Confession

Hello, I'm Snarefoot and I am a gearoholic.

When I returned to my long-suffering hunter a couple of months ago after burning out on my druidic affair, I was content with the gear I had. The hodgepodge of dungeon, Naxx, and Ulduar swag I was sporting was good enough to trivialize any single-player content in the game, good enough to run a dungeon respectably, and good enough to see me well into the grind to 85 when it comes around. I also had 10k gold, which from what I could tell, was all the money I would ever need.

As I probed around the game looking for new things to do, I wasn't even thinking about my gear. I was grinding my way through Netherwing Ledge, re-earning my Crusader title, and just messing around with pointless things, as is my custom.

Then, something strange happened. I suddenly. And quite without warning, became very anxious about my iLevel 200 rings and trinkets.

Maybe it was because I still had gearscore installed from my heavy pugging days with the tree, maybe it was just an inevitable outcome, but suddenly my epeen was just not enough. I needed upgrades.

No, I know what it was, it was the damn scorpion.

I ran Forge of Souls one night with Eric. At the time I was running a pug here there just for fun. It wasn't badgefarming or drophunting, just enjoying group content when I could get a friend along. Eric was there for the Needle Encrusted Scorpion, though. As we neared the Host of Souls I told him I'd roll need if the thing dropped, and give it to him if I got it. The poor guy had run that pitiful little dungeon 25 times without getting the trinket and I was good with my antiquated gear, so I figured I'd help him out.

Of course, the thing drops.

And of course, there is a glitch in the looting.

The rolls spin off in the chat frame and I win the item. We all say our goodbyes and I drop group and teleport out of the dungeon back to Dalaran and tell Eric to come find me. Then I look in my bag.

No scorpion.

Wtf?

I check the log - I had the winning roll, but there's no record of the item being distributed. It's still on the corpse back in an instance I am now locked out of.

Bugger.

So we each open a ticket.

Three days later, mine is still unaddressed, but his is escalated to the ninja department.

Another couple of days go by and I get an in-game mail that let's me know that my raid leader had reported a looting mistake and here's your item. My ticket has vanished.

So, five days of waiting and wondering what would happen later I have an untradable but really choice trinket and a sudden compulsion to get the epic achievement monkey off my back - all I need is a belt and a ring afterall, no biggie.

A few days of pugging and 3k gold less later, I had the achievement, but I also have a sad little 4200 gearscore. That stuff was so easy to get, just a few more pieces and no one will groan if they get me in a pug. A couple of weeks of that flawed thinking later and here I am, desperately clawing at 5k, stooping so low as to pug Halls of Reflection and plotting ways to get to 5200 without actually raiding, and watching my bank balance plummet daily. I am a desperate junkie hunting high and low for that next hit of purple dragon, and I need help.

Where is the rehab instance, and does it drop badges?

Greener Grass

When we started casting about in search of a new server recently, one prominent criteria we immediately agreed on was that we should move to a PvE server. These mainstream servers, we reasoned, would have many advantages over the furry-infested, drama-laden, cliquish RP servers we'd been playing on all along.

Turns out, though, that I might be missing those yiffers and griefers.

Here are five reasons why, in an order both arbitrary and insignificant.

Dalaran is too crowded. For some reason, realms with not-too-disimilar populations show a marked increase in people loitering in the main hub town on the PvE side. Are there really so many people off cybering in the hills of RP realm Azeroth? I guess so. When I got my beastly new macbook and cranked the video to 11 on WrA, I had slain the Dalaran lag beast. Little did I know the creature was just pausing to tie his shoe.

Oh lord, the names. I'm not he sort of RP snob that I once was, but I simply cannot take a guy named "Lolpallylolz" seriously. Yeah, I also hate the permanently-clenched overactors who report people with such infractory monikers as "Steve" over in RP land, but I would at least appreciate a world where toons have names that toons' parents might actually have given them.

RP servers do not deserve their reputation for maturity, because most roleplayers I know are childish as a rule, but at least most roleplayers I know are old enough to shave. I don't like dealing with abusive teenagers, that's going to be my real life soon enough. It just seems like I have more people to relate to on RP servers - middle-aged geeks without any real life friends.

