LFM Must be Geared

I'm not sure how it is on your realm but this is something that I hear in LFG channel all the time. It is also the phrase I hate the most because it is totally meaningless. Somehow in the course of the WotLK expansion the term "geared" has become a measuring stick of a player. But what is considered geared... and why is it important?

I remember during towards the end of BC I was pretty heavy into pvp on my druid. One evening though I decided to join a pug of Kara as a healer. The group had zoned in and without even fully buffing the tank started pulling without saying a word. Well the end result of a complete lack of communication is a wipe which is exactly what happened.

I then was kicked from the group. Totally confused I whisper the leader and asked why I was kicked. He replied that I had under 1400 healing power and that I didn't have enough gear. Well this boggled my mind because I looked at my character sheet and it said I had 1600. Then I remembered that I had logged out in my pvp gear which had significantly less healing power. When I told the leader that he must have been looking at my pvp gear and that my pve gear is what I was wearing... he pretty much called me a liar and put me on ignore.

To compound the issue

For the most part BC was you needed x healing or x + damage, hps, attack power whatever. Now though people are using mods that calculate the value of the gear you are wearing. However this doesn't even begin to go into whether you have chosen the proper gear only the item level and the quality of gems and enchants. You could be wearing spell power plate gear as a prot pally and have spell penetration gems... gearscore mods and sites wouldn't know the difference.

Sometimes people make poor choices just because the item has a higher ilvl. Take for instance the melee dps trinket out of Regular ToC Victor's call , this trinket has a ton of expertise that unless you actually need the expertise... is a step down from even the Mirror of Truth.

None of these even matter if the person doesn't know how to play their class. You can have the best gear in the world but still die in the fire if you aren't paying attention, or have a terrible spec and spell rotation.

One of the mages that runs with our raid group consistently does around 1k to 2k dps less then my mage. His gearscore according to wow-heroes is 200 pts higher then mine.

This weekend our 25 man run was a little light on healers for our Saturday night clean up of TotC and Ony. Earlier that night one of my Guildies let me know that he had the night off and was looking for something to do. So when the time came and I saw we needed healers I let the raid leader know that he was available.

The RL response?

"He is a little undergeared, most of his gear is from Naxx."

.....

To which I ever so politely reminded my RL... that the very priest I was playing was still in half Naxx 10 gear and was in FULL ilvl 200 gear when we started doing TotC!

I've been raiding with them on my priest every other week alternating between my priest and mage depending on what was needed. Our first clears of TotC 10 was with my priest in one piece of ilvl 219 gear from ToC 5. My priest still has 5 pieces I think of ilvl 200 gear and has healed up to Jaraxxus on TotGC (heroic 10)

And they are trying to tell me that the paladin who has cleared half of Ulduar with us before isn't allowed to go because his gear was low??

With my flawless and impeccable logic they finally invited my guildie into the group. How did he match up next to the almost full ilvl 245 geared holy pally?

He out healed her. Not by a lot... but considering the gear difference enough to make my point damnit.

I'm sick of everyone putting so much focus into gear.

Last week we only had 9 people for 10 man TotC... so we brought one of the RL's mother along on her mage... who did 900 dps. We one shotted every boss in TotC, VoA, and 2 shotted Ony.

/sigh