geared hunter, who was a lovely person, pulls 4k to 6k DPS on boss fights. I bet her GS was about 5.7k. It was almost bigger than her DPS!
Two, the 251/264 geared resto shaman I two healed with managed 38% of the healing compared to my 55% in my pitiful 5.1k GS outfit.
Tress are OP, but seriously, the worlds gone crazy. 🙂
Thats not even including the “LFM ICC10 doing 11/12 5.8 GS min” people. If I had 5.8k GS, why would I be running ICC10? Frost emblems for Primordial Saronites I guess?
ToGC is harder than ICC
Serious. ICC with the 25% nerf is regularly pugged at least half way by a huge number of people. I’ve been in two (of two) ToGC pugs recently that haven’t even killed Northrend Beasts. Conversations regularly run like this.
Someone says, “Can I get might instead of wisdom”
Random, non-paladin replies, “Lets just go its only ToC”
I say “ToGC”
Random replies, “whatever”.
We wipe on beasts. About 2 to 3 people die to Gormok’s flames. Half the rest die within the first couple of breaths attacks by the worms. Two more attempts, one of which we make it to Icehowl and every single time he charges at elast one person gets hit. Rinse, repeat, disband.
These are raids with 10+ nearly fully 264 geared players. Sure there is a handful of undergeared players, but most are way over geared for the content.
Ruby Sanctum
*thumbs up*
Love the fights. Not as hard as some of the heroic ICC, but it will be demoralising random pugs at least for some time yet.
Anyway hope all you priests out there are still having fun.
Gobble gobble.
BobTurkey's blog 
I stopped playing my priest before ICC, and I had the same problem as you when I started to play it again. Even though I have experience killing 12/12 + hardmodes on my other toon it was nearly impossible to get a pug unless it was Monday night when people start not caring. Then when I finally get in I do 2x the healing as the next best healer…
What I will say… is there are a lot more bad players running around with low gear scores than baddies with 6k… but that gap is not where it should be!
Nice to see you post again! Glad you’re enjoying the druid. We don’t allow GS in our raids but with that said I armoury people when LFG so I can at least know they’ll have a minimum potential (and I stress potential) to pull certain amount of dps or not get one shot by certain boss abilities.
I hate GS too – made my alting experience suck in moments as well…
GS has made all of my alting experiences worthless. Everyone has to start somewhere. And everyone expects “somewhere” to be already in ICC 25.
Harumph!
Hullo, Bob! GS is a mystery, isn’t it? It got way out of hand some time ago, and has continued to dominate PUG decisions despite the fact that every smart player in the game knows that it can’t tell you what a player can do! I still click on your link most days out of long and happy habit, and it’s good to hear your voice again. Rock on.
[…] people to jump through arbitrary hoops for honour of grouping with them – Bob Turkey’s recent GS experiences spring to […]
I have to agree whole-heartedly. Gearscore is single handedly destroying the PUG. The only time I would ever link it is when its combined with the recount addon. This divides damage done by gearscore – now that is a very interesting stat. It can still be a little skewed due to overpowered lower level trinkets e.g hunter DMC: Greatness. Otherwise its very useful for quickly spotting who is under-performing.
I do wish blizzard would break it in the same manner as AVR. Its probably more damaging to the game and community!!!
ToGC – heck I’ve wiped in Ulduar and Naxx (!!!) 10 when they were weekly, becasue worshipers on the altar of gear decided that their super awesome gearscore means essential and scaling fight mechanics can be completely ignored.( like falling damage for example, or silences and AoE damage that is percentage based rather then set amount).
majority of people were always..ummm easily led astray (long ago VoA where raid leader berated my husband for low healing based on overall meters – where my husband was dps for the entirety of the raid, and switched to tree for that one last attempt – per fight meters showed a completely different story of course). But gearscore made it ridiculously easy to do so and act like an oblivious jerk in a process.
P.S. some fights where AoE damage is mild, still present but mild and the group is spread out, good resto druids will always outheal shammies, but on fights with higher AoE damage and group that’s more bunched up? No one is beating me but other better geared shaman 😛 chain heal spam ftw!
