Which brings me to my shameful, shameful story…

I see in trade that a group needs a tank for the daily, HoL. I offer my service and my mouseover inspection yields worrisome results. I ask who the healer is, and it’s a shaman with frighteningly low health and mana totals. When one of the DPS see that Undergearedshaman is healing (for the first time too), he switches to a healer so now we just have 3 blue/green DPS and an appropriately geared healer. Apparently their guildies, but their guild is low on tanks. Anyway, I explain that it’s a tough instance and I’ll tank it for them, but I can’t wipe all night and then… I personally cause our only wipe when I forget about the patting boss. It was far from a speed run, but they performed admirably though their low health meant that a couple of them exploded when they saw Loken.

The worst part was they were so nice when I was eating my words after our run. They kept thanking me for not judging them for their gear scores while I was feeling like a jerk for doing just that.

So while there are definitely some gear requirements for harder content (especially for tanks) I’ll never judge a PuG in heroics again.

I was about to reply about our “system” of determining if we want certain people in our pugs, but it seems that Runycat was a lot faster. The comment about guild tags is very true – and it works very well, especially for a pretty small server that I’m on. You just know, that guy is from a not very good guild that’s still stuck somewhere, that other guy is from a guild that does all content without a problem. And above that, if you pug around, you should have a pretty good knowledge about what the puggers are capable of – though that counts more for healers and tanks, and rarely for dps, unless they did something really bad.

And Gearscore is pretty much irrelevant anyway with all the badge gear that’s availaible. You can have pretty nice gear and still suck (or be a total jerk), so why even bother looking at it. :)
Saithir´s last blog ..Apparently I’m a worst warrior up to date.

I think Neil hit the nail on the head with his suggestion that the long pause you experienced was the requester dealing with a truckload of pst’s (lol… or at least two). During Hollow’s Eve, I remember doing the HH a quite a few times early on and even one time having to “LF1M DPS HH”… omg, I’ve added that experience to my resume to be air traffic controller at Newark.

Hope everyone is doing well.

Just sayin’

I understand people wanting the achievements linked, though if you can prove that another of your characters has done the fight and you know it well enough, that should be enough. Sadly, it isn’t always. In fact, even if you can briefly explain the tactics? Sigh. The people forming these kind of groups are a little bit stupid.

The kind I like is the “come to this place so I can inspect you, then I may invite you” because that allows for the raid leader to see if a person has specced well, put effort into their gear and is also geared correctly for whatever encounter, rather than having full arena gear, or a paladin with attack power gems, and so on.
Jaedia´s last blog ..Relationships Within Azeroth II

Ret is not weak.

Ret does require some skill to maximise though. Knowing when to switch seals (e.g. to command for Ony’s whelps), keeping in melee range and behind your target. Paying close attention to your gear and enchants to maintain hit and exp caps (same for all melee really).

Some fights really don’t flatter a ret when you have enough target switching to mean your stacks drop off then you just suck it up. All classes have fights where they can excel or will just be a warm body making up the numbers.

I think Bliz will continue to balance the clases and we’ll see more variability from skill than purely from class mechanics. Well, I certainly hope so.
Ulv´s last blog ..Trial of the Grand Crusader 10 – Jaraxxus is Dead!

Haha i read you. On be.imba.hu i got a really nice score – thats when im not crit immune, way from hit capped and have almost no expertise (saying as a tank i would be failmachine wearing those gears) -> but 36.2k hp unbuffed and near 560 be imba score. it works… i put on my other gear when we are inside the instance. =)

They all can help a leader as part of their decsion making process, each one giving bits of infomation that forms a whole picture. How much of the whole picture a leader needs is down to their own comfort level and how much risk they are willing to take.

The problems occur when people start following a single metric of one tool and use it blindly, effectly the tool is controling their actions, they have become the tool of the tool.

Personally I like gearscore, but i also know the day I start saying “I’m only going to group with people over x points in Gearscore” is the day it will come back and bite me in the arse with a fail group.

Basically
Use the tools available, but be turned into a tool yourself