WotLK Classic is pretty-much a forgone conclusion, it could even be as little as eight months away; and I guess that another forgone conclusion will be the return of the controversial Gearscore addon.
How do you guys feel about this? Will you be glad to see it back in use, or do you dread it’s return?
Would you even go so far as to think that Blizzard should take steps to render the addon inoperable?
Don’t want to dive in moral aspect, that’s a subjective matter and a personal opinion of each one.
But from technical standpoint, the addon is completely fine. Does not cause any crashes, lag or interference from what I remember. Also does not give you any advantage over players that do not use it.
So, taking only objective criteria into account, no reason to take any actions against the addon.
Doubt Blizzard will take any steps against it, nor do I that they should. Do I think it’s bad? Sure, but whether players ask for armory, inspection or GS, it’s nearly the same thing.
It will be particularly annoying when people will start with " 5.5k GS - no achi, no inv" but it is what it is.
Besides, these days with GDKP making up 90% or more of the pugs because people like to stare at a currency, all you need is gold. Not gear, not achievement, not skill, not performance.
As long as the addon itself doesn’t value cloth casting gear from ICC more than a blue plate gear from dungeons for a warrior (back in the days, it was working that way), it’s fine.
Should be easy enough to associate an item’s GS based on class and talents, should any addon dev want to take the time.
we got warcraftlogs
This is one of the factors that I had a problem with back in the day. The example I always used was a Hunter who knew all the tactics, was reliable, competent, experienced but with only a 480k GS being turned down in favour of a complete jerk of a Hunter in Shammy spellcaster and strength gear, with a pet on aggressive who bunny hopped around like an idiot, constantly wiped the raid, but had a 550k GS thanks to equipping any old blue, cloth or PvP item they could find as long as it had a high score.
Not sure how often this actually happened, but it did occur to me that raid leaders who relied purely on GS as an indicator of competence were not very wise raid leaders.
Gear score proves nothing now; you only need tons of gold–sadly, huge amount of player base buys gold. I think that addon was and will be pure nonsense lol Best advice I personally can give: Find a solid guild that is friendly and you will not have to worry about that addon <3
lead your own pugs, get achievements, disregard crappy addons like gearscore. all the content in wotlk is pretty easy to lead/do with the exception of ulduar hc with achievements and maybe hc icc, u should not have issues
Gearscore wasn’t really the issue, the issue was people setting stupidly high standards for the content they wanted to run. ICC25 level gear wasn’t needed for ICC10.
That’s impossible to do, period
This tbh,
In original Wrath logs weren’t nearly as popular as they are now, just being able to quick-check somebody should logically eliminate the requirement for people to spam “6k gs or gtfo”
Is it? I believe there are precedents.
I have a distinct memory of addons such as Decursive that automated decursing activities made inoperable during the vanilla period.
Yes, they disabled addons choosing spell targets, drawing on the ground, sending /who querries and some forms of hidden chat channel communication.
But can you imagine how many addons and ui interactions they would have to break to render it impossible to add up preset numbers assigned to gear pieces upon inspecting a player?
That being said, between warcraft logs, gdkp pugs and 3+ raidteam guilds, I think gear score is simply redundant. If anything, there will be an addon that just syncs and shows your best and average parse for the latest tier.
TBCC, especially in these later phases, has very sensible and optimal itemization. If there was a need/demand for gear score addon, it would already see widespread use.
EDIT: AHMAGAWD my almost 2k posts since launch of Classic are gone. I assume that’s due to a transfer. Well GG Blizz, thanks a lot.
Hehe same here. My guild transfered to Nethergarde and I was obliged to join them. Here I am now, a poor wee little forum newbie once again.
As for GS, you’re likely correct, and (for the attention of general readers) please bear in mind that I’m not actually advocating making GS inoperable, banning it or whatever. I’m not offering any opinions of my own. I merely threw it out there for the sake of discussion.
Yeah, your post count is tied to your character and changing server resets our character’s ID; which is how I went from 5k post count to whatever I have now.
At least forum noobs can’t say anything along the line of “lol look at this nerd with 1k posts”.
Unless you erase people’s ability to inspect other characters, you can’t stop something like GS from working. Heck, people could just get the gear info from something like warcraftlogs and compute your GS from there, and there’s nothing Blizz could do about it other than, I dunno, disabling warcraftlogs altogether (which would piss a huge part of the community to no end).
So nah GS is gonna happen regardless. Though at least I hope this time it will be a bit more refined than the original version - for example noticing if a character is deliberately using PvP/offspec items to inflate their GS without having to inspect them outright. Heck, I’d go so far as to claim that, with warcraftlogs being as widespread as it is, GS might be even somewhat obsolete - if I need to know if I want to inv you in a pug raid or not, I’ll just check your name on wlogs, and if you’re not there, chances are you won’t get an inv regardless. If you are, your parses and performance will be there for everyone to see, regardless of your GS.
Furthermore, wcl even shows your average item level (same as gear score basically) AND your parse among people with identical item level average. So if you “cheat” your gear score, it will show there. The more I think about it, the clearer it becomes wcl completely replaced gearscore for all intensive purposes.
Good idea had most people had time to check 24 individuals before a group, if that characters is registered and if parses acually would tell the whole story other than how individual DPS/HPS is in a good context (bad groups with few good players would still be bad individual parses, apart from HPS) - which we both know they rarely do. I think we both know the downsides with starring blindly at parses, so I’ll leave that alone.
People will do whats fastest and easy, and a simple digit will always win over anything else (GS in this case)
I agree with you that GS in that case should be tweaked so that BiS lists (and not just the top items) are crosschecked with spec (even if that can leave some error in stats like hit% etc, but still). Enchanted and gemmed items should be given a higher value than nonenchanted and ungemmed etc… Would need some more work, but would in the end be good not just for group creators but to prompt people into pushing their own character (remembering to enchant etc).
EDIT: I’ll add that the other part of the GS era we shouldnt forget is “Post achivement” followed by the one starting the group getting it after its finished ^^ Getting lesser geared Alts into groups at a point wasnt the easiest task …
What I meant is that you could have an addon “piggyback” off WCL as a database, getting around any WoW bans completely. Plus it doesn’t matter for groups forming on Discord anyway.
Bottom line is, I don’t see Blizz being able to remove GS even if they wanted. And they prolly don’t care either way