My Love/Hate Relationship With Gear
Ah, gear. The subject of much controversy and debate and hording and ninjas and raid drama and bragging rights. Don’t get me wrong, I love new gear as much as the next person. I also fully stand behind the desire to have great gear with optimal stats for your character. Stack that AP/Agility/SP/Stamina.
However.
When gear becomes the focal point to the exclusion of everything else, I have an issue.
Gear Without Skill
We’ve all seen it. People hollering in LFG or Trade looking for raiders with a particular gear score, a specific AP/SP/HP, or whatever. How many times do those same people stop to think about skill? I’m sure most of them just figure that if someone meets a certain mark then they know how to play their character, right? Eh, maybe.
We can all agree that gear is stupid easy to get at the end-game. If you have a bit of cash, time to grind some heroics and get lucky in a Vault run or two, you can be in full purples within a couple of weeks of hitting 80 with your hit/expertise/ap/agi/crit/hp/sp/etc/etc at their optimum levels for your spec. Two weeks. Does that mean you know how to raid with your toon properly? Does that mean you possess the skill and knowledge needed to be a part of a team and you know your proper role in each fight? Not necessarily and we all have run across “that guy” who doesn’t know the first thing about his toon despite having 3/5 T9.
Skill Without Gear
The flip side of this issue is one that I actually see more of lately and it somewhat saddens me. Good players thinking they aren’t good enough or they can’t be better because they don’t have “good gear.” How many times have you run across this? ”We don’t have the gear for this.” or, even worse, “I don’t have the gear for this.”
We’ve become so conditioned as players to equate great gear with great healing/dps numbers, that anything below that arbitrary bar is seen as not good enough and therefore not worth trying to improve.
Before you protest and say that you DO need great gear to do great things, think about the number 1 or 2 guild on your realm. The guilds that get the server firsts. Maybe even the guilds that get the world firsts. When that guild got your realm’s first downing of Algalon-25, that was, what, 5 weeks or so after Ulduar was released? Maybe not even that long? So 25 people (assuming it was the same 25 from start to finish) went through Ulduar-25 5 or so times. 3-4 drops a boss, assuming everyone got really lucky and pieces for main specs actually dropped all the time, you’re looking at the group having 1-3 pieces of Ulduar 25 gear apiece. Mix that with some crafted pieces, a couple of badge items (this was before heroics dropped Conquest emblems, mind you) and the rest is, remember this, Naxx25 gear.
And they downed Algalon.
Go watch the video for Ensidia’s world first downing. You will see Warglaives and a Thunderfury.
It’s not all about gear.
I have seen players in a mix of purples and blues pump out more dps than someone in the same spec fully epic’ed out in the latest and greatest.
Skill Trumps Gear
None of this is to say that gear has no place in the measurement of your character’s ability in any given fight. It is definitely on the list. But it’s at the bottom of the list. Skill, attitude, attention, build, glyphs, gems, enchants, THEN gear.
This is something that, as a guild leader, I try to communicate to my raiders when we’re up against something particularly challenging. It’s easy to get frustrated and say that we can’t do it because of gear level. ”We can come back after we get some more gear.”
Well, yes, we could. But will we do better because we upgraded someones chest piece from 232 to 245?
I realize there is a mental component that goes with it. We equate great gear with great performance, therefore, when we have the gear, we do better inherently. I want us as players to move past that and move away from it.
Always try to better your raider through research, build tweaking, rotation tweaking, and, yes, even gear. But, remember, while you will inevitably do better with better gear, don’t forget that you are capable of doing great things with the clothes you have on your back.
This is definitely a topic that has been brewing in my mind for some time now and I’m curious to hear your thoughts on it. How much importance do you HONESTLY place on gear?
