Saturday, January 16, 2010

WHO'S THAT ROGUE WITH ALL THAT SPELLPOWER?!

It certainly isn't Shaft, and it could very well be me in your next PUG.

You see, I realized something last night when I was queueing up in the Dungeon-o-Matic 3000. The tool itself was calling me a loser, and asking for achieves (or telling me to GTFO, basically). It was Cho'gall fever all over again, but fake achieve generating addons couldn't cure these blues...

This was going to require something drastic!

It all started, as I said, when I went to queue up for randoms. I decided I was sick of running CoS, HoS, and HoL over and over (and over and over), and decided to select a narrower band of choices. Little did I know that I apparently sucked, and so did my gear. This is my fourth 80 now, and while my other three are able to stand tall with the big boys in ICC, my lil rogue is apparently being told by the game itself to go stand in the corner, and when it's time to eat dinner, I'll be sitting at the kids' table.


GG.

Mousing over my unit frame, everyone's favorite new Baddon, GearScore, informs me I'm sitting at around 3100. I'm not sure what that means, really. I just know I actively play when I'm inside of a dungeon, instead of tabbing out to YouTube and watching dancing hamsters while putting someone on autofollow like everyone else does. Apparently I'm bad.


So then I get to thinking. If the game itself is telling me I'm bad, how closely does it really pay attention? How does it KNOW I'm bad like it insists that I am? I start looking at my gear, and see that I have bracers, boots, and a chestpiece below iLevel 200. Hmmm. Let's see... wowhead seems to indicate a distinct gap in instantly obtainable gear between the Eviscerator Treads (iLevel 187) and crap that requires random recipe drops out of Ulduar (213+). I mean, I could go run Naxx, I guess? But I want to pwn faces NOW, and ... hmm... no... nothing on the AH.... WAIT A SECOND..! WHATS THIS I SEE?


Interesting! My warrior is a leatherworker! WELL LET's GET ON THAT, SON!


Okay, so the boots are out of the picture. There's actually a decent set of roguey bracers on the AH, but no chestpiec--- OH WAIT.


HUZZAH! I run to the bank and grab some ridiculous dragon head fist weapon thing just in case the LFG tool has a stick up its ass over heirlooms (the Dal Rend MH sword), and equip all my new items.


Well lookee lookee! Queue up the Jefferson's soundtrack, because I'm moving on up, yeah, baby! Not only that, but everyone's favorite Baddon is happier with my new leet gears too!


I'm sitting at iLevel 200+ in every slot, EXCEPT FOR MY HELM. Fuck! Turns out the only helms I can get are 187s, until I either buy a trashy PvP one, or ....

...yeah, go run Naxx.

I looked at how many stone shards I had, and saw I would still fall woefully short if I redeemed them all for honor. I'd do the For Great Honor quest, but I've never actually set foot in Isle of Conquest since the day after it opened and people were feeling curious.

Plenty of helms drop in randoms, though!

At this point I'm still prohibited from queueing from the new 5 mans or Trial of the Crusader heroic (ToC? Seriously?). Next helm I see that I can equip is getting needed on the instant it drops, though. Cloth with spellpower and mp5? Hell yes please thankyou.

I need something to go with my swanky new dress.


Once I get a new helm, I'll let you know if it worked. Wish me luck!

15 comments:

Khatib said...

It baffles me so much that you've long ago seen through the bullshit gear grind that is the driving force behind anyone playing WoW, you don't appear to have a solid crew of friends you play with, you deal with PUGs all the time, and yet you STILL keep playing WoW.

That's some serious dedication, lol. I expected you to have given it up by now.

Anonymous said...

I think you're making this too hard on yourself.

Sure, you can fool the tool, or you could go run normal mode trial of the champion and the normal mode new instances - they all drop really good gear (and higher than iLvL 200 I think).

Also, you're right about the heirloom weapon, I think the dungeon finder and gearscore both count it as level 1.

Rich said...

@khatib: I've actually got a solid guild I'm running with again, I'm just back in Japan for ten days or so, and stuck in the time shift of playing while america sleeps.

The gear grind is silly, but stuff like this keeps it interesting. I stand by the fact that WoW is the best game out right now. It's what I play ;)

For what it's worth, I was stuck in a weird limbo after juggling my gear around for a half an hour or so. I hit ToC Heroic in the random finder, and was surprised after the run that it allowed me to queue for Forge of Souls (H).

I opened my character pane to see what I was wearing, that had changed, and saw it was my normal gear. Opened the LFG tool again, and it said my gear wasn't good enough... but I was still "in the queue". Left the queue, tried to requeue, no luck. Put my spellpower gear on. Went to the bathroom. Came back, I was able to queue again. So I did, and got in HFoS. Cleared it (wearing my real gear), and now it lets me choose it no matter what I wear.

It felt like there was a lag in the update... like the tool parses your gear every few minutes, not all the time, but even when I left myself poorly geared for 10 min, I was still able to queue after getting in it that one time.

Now I can't queue for it, since I've done it for the day. More testing tomorrow, I guess...

Unknown said...

If you wanted to check if its based off gear or a combo of gear and achievements you could have just Q'd with no items on.

Anonymous said...