It's hard to become invested in my own toon on a PvE server. While I had largely stopped getting mixed up in the RP scene in general, in my own way I was still a roleplayer. My characters were characters, with backstory and motivation, even if long nights of queuing for randoms did stretch the suspension of disbelief a little thin. On a PvE server I feel completely ridiculous thinking of such things, and certainly would never share such thoughts. I miss that level and type of attachment to the avatar I spend so much time with.

Finally, I just miss roleplayers. Again, I have been estranged from the RP reindeer games for a while, but I still get a little thrill when I stumble on a group of people out roleplaying in the wild. You wonder what story they're developing, who their characters are, and if you can play some small part. Sure, odds are they're just cybering, but voyeurism is voyeurism. It's shocking what those Draenei can emote about their tails.

Keeping the Lights On

It has been a while since I posted here. It has been a while since I had much to say. Truth is, I have been having a lot of trouble finding my way in WoW since our idealistic guild experiment over on WrA fell through and as I have been unable to find my feet in the game, I have not had much to write about.

I have never quite stopped playing, this isn't like my earlier angst-driven exiles, but I have played less. Along the way I have changed factions, changed servers, done several long rep grinds, geared a second toon, given up on capitalism, reskinned my hunter three times hordeside, given up on my alts, redone the Crusader grind, rediscovered battlegrounds, not talked to a single stranger, and still I don't know what to do when I log in every night.

The thing is, I don't really like playing WoW alone, but I am so terrified of strangers that I am unable to join a guild or even a chat channel. In the early days, back when I was a devout roleplayer, I was able to find just the smallest crack in that wall and use my character as a way to make the handful of contacts which gave me years of thin but ever-present social contact in-game.

Unfortunately, the decision to leave SwC cut my already-anemic social circle down to a handful of names, and my decisions to then finally give in to horde-curiosity and then move to a random unfamiliar server have left me with precisely one friend in-game. It's become lonely even by my introvert's standards.

So, what do I do now? RealID offers some potential, assuming any of the small cadre of people who know me are willing to sacrifice privacy to reestablish contact. The effort Eric and I made to form a guild with our own in-game agenda resulted in the discovery that no one else has our in-game agenda. Joining a guild would be the right answer for anyone not incapable of taking that step (though I am seriously considering giving the megalithic AIE a try - maybe it's too big, and guild chat would be no more coherent or accessible to me than trade chat is now, but I would have more chances to interact with people in a safe context than I have now).

It's funny, so many bloggers are adrift in WoW now due to the lack of worthwhile or novel content and are only staying to be with their friends, I have no trouble finding things to do, but I have no one to do any of it with.

But enough tearful introspection, the real reason I am here is to get advice on spending my Frost badgers. I am on the brink of hitting the 60 milestone (which is a lot when you don't raid and often skip your dungeon daily to concentrate on Argent Dawn rep or whatever). My original plan was to buy the 264 cloak, as I did with my druid - twice - on the grounds that it was one of the highest item level bump I would get and would be unlikely to be quickly replaced in the expansion (I wore my Kara cape all the way to Ulduar afterall), but I had a pretty good cape off some Keeper or another and then got a 232 piece from the Midsummer boss. At this point, the biggest upgrade Frosts will get me is a nice 264 trinket to replace my iLevel 200 Mirror of Truth. The mirror's a good toy, but the Frost trinket is really nice and will probably last a while in the expansion as well, in addition to giving my gearscore a nice kick up the ladder toward the event horizon of 5k.

But, then there's tier 10.

In theory the tier 10 two-piece bonus is just a month and change away, even for a non-raider, and especially with the extra two cheap badges a day during the holiday, but that's for a more diligent player. For me, the extra 60 or 95 badges is a huge mountain to look up at, and I may not hit the peak until we are so close to the expansion that the effort risks going to waste, and seeing as I already overgear heroics and have little chance of going back to ICC, do I even need that class of gear to begin with?

So, grasshopper or ant? Where do I spend my Frosts?

Post Repeat: Hold the Gates!

This is a repost (and edit) of a classic old post, which I find to still be relevant. I still see SoTA runs where I personally was the difference between a defense and a steamroll, and I've steamrolled the alliance because they didn't follow my advice. The only thing that's changed is now I fight for the Horde.

