Getting in to raids is frustrating

[Groghole]

I havent read the entire thread but here is my two cents.

I've had similar problems to the original poster, as a tank with aprox 4700 gearscore, I feel I have capped out what I can accomplish with badges and heroics. I could get a couple peices JUST to raise gearscore but that I wouldnt actually want. I was fortunate and got into a raid for the first time ever as a PUG and was the OT. Nax, we didnt get far due to server lag but I had never done Nax before so it was all new to me. With the two tank builds, blood/frost my DK has, I got third place on the DPS meter?

Bottomline: Requirements for pugs to enter raids are ENORMOUSLY overblown. As an OT I had enough gear to get third on the DPS meter? Smart players outweigh gear, unfortunately there is no way to know if the person can play smart or if they are lazy by just a GS or achievement.

[Bowen]

Pugs are generally made to fail, you either have a person organizing it who is looking for a boost along with his friends and invite anyone (or people who have tip top gear and achievements, when they themselves don't), or you get someone really good with a few good friends who end up having the rest of the raid built up with totally bad people (who have the gear but because wotlk is welfare central they end up having zero skill character and raid wise). Even if you cannot join a committed raiding guild, I 100% agree that it is a must if you wish to do any kind of decent raiding that is not over geared and nerfed content and secondly be efficient with your time you spend on the game.

[swollenpickles]

Pugs are generally made to fail, you either have a person organizing it who is looking for a boost along with his friends and invite anyone (or people who have tip top gear and achievements, when they themselves don't), or you get someone really good with a few good friends who end up having the rest of the raid built up with totally bad people (who have the gear but because wotlk is welfare central they end up having zero skill character and raid wise).

The problem with 99% of pugs is that people joining them seem to expect the run to be a cakewalk, free ride, and they'll quit first sign of having to actually put effort in. There's no reason a group with GS's in the 4.5-5K range can't clear Onyxia 10man. Sure, it may not be as easy as it would be with a group that has all people with 5K GS and above, but it can still be done, so long as everyone knows there role, and is capable of playing it. It gets painful when, after spamming LFG for an hour putting together a group, the group falls apart at the first sign of wipe. Personally, when I go in to a raid, my goal is to clear the bloody thing. I don't care if my toon bites pavement 10 times in the process. Unfortunately, there aren't a lot of other people that share my view. First sign of wipe then people start quitting, like a wipe is the absolute worst thing in the world that could ever happen to them. Come on. Get some perspective. It's a game. Sack up and try again.

Proving that you have the 'achievement' is proving to be increasingly meaningless as well. As others have posted that can be faked with addons. I'd also suggest that there are a lot of people getting carried through raids by guild mates or friends, and while they technically have the achievement, doesn't necessarily mean they know what they did to get it. Personally I have DBM running, I can access the internet and read strategy guides before hand. IMHO that makes me as qualified to run a raid as a large number of those that 'have the achievement' even if I don't.

[Teggon]

The problem with 99% of pugs is that people joining them seem to expect the run to be a cakewalk, free ride, and they'll quit first sign of having to actually put effort in.

You hit the nail on the head my friend. Gone are the days when people actually put some efforct into getting gear. In blizzards attempt to have us all geared and ready for Cataclsym they've created servers full of selfish and lazy individuals. As said first sign of a wipe you'll see your raid fall apart quicker than you can blink. I would like to see blizzard do something similar to Heroics were you get a debuff for deserting a raid only it lasts for 24hours. Then players will think twice before deserting a raid just because of a wipe.

[swollenpickles]

I would like to see blizzard do something similar to Heroics were you get a debuff for deserting a raid only it lasts for 24hours. Then players will think twice before deserting a raid just because of a wipe.

It's funny cos a couple of us that were left in a bailed raid the other day said the same thing. We were half way through so was going to be hard to get new people to fill the spots for what was a half cleared raid, and we were screwed cos we were locked to a half cleared raid.

A wipe is no reason to quit. Now if a group consistently wipes at the same point, that may be different, but if people quit on the basis of a single wipe that's pretty weak form IMHO.

[gacktt]

You can go from fresh 80 to 5k+ gs just doing a day or two of heroics.

[drae]

A trick thing I've been doing lately is keeping my previous Skada boss report available; then I just report to the raid leader and he can see my DPS. It helps that I can pull substantially more DPS for my gear then most Puggers tend to with better gear. However, my guild tag might be enough to get me into most PuGs; being from a very established (and top-progressed guild on your faction) probably helps me more then I realize.

Or I bring a guildy with me (that's what they're for!)

