Gearscore is so yesterday

Last night I was healing a guild ICC10 group. Someone asked about the Lich King encounter and what kind of gear score is required. I swear if it was possible I would have gone through vent and strangled him.(btw this person should be far more concerned with his dps, he was riding just above the tank)

Once more, with feeling.

The Gearscore mod is highly flawed. It doesn't track enchants, experience or the accuracy of stats on the player. All it measures is iLevel. And any Hunter who knows anything about gear knows that Darkmoon Card:Greatness is better than basically every trinket under ilvl 245, and things like Herkuml War Token are inferior to 245 and even most 226 trinkets.

Someone just pointed me to a bright and shiney new method of warcraft evaluation.  Elitist Armory.  Its a web based tool that is a hybrid of the Elitist Group mod and the WoW armory.  Elitist Armory is everything Gearscore could be if it wasn't a lazy mod for lazy players.

For kicks, giggles and examples lets look at my Elitist Armory page.  You can see a ton of information about my character.   Both of my talent trees, my professions, the average item level of my gear not counting trinkets, and the accuracy of my gemming, enchants, and gear as it relates to my class and spec.

But beyond that, we get into the meat and potatoes of EA – the Raid Experience calculator.   This is highly cool.

If you’ll look (at time of writing), I’m 100% experienced in ICC10 but only 89% experienced in Ruby Sanctum despite having 2 Halion kills.  Why? Because EA’s Raid Experience index doesn’t just care about kills and achievements, it actually rewards repetition, rates harder encounters (LDW, PP, Sindy, etc) worth more points than lesser encounters (the whole Lower Spire on normal, etc.), and gives you a composite index as it relates to a value at which one should be expected to be 100% experienced with the instance.

Elitist Armory is unique in this experience is rewarded, not just “link achievement”. Running the instance weekly and gaining more and more intimate knowledge of the encounters builds my experience rating, until it caps at 100%, at which point I should be considered autonomous and able to work on my own in this instance.


It also has the usual “look at their gear/gems/enchants” stuff that you’d expect from an armory, experience ratings for 5-mans and older content, and a whole bevy of information to give you a REAL way to determine a raider’s aptitude, instead of just saying “oh that hunter has 5896 gs, take him”.

It’s a major step up in information analysis for current and aspiring raid leaders.  Spread the word, there's a new sheriff in town.