I've been running some battlegrounds lately, on Rutabega, so I could get some honor. In the new random BG system, I've gotten Strand a lot. Oddly, I haven't gotten EoTS or AB at all.

Anyway. I've been in matches where we rolled to victory quickly and easily, and ones where we were crushed. A few were close contests. Every single one of them had something in common.

Gunners at Purple and Red gates.

The second-tier gates from the front are key to successful defense in SotA. When the blue or green gates fall, if there's still tanks rolling along, it's not possible to get to the the guns at Purple and Red in time to mount a defense there. If, on the other hand, there are already gunners at those two gates, you've got a really good chance at blowing up that wave of tanks before they even fire on your gate. If you blow up that first wave of tanks completely, you've got the game half-won. If you beat up the second wave of tanks enough that they get blown up before taking Yellow, you've won.

Let me repeat that. If I were mean, I'd put this in blink.

When the Blue/Green gates fall....

... it is IMPOSSIBLE to get gunners to the gate before tanks get there ...


... so you MUST start with gunners at each gate.

So here's the basic defense strategy. At the start of the round, put one gunner on Red and one on Purple. Two on Blue and two on green, the rest go and fight on the beach. If you don't have a gun, focus on killing tanks - ignore enemy PCs except in defense of your graveyards. Gunners can also drop rockets right on the graveyard flag as a secondary target, delaying the offense's acquisition of the extra sieges and closer graveyard. If you keep a shower of rockets on the graveyard flag, they'll never cap it, but you need to kill tanks as a higher priority.

If the tanks do the smart thing and focus on one side (people usually focus Blue, I have no idea why), then whoever is on Purple or Red (the side that's not being attacked) should mount up and make a break for the other gate, thus having 2 gunners on that gate. Protip: you can see the tanks on your tactical zone map (hit shift-M), so you know what to do Right Away. If, on the other hand, there's 2 tanks at each of Blue and Green, stay put, as in this case you can probably beat the incoming tanks with only one gun. Use the gun on the "outside" of the map, the one closer to the gate that's being attacked, and eventually someone will fall back and do support gunning. Sometimes it's easier to just put 2 people at Red and 2 at Purple, but this gives you 2 more people to push on the tanks with.

In either case, as soon as the first gate falls, the people manning that gate need to fall back to Yellow ASAP - this is the same problem as before, there need to be gunners at the gate beyond the ones being attacked so they can unload the max damage on the tanks that get through.

Again, if you're not on a gun, focus on the tanks. They need tanks to get through walls. They can do it by running seaforuim, but this is a desperation move, as it just takes too long. The only reason to attack a PC and not a vehicle (if, of course there's vehicles around) is in defense of the graveyards. Most of the time, they only send one or two people to cap the graveyards, good defense here will buy precious minutes without those four extra tanks.

The strategy for offense is just the opposite, of course. Focus all four beach tanks on either Blue or Green (mix it up each time), send three people to assure a graveyard (and tank shop capture), and drive your tanks hard. Remember that you can catapault shoot gates down, so get some damage on the gates before you get into ramming range. If you're really coordinated, have Melee characters drive the tanks, and have ranged characters as passengers. Use snares, roots, polys, and fears preferentially- you don't need to kill the defense, just keep them from attacking your tank.

The most recent SotA I ran, we won. On defense (which we did first), we held off for the full ten minutes because I personally manned the red gate guns which held the first wave of tanks off, and then convinced people to save our GYs and man the yellow guns for long enough to make the courtyard battle a zergfest with 15 on defense because we slowed them enough at the second tier gates to keep them from rolling over us.

On offense, we got the Storming the Beach achievement, because I grouped with two other tanks in an assault on one initial gate (the fourth tank went the wrong way and got killed), and each of our tanks had at least one ranged character riding shotgun. Defense tried to stop us on the beach, and as soon as we rolled through the Blue gate, we kept steamrolling on. I literally hardly stopped moving for the entire BG, except to ram once in a while (and when I did that, I could ram from underneath the single gunner on the second and third tier walls- if either wall had two gunners, we'd have been stopped, probably). We spread out a bit in the run up to the walls, to keep people from AEing both tanks, and we shot boulders at the gates before we got into ramming range. Booyah.

And that's why I love SotA. It's a battleground where mass coordination and tactics will trump individual gear and one-on-one battles all around. Now if only I can find a way to make sure my teammates always learn this lesson and the alliance never does.