"MY gearscore may be low, but I know a Really Wicked Tank Main that will tank your 10m ToC pug if you invite me."

Tanks are tough to find for pugs on our server, so much so that they don't normally mind carrying my 3500 dps warlock (I still have sub ilvl 200 blues on! and a TBC trinket!) if I bring a good tank with me . Wicked guildies are valuable assets.

I've never had gearscore myself.

[mjhmia]

You'd be surprised how well an announcement in trade chat like "experienced hunter looking for raid group that doesn't rely on retarded gearscore checks to determine skill" will help you find quality players that don't subscribe to gearscore as their sole qualifier. And doing so usually ends up derailing trade chat for about 10 minutes making everybody debate/agree how stupid gearscore actully is, which is a plus.

I actually uninstalled the gearscore addon and now when people ask me what my GS is I tell them I don't know, but if I'm trying to get into a raid I'll mention some relevant stat like my DPS or healthpool (depending on my role). That usually works in starting an intelligent dialogue about 30-40% the time. The other times I don't get any response back at all, which just tells me I probably don't want to be in a doomed raid with those sorts of "leaders" anyway.

[Banterloft]

Lets not turn this into another GS discussion. It sucks, I know. The trouble is that with the ease of content the Naxx and Ulduar brought us then people got use to one shotting everything. The idea is with a high enough GS then your raid will run smooth. I will admit that I ask for a achieve and wow-heroes a person prior to bringing them into a pug for ICC however, when people explain to me that they know the fights and just need to get in for the gear I ask something like... "You know how to get out of the square of fire that Marrow drops during bonespike right. Most call me out and say... "Square? You mean the X durning bonestorm?" I tell them they have passed the test and I /invite.

Just wanted to steer this away from GS before the hammer drops.

[swollenpickles]

You can go from fresh 80 to 5k+ gs just doing a day or two of heroics.

I'll bite. How can you do this in a day or two from just heroics? Use a hunter as an example, cause I've run more than a day or two of heroics, and I haven't cracked 5K yet.

[Deathshay]

(...)
DPS = gear + skill - lag. I think I've played long enough to be at the point where my rotation and familiarity with the class is such that I can make up for the 300-400K gear score discrepancy that keeps me out of a lot of PUGs.

About that formula, in reality it is not addictive, but multiplicative, so the right formula is more like the following:
DPS= (gear*build)/((1+b*e^(-a*skill))*(1+lag))

Unfortunately your not going to find any correlation between the two, because GS is a irrelevant tool that cannot measure skill. You are not your gear (although many people think otherwise), yes you need some but its not "be all", you are how well you play your character. But lets drop this GS discussion, its old, its tired, and we all know that discussion about it ends in the same place.... a locked thread by our friendly Ninja Moderator.

If you want to get in to raids my best advice is to build your character the best you can, hone your skill, and start guild shopping for one that meets your needs and schedule.

Tecnically, it is not entirely true that there are no correlation between GS and DPS, but I am talking about statistically correlation, and my guess is that the linear correlation between GS and DPS is somewhere around 0.1-0.6. It drastically changes over comparisons over larger gaps, since the GS to DPS conversion is not linear, asumming the same skills.
The problem of the above, is that it assumes GS is supposed to help you gauge the skill of the player, while its perpose is much more in the form of giving the user a very fast preliminary check of whether someone is in the gearrange of the content you are planning to go to. The building of the gearscore addon are also setup to give you a fast overview of the gearlevel, and not to tell you how well geared a person is. This means, that if someone got 0.1-0.2 more or less gearscore then it doesnt really mater, because that is the approximate precition of usability of the gearscore addon.
Above is a shorthand describtion of the formula for dps, through which explains that gear is an important part of the equation, especially if expect people to pull out huge numbers, while this is only achiveably if the person has the skills to pull out a performance close enough to maximum to make this really mater.
So if we have to look proporly at the correlation, we have to look the following factors:
skill of people with X GS
gear of people with X GS
build of people with X GS
lag of people with X GS

Now, most of you are probably going to agree with me that the correlation between lag and GS is VERY low, though it might exist in the form, that people with extremely bad connection are less likely to finish runs, and therefor less likely to be fully equipted. If we however restric ourself to look at reasonally hight GS, then the corelation will be negitible for this perpose.