The view on the tool is that it looks not only at the gear you're wearing but also at what is present in your bags/bank, making it pretty impossible to fool it by queuing naked. It would still be possible to fool it by collecting any epic items you can come across though. From personal experience, you don't need epic items to get ToC, just ilvl 200 (which can be blue items from Heroics).

Kyir said...

I don't think Blizzard realizes that if you're horrible, all the good gear in the game won't save your group.

Clearly they need a better way to measure such things.

Josh said...

Well you can get gear with a little time but it should not take too long. I got to 5k GearScore 2 weeks after I got to 80. I just ran normal ToC a lot and triend to get as many epic as I could there and then I did FoS, PoS and HoR. After that I got some decent gear and then I started doing random heroics to the Emblems. Emblems are the best way to get pretty decent gear. It will take some time but if you play consistantly, you can get full T9 gear with Emblems of Triumph. Good Luck.

Josh
http://wowresourcecenter.blogspot.com/

Rohan said...

I'm not sure I really understand your strategy here.

Why didn't you just run normal Heroics for i200 gear, and Triumph badges to round out the missing pieces?

Sage said...

Ixobelle said: "I decided I was sick of running CoS, HoS, and HoL over and over (and over and over)".

Yeah, I know the feeling with random heroics, but I'm a tank with 41.1k HP. Instant qqs and multi-mob pulls ftw. On the one hand I want to level a Warlock/Hunter. On the other hand, I don't want to deal with the BS of gearing up.

Hatch said...

There's a lot I object to in this post, but I gotta assume you are just doing this half to be funny and half to poke at the holes in Blizzard's system. It is pretty funny. :)

But I do want to note that something from your post seems to be a common misconception among players: that if someone/something says their gear is bad, it is telling them that *they* are bad. We are not our gear.

We can be great players and super friendly and great people even if we have greens. But that doesn't mean we are somehow entitled to Q for dungeons our gear can't handle. No matter how well you play, there is a limit to how much of your gear you can overcome. And even though you are a good player, it's still not fair to expect other players to carry your undergeared ass just because you cheated the gearchecking system.

In your crap gear you can probably outdps most of the people I meet in randoms in tier 9. I think that means that bad players should somehow also be weeded out by the lfg system, not that the undergeared should get to ignore gear checks. No matter how well you play, a H HoR group will fail with even one person in your gear there. :(

I'm assuming you are doing all this as a joke, but I just hope that other people don't take your post as encouragement. :P


It made funny fodder for a post, but for those of you out there who might take him seriously: just run regular instances, especially the newer ones that give 200 and 219 epics, before you demand to be Qed for whatever heroic you want.

Hatch said...

PS I'm pretty sure gearscore considers heirlooms to be ilevel 187 blues. I've noticed on my heirloomed alt that he has like a 1200 gearscore in his 30s and people with no heirlooms are in the low hundreds.

Krunchy said...

That's one thing that always amused me about the new lfg tool. I started playing again (I'm weak) and now I roll with a paladin. I'm prot and want to do some heroics, but the stupid tool tells me I suck. Blacksmith friend makes me some pwnage epic plate stuff and my stats all jump drastically and I can tank anything under the sun! Apparently, though, I'm not leet enough for heroix. I have heard my higher gearscore guildies talk about some terribad people they HAVE run with in heroics who do less dps than the tank or can't hold aggro for shit, but are in tier-holy shit epics.

Yup. Gear equals skill. Those of us with brains know better, but now the damn game itself is LITERALLY telling us this.

If I could convince my rl friends who play (the reason I came back) to jump ship to Aion or to go to STO or TOR when they hit, I think I'd totally quit WoW right now. Cataclysm better be pretty effing amazing or I won't stick around for much longer after it hits.

Also, hello Iso, how have you been? <3

Anonymous said...

My protection paladin was able to queue for H PoS with three items below the superior quality.

One of the DPS and its replacement dropped group immediately upon inspecting me; apparently you are not supposed to tank this with 26k health unbuffed.

We decided to 4-man it and we cleared it with no death.

The two dps were not against using CC on the 4 and 5 pulls and in fact, they enjoyed having to do something different than the usual AoE the crap out of everything.

I was told the run only took 10 minutes more than a go-go no death run with an overpowered group; not bad for 4-manning it using CC.

Carealess of Ravencrest

Kensai said...

A pox upon that addon.
This expansion brought some really bad abbreviations... BiS, GS, Ach blah blah blah.

I played with that stupid gear score just last night after a respec/regem, and i discovered how flawed it is. A trinket with expertise is worth more than one with AP even if i'm capped, pvp legs are better than T8 legs, and generally everything that's high ilvl is better than anything below. Stat balancing don't matter, nor stat prio, haste/crit/expertise caps... basically i could go around in pvp gear and be eligible for anything.

Didn't test this on my tank, but i bet i could go all armor penetration gear and sign up as a tank for heroics.

Gear changing every 3 months, pve targeted for pugging, what the hell happened to this world ?

Sage said...

It would be HERESY if an instance actually required you to use CC, not multi-mob pull, and could go there if you didn't have 'enough' gear.

Srsly, what Ixo is doing is working as intended. Blizz wants skill to overcome gear, while the opposite is coming in here. And srsly, remember chain-running ToC & pugging heroic ToC. I remember when, as a tank, I did more damage then two members, and we still completed it.

Maybe someone shouldn't be there, but in the end, it's about having a good time, not grinding random heroics.