Hit rating? Unnecessary

Wow. I just read an elitist jerks post that reminded me why I love that forum.

Here's the scoop. When you're dual-wielding as a warrior, queuing up an on-next-swing attack makes your offhand (white) swing use the 1H miss table rather than the DW miss table. Which means, if you have 8% hit (or 5% with precision), you will never miss with an OH attack that occurs while the heroic strike button is lit up. The post goes into some detail about how to take the most advantage of this, by making sure your OH swings as late as possible, relative to your MH (giving you more of an opportunity to queue HS).

If you have two weapons with an identical speed, this means not using /startattack until you're within melee range of the target. If you do that, the OH will swing halfway through the MH swing timer. If you use /startattack when you're at range (and take more than Swing/2 to get there), your MH and OH will swing at more-or-less the same time, making it hard to take advantage of this bug.

There's also some other weird bug that can't really be exploited but causes Deep Wounds to do more damage than it should.

Both bugs are substantiated with combat log parses and tests. People were able to get 100% hit rates on their offhand weapon with only 8% hit (that should result in what, an 18% miss rate? I think the base DW miss rate on bosses is 26%, but I could be mistaken).

If nothing else, this makes HS actually something close to break-even in rage generation, since it ensures that your OH white attacks will hit, and if it crits (I get up to 65% crit rates in my mediocre gear) you get another 10 rage on top of that. Wild.

Keep spamming HS, my warrior brothers!

Why I fear the Warrior Cataclysm changes, Part Two: Rage Mechanics

In my earlier post, I talked about my personal worries about weapon scaling in Cataclysm. The core of the problem is that in both BC and LK, Fury Warriors started the expansion at the bottom of the DPS heap, putting out laughable damage and really only existing as an offspec for someone who was normally the tank. By the end of the expansion cycle, however, Fury Warriors top the charts all over the place. If you think of a DPS vs Gearscore chart, the Fury Warrior line has a lower Y intercept, but a much steeper slope (and it actually isn't linear, but instead seems to be polynomial in GS where many other classes ARE linear - and that's the problem).

Rage: The Source of the Problem

Why do Fury Warriors scale so strangely? The short answer is: Rage. Rage is a funny thing, you get it when you hit a mob with a white attack, and the harder you hit the more rage you get. You use rage to fuel your special attacks (yellow hits) which, in addition to costing rage, don't generate rage. So, the first-order analysis yields a simple issue: the harder-hitting your weapons, the more rage you generate.

Rage generation wouldn't that big of a problem normally, because Fury Warriors really don't have all that much to do with their rage. In Berserker Stance, you've got two instants to throw out: Whirlwind and Bloodthirst. Whirlwind has a (glyphed) 8 second cooldown, and Bloodthirst has a 4 second cooldown. So, every 8 seconds you have to press 3 buttons, leaving you with 2.5 seconds of sitting around waiting for abilities to come off of cooldown. Even with a majillion rage, you're still just going WW BT BT (wait) WW BT BT (wait) and so on. So what's the problem?

The thing is, when you've got more rage than you can dump with the base rotation, you start hitting Heroic Strike. Currently, Heroic Strike "converts" your next mainhand swing from a white (rage-generating) attack into a yellow (rage-consuming) attack. Heroic Strike is the rage dump for warriors, since you not only pay 15 rage to use it, you also lose out on the 30+ rage your mainhand attack would have generated. Still, when you're sitting at 100 rage, you might as well do something, and all Heroic Strike really does is add an extra 495 damage to the attack, right?

Wrong.

Yes, Heroic Strike makes your next attack do 495 more damage, which is nice, but it also converts that attack into a yellow attack. Yellow attacks have an 8% chance to miss the target, compared to a 26% miss chance on white attacks. You'll have enough hit rating to make sure your yellow attacks never miss, but white attacks still do miss. Furthermore, yellow attacks cannot be glancing blows, whereas about 24% of your white attacks will be glancing blows (which do about 35% less damage). Yellow attacks are also "abilities", so impale means they crit at 220% instead of the normal 200% of white attacks. Finally, you probably have the Glyph of Heroic Strike, so you actually end up getting 10 rage back whenever HS crits. So, heroic strikes are a LOT better than white attacks, and if you can convert 100% of your mainhand attacks to heroic strikes, you're doing a lot more damage.