Next we are going to asume that there is a relatively hight correlation between a good build and good skills, since if you have good skills, you likely also know how to spec appropiate, and if you were guided to a good spec, you might aswell have been guided in playing it. There is a difference though, as you may have gotten advise on build by a guildie, but still dont have the skill to pull playing it off proporly, or a really good player sitting in a suboptimal build, because that fits his or her playstyle better and allow them highter general performance. Now as for dps reasons, these 2 can be pulled together as a factor, I will make the assumtion that "for boths correlation with GS the difference between using a good build and having height skills will average out", and therefor assume we can use on common correlation for these.

As good players will generally have a heighter chance of succes in their enconters than lesser skilled players, and on the top of that the ability to go further into the content than lesser skilled people, there will be a different density of skilled players at different progression levels. This is much complicated by the concept of alts, but the speed still aplies to these too. As the gear of a specific itemlevel is gathered is a stocastic derivated function from the intergral of your progression level over time (for mortals, this means that the longer you spend in a certain level of content, the more gear you will get from it, but it is still based on chances so it is not entirely sure), then we can derivate that as GS is a measurement of your average itemlevel weighted by slot type, then GS will some will somehow have a correlation with skill/building. The problem here is the speed function in content based on skill on the different content levels being very forgiving to lesser skilled players, with it being a very slowly raising function until you encounter top level progression content, where it starts to show any significant difference over the classical different skill levels. With that in mind, GS doesnt really tell much about the skill of an indivudual before it reach a certain treshold, but much more how long the person have used in gearing up. It could be argued that people who have used more time gearing up would have more experiance, but due to lower content (meaning content you outgear, such as heroics for most people) being rediculess easy, then there is problem of making more skilled players dull by staying to long in it, which means that the general quality of players have a lower derivation in mid content, until it starts having serious derivations in height end content, where skills are shown. So what does that tells us? It tells us that we cant trust GS to tell us anything about the skill of the player unless you are seeing really hight numbers, as the correlation is way to low on the lower and mid parts.

Now for the last correlation, gear and GS (yes this is special, since gear here means appropiate gear, and not just int cloth pieces for a plate tank). Here a fair approximation would be that
gear=(1/(1-d*e^(c*skill)))*f(GS)
Which is interely bassed on, that people with highter skill generally chooses better pieces of gear for the corresponding itemlevel than people with a lower amount of skill. And the fact, that gear and GS is not linearly connectly (likely exponential or poential connected, or something such as that, which would require a study of the exact composition of factors for a specific role)

Now all of this can be combined together to describe the the value of dps as a function of GS and its appropiate uncertainity. As the formula extra is quite tendious, I will leave it out for now (as it requires backtracking through a lot of functions which have not been clearly defined), but I can atleast describe some of the attributes which such a functions would be very likely to have based on the above:
1) First of all, the average DPS will raising with heighter gearscore, increasing faster pr GS point the heither the GS.
2) There will be a large uncertainity in of the function, which will be slowly falling untill the hight end game treshhold, where the uncertainity will quicly fall. This both due to more ensured skilllevel of hight end raiders and to the logistic nature of DPS functions dependance of the skill variable.

This clearly show us, that there are some form correlation between GS and DPS, but the level is not assured to be extremly hight, and generally depends on the skill distribution and the values of the constants in the skill factor of the dps function.

If any of the above seems a bit akward, please say so.



Concerning the problem of getting into pugs, I can tell you from my experiance in running pug raids, that the way you write your first message to the person has a very hight impact on your chance of getting into a group. For instance, which one of the following would you take if you were a raidleader:
a: "inv me"
b: "want rogue? 5142 GS"
c: "Hi there, I heard you need some range dps for XXX, I wondered if you needed this hunter, though I can probably only 5 k dps in a 10 man though"

If you ask me, I would barely even bother with the first one, unless he somehow sits on class/type I really need for the composition, and even then I would talk to him first. The second one, yeah okay maybe, since almost everybody write it that way nowadays, but certainly not something to bring him to the from of the queue, and even then he is stupid enough to tell me his GS instead of giving me some more usefull information, so I wouldnt expect top performance from such a player. Now the last one is different. If I get a whisper like that, I would look around and see if I need a hunter of that qualenty, and if I did, you would get in, simple as that, and asuming the raidleader is the type that can trust people, he would probably not care very much if his intial check tells him that you got low gearscore. If you check such a person, you dont use gearscore, you check it on some site which better can tell you if gear is set up correctly (gemming, enchanting, not having rediculess setup) and if the spec is meaningfull, which it most likely will be.

Another posibility is getting recommended into a pug, in a meaningful way, but that requires connections, and people on the same server to know how good you are. The idea is, if you see someone you know in a raid, ask them if they can get you in.

