The myth of the gear
As you saw yesterday, we cleared Ulduar 10 in blue gear. The question is obvious: why bother? And even better: why spend loads of gold on this?
This plan was a long-long one. Actually it came when my girlfriend's newly leveled (lvl 70) prot warrior was invited to a Gruul run as friend to an empty DPS spot and ended up tanking him successfully after the real tank pulled the combination of falling debris + hurtful strike + missing shield block (in lvl 70 the monsters had a "crushing" attack on tanks that should be prevented by using abilities).
From this display I was sure that gear is vastly overrated in the game. It was further enforced by the event when Ensidia cleared Naxx25+Maly25 in lvl70 stuff. I wrote about how little upgrade gear gives, convincing nobody, despite the obvious math. It took some time to realize that this is not just a mistake of ignorance. It is a Myth that has strong emotional value among WoW players.
Even more surprisingly the Myth is shared by both top and bottom players, despite they disagree in everything. I've seen guilds not accepting applicants if they have non-epic gems or having "wrong race" (non-orc for hunter for example). On the bottom, the people blame all failures on "being ungeared", honestly believing that the guy with 1200DPS is just needs some more ilvl200 replaced by ilvl 213.
I believe if the players would be asked "How much stronger an Ulduar geared player is than a blue geared?", vast majority would guess 2x-3x more. That's why topguilds do undermanned runs but never ever tried blue geared runs. I believe most topguilds would prefer having 1 top geared player and one empty spot than 2 blue geared players.
I've already done the math, won't do it again. As a simple example please compare my stats in blue gear and (mostly ilvl226) epics:
Tree spell power: 1717 (2428)
Crit%: 8.8 (14.7)
Haste: 90 (301)
casting MP5: 246 (368)
HP: 14800 (17700)
Mana: 14400 (18300)
My rejuvenation ticks for 1860 instead of 1660. If we consider haste and assume it could crit for +100% (like most spells) then my power would be 1860*(1+0.147)*(1+0.1225) = 2394 instead of 1660*(1+0.088)*(1+0.0366)=1872. The difference is 22%. If we add 300 more SP and a Val'anyr, we are still at +40%
Another direct example is the damage meters from our blue Ulduar run. I don't see 1200 here:
Edit: I can't believe that I have to explain the obvious. I get "my guild has 8K DPS in epics so the math is flawed" comments without any math. Well, the difference comes not from gear but from raid buffs and synergies. With having a synergic team instead of "anyone who wanted to come" we could increase raid DPS with 20-30%. Just think of the melee zergs or the full-caster teams. Compare plain dummy DPS in different gear for results. Simple example: GF's ilvl 200 hunter does 2.6K on dummy, 5.4K on Patchwerk25. The "bring the player not the class" is a nonsense, just most people are too bad in maths to recognize it.
Last evidence, and I refuse to argue with anyone who doesn't provide evidence just "anecdotes": I downloaded Shandara's hunter DPS spreadsheat. The "sample SV spec" had 7250 DPS in full T8.5 and all juicy stuff. I replaced every gear pieces with blues (and might picked some bear tank stuff as I suck at hunter) and got 4950 DPS. So the increase is 46%.
Now let's see how could this Myth survive, despite being obviously wrong and could be easily defeated by mathematics. The reason it survives within the lower segments of the playerbase will be the post for tomorrow. For today let's see why the top players vastly overvalue gear. There are a wrong and an acceptable, but seriously suboptimal reason.
The wrong comes from the bias of overvaluing everything we worked hard for. The top player may wiped weeks for that bosskill, and while he initially did it for the challenge itself, or being world first or server first or whatever first, he will see the loot as reward. He matches the value of the gear to the effort, while there is no such connection. For example you can get ilvl 245 from facerolling Colisseum while hard mode Ulduar loot is just ilvl 239. If the same loot would come from a vendor for 1000G, the same player would not find it so great, despite it has the same stat.
The second reason is using gear as a primary screening tool for application. Topguilds get several applicants, 90% of them are not acceptable, because they are just M&S want to be carried, or immature punks. Looking at the gear is a 10 sec process and filters out obvious slackers. However this is highly sub-optimal as it forces the applicant to farm 5-mans and Naxx for gear he will dust anyway in the first 2 weeks in the guild. This turns several potential good players away if they don't have the time or the will to farm boring content. For example I would surely not raid if I had to attend 5 raids in 2 weeks, considering that 3 of them are boring farmruns (extending raid ID helps, we keep the same ID until Firefighter goes down, that increases my attendance largely). Luckily there is a goblin solution for this problem: the applicant could get the attention of the guild for gold: "try me out in a 5-man or 10-man, I pay 1K, if I fail, you keep the gold, if I'm not, you get a good new member".
He definitely isn't trying to make a point about gear not being hugely important. Not at all.