Wait, did I say finally? I forgot: Bloodsurge. More heroic strikes means more Bloodsurge procs, which means more free Slam attacks. By the time I got to about a 5200 gearscore on my warrior, I pretty much always had the free slam proc up whenever I had a free GCD in which to use it.

So as warrior gear increases, their rage generation increases. Eventually, they're getting so much rage from their offhand swings (which are not converted to yellow attacks from heroic strikes) and procs from the heroic strike glyph that they can convert 100% of their mainhand attacks to heroic strikes. Moreover, they eventually get a high enough crit rate that Bloodsurge is always up.

As warriors progress in gear, they go from being limited by rage in terms of what they can do to being limited by GCDs in terms of what they can do. As far as I know, no other DPS class makes this inversion. No matter how cool your gear is, Death Knight runes still only regenerate at the same rate, and they only get 10 runic power per rune spent, whether that rune did 10 damage or 100000 damage. Rogues are limited by energy regeneration rate, and while they have tricks to improve energy regen, it's mostly based on talents (excepting combat potency procs, which scale with offhand hit and haste, but aren't as overwhelming as rage generation through hits). When that inversion takes place, Fury DPS shoots through the roof.

Normalizing: Attempts to fix the problem

I am not going to talk about the first ill-fated attempt to "fix" rage generation back in the Burning Crusade, because I was playing a warlock at the time and didn't really pay close attention to it. The current plan for Cataclysm is (at least, what I've seen from reputable sources): you will generate a fixed amount of rage per hit (not miss), which is based entirely on weapon speed. Slow weapons will generate more rage per hit. On the surface, this "fixes" the problem by creating a new one: instead of being really rage-based, DPS warriors get a smoothly-refilling resource pool that's independent of their gear. In other words, they fixed the rage problem by turning Rage into Energy, Focus and Runes, only that they don't regenerate (and in fact decay) out of combat.

Yay. You know, I always wanted to play a rogue. So, I rolled a rogue. But then I decided I liked warrior mechanics more. So I don't play a rogue. But now DPS warriors are the new rogues.

Wait, you say. Hold everything! Rage doesn't just refill at a constant rate, it will be scale with haste and crit! If you crit, you'll get 2x the rage from that hit, and rage generation per hit is a function of base weapon speed, meaning haste is finally a meaningful stat for warriors. Hooray!

So, in order to fix the Cataclysm warrior, they are changing the rage generation mechanic from the interesting (yet flawed) system of Yore to a new system that looks more like everybody else, except it still scales with crit and haste just like the old system did?

Well, that seems like a stupid idea.

Double Dipping: the Real Problem

The real problem with how rage mechanics respond to gear is double dipping on DPS stats. When a DPS stat not only directly improves your damage output (critical hits do more damage), but also indirectly improves your damage output (more rage means more specials), you've got a scaling problem. We know this is a scaling problem already. Rogues stack the heck out of haste, and love it when you hit heroism and drop a windfury totem, because more attacks means not just more damage, but more procs as well. Fury warriors get so much rage and extra special attacks from critical hits that getting Impale and Deep Wounds for "only" extra flat damage on crits is really just gravy.

Another huge part of the Lich King scaling is the unexpectedly wide range of gear item levels. Between the 10-man and 25-man gap, there is also the hardmode and easymode gear, so there had to be a very large range of stat improvements from the start of the expansion to the end of it. It may be possible to tweak everybody in such a way that they scale more-or-less in a linear fashion for the limited region of item values that exist for the Cataclysm release, but this problem of nonlinear scaling and double dipping from DPS stats does not seem like it will go away.

Unless the designers convert the basic assumption about Warrior DPS rotations. If they make Warriors always GCD limited rather than resource limited, then having a lot of extra rage toward the end of the expansion isn't all that big of a deal.

Hmm. Did I mention that they're taking away the on-next-swing mechanic from Heroic Strike? It's going to be a GCD-based special. So it looks a lot like warriors in the cataclysm expansion will be GCD limited rather than resource limited.

And here you thought Ghostcrawler was doing you a favor, keeping you from having to watch your swing timer and spam heroic strike at the right time.