[Theandris]

I'll bite. How can you do this in a day or two from just heroics? Use a hunter as an example, cause I've run more than a day or two of heroics, and I haven't cracked 5K yet.

Certain classes / specs can gear faster than other getting into random heroics quicker. For example it takes less than 30 seconds in que for a tank or healer, if you que as only dps you could be waiting 15 min up to 45 minutes. Get a tank or healer in your guild to que with you.

Back to the OP, as others have stated prior a lot of pug raids are fail. Get into a guild or make friends with a guild that can get you into raids. There will always be gear snobs out there that quite honestly have no idea how to setup a raid. From what I've found in the few pugs that I have run is if they are basing their raid invites on gear score and achievements then the raid will be filled with 75% of the people that don't have the knowledge, awareness, and skill that it takes to complete the raid. If there is no possable way for you to get into raids other than pugging then unfortunately you have to fit the requirements of whomever is setting up the raid. Try setting up the pug yourself, even if the content is new to you. There is an abundance of information on this site which could assist anyone in leading an efficent and fun raid thru most of the content available.

In reguards to the Gearscore addon, It can be a very helpfull tool if used properly. Quite honestly I could really care less what someones gear score is either thru the addon or wow-heroes. What the addon allows me to see is this. 1: have they taken the time to enchant their gear. 2: Do they know what their hit cap is and have they reached it or for a tank it tells me if they are defense capped. 3: Do they know how to gem / enchant properly and get the correct gear for their spec.

[Thorelle]

My advice is to watch the video Lore did on how to make sure you find a good guild, then hit the guild recruitment pages and find a home.

Could you please give a link to that video?

I'm not sure if you meant a forum user called Lore or projectlore.com's videos. In either case I was not able to find such a post/video.

[Quinafoi]

Could you please give a link to that video?

I'm not sure if you meant a forum user called Lore or projectlore.com's videos. In either case I was not able to find such a post/video.

Weekly Marmot, Episode 12 - Finding the Right Fit
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_rn9JCSTr9I

[Fledern]

I'll bite. How can you do this in a day or two from just heroics? Use a hunter as an example, cause I've run more than a day or two of heroics, and I haven't cracked 5K yet.

1-2 days is a bit of an overstatement but if you want to cheese gearscore, you'll need:

310 emblems of triumph, (this is for a generic class setup, for gearing up a hunter, it could be different)
12 crusader orbs,
some crafting materials related to your armor class (i'm guessing various leather types, including some arctic fur)

Basically, you get the 245 head & shoulder offset pieces, have the ilvl 245 chest & bracers crafted, buy ilvl 232 hands & legs tier items, the two trinkets and the two rings sold for emblems, again 226 emblem (conquest) neck, belt and crafted 226 boots.

Now, probably some of the rings/trinkets will suck big time for your class but it'll give you gs. Then you can run the new icc 5mans to upgrade the neck, belt, ring & trinket with ilvl 232 appropriate ones that will actually do more for your dps than the crap you got to boost your gs. Oh being a hunter you'll need ilvl 232 weapons from the 5mans. Other classes have the advantage of filling their ranged spot with emblem stuff.

Together with the icc 5man stuff, you should be able to hit 5100 gs. Not to mention have gear that's actually pretty decent gear for the job you want to do. This recipe works for every class.

That's the formula i'm following for gearing up my newly dinged 80 pala. I hope to hit 5100 gs both healy & tanky. Getting into 5mans with my crappy 2900 gs is hard ofc but it's getting there.

[swollenpickles]

I'm glad to say I hit 5K GS on the weekend (without having to resort to 'padding'). I'm at the stage now where my gear will basically only improve through running some raids. It took me far longer than 1-2 days to get to this stage though. Collecting the 50 frost emblems for the cloak alone was a 2 week exercise.
My Average Item Level for 16 Pieces is 234.50
Boots are pvp still, but they were a dps improvement over what I had and since I can't afford the crafted variety, they'll have to do for the time being.

Quite honestly I could really care less what someones gear score is either thru the addon or wow-heroes. What the addon allows me to see is this. 1: have they taken the time to enchant their gear. 2: Do they know what their hit cap is and have they reached it or for a tank it tells me if they are defense capped. 3: Do they know how to gem / enchant properly and get the correct gear for their spec.

The problem is gearscore doesn't (unless it's changed overnight) tell you anything about gems or stacking stats suitable to your class. This is why I've seen other hunters with ilvl245 tanking rings (yes +strength and +def - go figure) and other non-hunter beneficial gear who have had higher GS's than me do significantly less dps.