Why not just join a guild Bob? I am sure there are a number of them that would be happy to have any healer. They might not be Heroic ICC but at least you would not have to pug it?
I was working on Halion last night, and between wipes looked over to my brother. We was in Ulduar on Razorscale doing the weekly. I was like, “are you still in there, I thought you started that before I even logged on?”. He was like yep… 3rd wipe. What should be a 10min run, FL and RS, turned into over and hour pugging adventure. If pugging was the only way I could raid, I think I would probably just quit the game. I don’t blame Gear Score, I blame all the people out there trying to do content they aren’t prepared for. Blizz gives out gear like candy but they don’t lock content anymore, which leads people to think if the door is open I might as well walk in.
I have to agree. I recently came back from a 5 month hiatus to find ICC pugs not taking anything lower than 5.4gs (luckily I’m just at that marker). I find more baddies running around in higher gs than I do with lower gs. Hell, all you have to do is pvp some and your gs is high enough to make it into a pug.
Too bad your’e not on my server. We don’t have a hard GS requirement for our puggers. I just armory everyone to make sure their gems, specs, and enchants make sense guesstimate if they can do the dps/hps needed and we’re off to ICC.
Its imperfect but you get surprises like a 4.8K gs tree that solo healed the last 20% of Marrowgar and the 5k gs Hunter that was only doing 1.8K dps (both with the 25% buff mind you).
Side effect of our relaxed standards is that almost everyone we pug asks to come back and 3 have joined our guild.
Yeah Steen the correlation between GS and ability to perform is low. A prime example was the player I was helping in whisper because he didn’t understand how to use enchants and gems. Just as we were finishing he excitedly told me he was just about to reach 5.6k GS…
Thanks Napps.
Internally in my old guild we didn’t use GS at all, although some used it when organising pug raids.
@Nuclayer, sure I could and probably will join a guild, but thats not going to the general impact of GS.
LOL@Dahk
What server are you on Dyre42? I
Thanks for the comments all.
Gobble gobble.
Hey BT.
Was sorry to see HB step down from raiding.
If you’re still after pug stuff we generally run an icc25 on the weekends with alts from Awaken and mains from Cadence. Noone cares about gearscore..except to make fun of, hell one week we were short on heals for a guild alt run and I took in my scrubby, freshly levelled to 80 herbing druid Mooie in, I think she started the run on 3k something in quest greens. The buff is a joke, most of the place is faceroll, so she’s now rocking 11/12 on 10s in her terribad gear. Was hilarious.
Thanks for the offer Belara.
Between the faceroll buff and the impending expansion I feel its pretty pointless raiding ICC except for fun. Which did actually get me wondering why I was raiding the rest of the time 😉 Must be the purples for ma e-peeen.
Yes, I completely agree that Druid healing is ridiculously overpowered. Priests (especially especially especially Disc priests need some love!). I have 4 80 healers (all 4, priest shammy drood pally) and Druid is ridiculous. This weeks VoA runs were 60% Druids.
T9, disc priests were in a good place. T10, not so much.
Really, gearscore can be a valuable tool.
But you’re quite fail if that is the ONLY tool you use to evaluate someone.
GS should be the first thing to check; if low, check spec, gems, and chants.
If all those look proper, they are likely worth a shot.
@Falter, what your saying there is basically true its a very small indication of potential but is way too often abused for example ..a pug i joined some weeks ago on my freshly 80 druid healer ..i had grinded my t9 pretty quickly, i had around 4.8-4.9 gs and was only let in on account of my main being fairly well known on the server, still managed to outheal the other 2 healers though, and there was a retri paladin with icc25 gear on and very good gs which was obviously the only thing the leader had looked at since it was pointed out to him later that no one was quite sure of this paladins job due to the half holy half retri gear he donned… gs does not account enough for stats and not at all for ability so is in my mind next to useless, want to see how good a player is …take them and find out!