Why I fear the Warrior Cataclysm changes, Part One: Weapon Scaling

There hasn't been an official preview of the new Warrior talent trees yet, but some stuff has leaked, plus there's a fair amount of meat in the original Warrior Cataclysm preview. There's also this interesting series of posts by Ghostcrawler in the DPS forum.

For people who aren't following Warrior mechanics, here's the key points I want to discuss.

• Rage from attacking will be generated as a function of base weapon speed, rather than damage dealt.
• Critical hits will generate twice as much rage as normal hits, and offhand hits will generate half the rage of a mainhand hit.
• Heroic Strike (and cleave) are being moved off the "on next swing" mechanic and turned into a normal GCD strike with pseudo-execute mechanics (their rage cost and damage output will scale with how much rage you actually have).
• Fury will have a choice between 2H and 1H dual-wield, with two "sister" talents at the top of the tree: Titan's Grip (as it exists now) and Single-Minded Fury, which is supposed to be designed to make it so 1H weapons will be competitive with Titan's Grip.

Now, let me say that I'm mostly excited about Cataclysm. I also have a lot of faith in the game mechanics team to create a system that's pretty balanced. But I've got some worries about the form that this balance will take, as well as the points of apparent trouble that I see right now. Let's start with Single-Minded Fury and work backwards.

Chapter One: Weapon Scaling

I love the idea of being able to choose between TG and SMF. Titan's Grip is a very satisfying talent; being able to dual-wield gigantic weapons is every berserker's dream. On the other hand, I've got a pair of Nighttimes in my bank so far with probably more to come - I greed on them when they drop and I run HFoS a lot. I just hate to see such lovely 1H weapons go unused. So having the opportunity to have many weapons choices (single-2H if you count Arms specs) is exciting. What I'm worried about is scaling.

Titan's Grip has always been a scaling problem. 2H weapons need to be designed to work with most plate DPS classes (Arms, Ret, DKs), but also dual-wielded by fury warriors. There's a start to balancing this baked into the Titan's Grip talent: a 10% flat damage tax- when you dual-wield 2H weapons, you do 10% less damage. The other part of the balance is more subtle: Fury Warriors have few instant attacks, so they are balanced around doing a larger portion of white damage than most other DPS classes. The base Fury rotation uses three instants every eight seconds, leaving 2.5 seconds of just white attacks in there. More on this later.

I'm not sure if this was an unforeseen consequence, but it also turns out that Fury Warriors scale exceedingly well with hunter stats. Agility, Crit, and Armor Penetration all make Fury Warriors very happy. As a result, I chose the agi-ap-arpen Quel'delar over the str-crit-haste one when I finally broke down and spent the 10k on a new 2H last week. Similarly, if you compare damage stats for rings, neck pieces, and cloaks, you have to look at hunter-rogue-shaman gear as well as strength DPS stuff. So when the game designers make a hunter stat-stick that's also a sword, Fury warriors look at it for more than just stats. That may not last into Cataclysm, as they are (I believe) taking the flat AP mod off of agi weapons and instead making agi classes gain AP from raw agility on the weapon. Fury warriors will probably still get a respectable amount of crit from agility (or maybe not- but that's why we use agi/AP items now, the combination of flat AP and crit from agi is better than just a lot of AP from strength on comparable items).

The new rage mechanics means Single-Minded Fury should work okay to start with: you'll get approximately the same rage income from dual-wielding faster 1H weapons than the slow 2H weapons. Easy-peasy. The thing I'm worried about is stat scaling. In order to balance everything, the designers have to take into account that the SMF Warrior will have lower overall stats than the TG warrior, since 2H weapons are itemized to have more bonus stats. Not only will they need to bump up the damage multiplier to make the lower-DPS weapons comparable to dual-wielding 2H weapons, they'll need to do that in a way that accounts for the lower stats on 1H weapons. And they'll need to do that in a way that keeps Warriors roughly in balance with enhance shamans and maybe even rogues, all of whom are fighting to get the same weapons but have vastly different damage output mechanics.

In defense of Gearscore

Gevlon just posted an "I hate gearscore" rant, and while I agree with him on some levels, I disagree on the overall conclusion. Rather than just post a long comment on his blog, I'm posting my response here.

Let's ask the question sideways: who is hurt by  GearScore? In order to approach that question, I'm going to be making a couple of assumptions.

One: we are talking about a scenario wherein a raid leader needs to pug someone and puts a reasonable minimum GS on their pug requirements. By reasonable, I mean 5000 GS for ICC, which is easily accomplished by farming heroics for t9.232, or lower GS for lesser raids. I don't mean the 6.5k GS requirement for ANYTHING, or the 5k GS naxx run.

Two: while Gevlon has demonstrated that it's possible to kill a LOT of raid bosses in iLevel 200 blues, the reports also indicate that there's a lot of perseverance involved in those boss kills, on the order of ten to fifteen wipes per boss kill. Clearly a higher GS will assist in surviving and killing bosses. Skill is important, but skill coupled with GS is even better than skill alone.

Three: you're on a large enough server that there are high-GS raiders ready to PuG and fill in your slots. More on this later.

Okay, so we can look at two variables: GearScore and Skill (henceforth GS and S). Rather than make any fine distinctions, we'll just create two qualitative values: high and low (do a median split if you like, but really there's probably clusters in skill at least, and most likely in GS as well). Therefore we have four categories a Potential could fall into, and I've listed them in order of preference.

High-GS, High-S: we want these people in the raid. Gearscore does not prevent them from raiding. Once they pug with you once, if you're a good raid leader, you will note their performance and add them to the list of preferred puggers.

Low-GS, High-S: we'd like to have these people in the raid, because they probably can do a respectable job (at DPS at least) and probably know all the fights from first-hand alt experience or through thorough preparation at TankSpot and elsewhere. It kind of sucks that GS will serve as a barrier to their entry to the raid, but there is a bright side which is two-fold. Given the choice between High-GS, High-S and Low-GS, High-S, we'd rather have the former, and it only takes a week or so of heroic grinding for the highly skilled to go from Low-GS to High-GS. Less so if they're also good at the AH and can afford some choice BoE items (264 crafted boots/pants, battered hilt, etc). So while it sucks for both the raid and the raider that we exclude this category, such an exclusion is temporary and will be overcome later.

High-GS, Low-S: these people suck. They're the ones Gevlon is talking about. They grinded their way into t9 without learning their class. For example, just the other day I had a paladin healer put that stupid immunity bubble on me while I was tanking. The mobs I was tanking promptly aggro'd other people and there was a near wipe. How do you get to 80 without learning about that? Having these people in your raid will suck, and if you're a RL you need to boot them as soon as their incompetence becomes clear. On the other hand, if you're just trying to fill a DPS slot, having this dummy do 3k DPS is better than running with 24 people on some fights.

Low-GS, Low-S: the raid is better off without these people.

So, as you can see, using the GS metric to discriminate between Good and Bad raiders is subject to false positives (High-GS, Low-S) and false negatives (Low-GS, High-S). The false positive is in no way unique to the GearScore discrimination test. The only real way to determine skill is by extended interaction with the player. They could have been carried by their prior raids into their achievements, they could have paid someone else to farm their badges, they could have just taken over their older brother's WoW account when he went off to college. One job of the competent RL is to review pugger DPS on trash and their reactions to various fight mechanics (standing in the fire, etc) and boot people if they're not performing. The false negative, on the other hand, does kind of suck, but is easily remedied by the player in question: go get some tier gear and come back next week.

The next question is: given that GS is at worst, no worse than any other system that can discriminate potential raiders, what are its strengths? Strengths really come down to one thing: simplicity. While it's possible for a raid leader to check out a character's achievements using the armory (while maybe taking the pugger's word that their alt MrAwesomePants really is their alt and see is a Kingslayer), that's a lot of work and is no more likely to discriminate skill than a GS number.

Clearly, one can abuse the GS system, asking only for very high GS requirements to enter the raid. These raid leaders either have a very small number of slots to fill or have no real faith in their raid or their own ability to lead the raid and need the extra cushion provided by the 6k GS.

In an ideal world, we'd have a better discrimination test to easily detect skill without needing to watch someone raid. Even in that world, we'd still preferentially choose high-GS, high-S people over the low-GS, low-S people. GearScore may be a lousy way to pick puggers, but it seems like it's better than all the other lousy ways to pick puggers.