Is gear score highly overrated?

upinyaslayin

I was thinking about saying useless at first to be honest, but then I thought it's not completely useless because you do have to have certain requirements to even queue into some places so it's needed and yes if you see someone with like an 18k gear score who brought a bunch of stuff will probably do a ton of damage, but once you hit the 13k to do shores and lostmauth the area between about 13k and 15k is an extremely grey area and i'll explain why

1st off I'm not 100% sure exactly how gear score works, but it seems to be pretty straight forward when it comes to main stats like defense, recovery, power, crit strike etc. like if i remove an enchantment thats 150 power from an item, i lose 150 gear score. So here is why i feel it's kind of overrated. I'm currently at about 13.5k I run a full swashbuckler set. Now if i was to run a 2 and 2 set (swashbucker and master assassin, or swashbuckler and draconic) my score would go up to about 14k instantly, but my character wouldn't be as good. in reality my 13.5k gear score is more equal to about a 15.5-16k gear score and here is why i feel that. (FYI i have a TR class)

1) Gear score doesn't account for which stats you are getting, it counts them all equal
for instance I can boost my defense up in exchange for power and my gear score goes up but i lose damage, and as a damage dealer this is counter productive. I have no issue staying alive as is and even boosting my defense, most bosses will be able to one shot me anyway so there is no gain from it. And i would do less damage.

2) Gear score doesn't about for how well you spec your character (feats/boons/attribute points/abilities etc)
for instance, I get bonus stats from boons, which sure most people have at the T2 point anyway, but even having the first 3 (crit strike, armor pen, and power IIRC) thats 600 gear score if it was an enchantment instead of a boon. matter of fact 1 boon is better then a level 7 enchantment but the level 7 enchantment raises your score 185 a boon which has 15 more points raises it 0. even the base crit severity which is 70% mine is well over 100% because vorpal (doesn't raise score) feats etc. i have feats that boost my power and damage. none of it counts towards gear score. there could be someone with a higher gear score that doesn't have these feats picked.

3) gear score doesn't account for full set bonus.
for instance i use the swashbuckler which basically gives me 450 recovery plus an additional 1000 power and 1000 recover when it procs which is pretty much all the time. If i gave away that additional 2000 stat points in exchange for a 2 and 2 set I'd gain a hard extra 450 stat point and in turn an extra 450 gear score. but I'd be losing 1550 stat points in doing so.

4) gear score doesn't account for enchant types
enchantments that have multiple stats (like draconic) give you a higher score because it's overall more points, but some of those enchantments points go to useless stats for your character.

5) gear score doesn't look at boosts from companions.
I run the augmented companion so i get all his stats plus and extra 8% (on the defense slot) he has like 3k in usefull stats for me, none of it counts towards my gear score. someone with a higher gear score who doesn't have one, has less stats then me overall

So basically those are a few examples (I do have more) on why I think gear score is highly overrated. there are so many things it doesn't account for that it's basically way overrated. What are your thoughts?

sinibyte

Gearscore is a borderline useless metric. Not totally useless as it shows how much time (and/or money) someone has invested in their toon. But it is no metric of player ability.

strictlyevil

Gearscore is completely relevant if you follow the points you mentioned above. If you take two players who have roughly the same skill level and both know how to spec their characters then the higher gearscore player will more than likely perform better. That's why gearscore for most of us who recognize how the game works is just a very rough estimate into the time or money someone has put into the game thus far and not how well they will perform. This will eventually get better though and people will eventually start to realize this as it becomes more mainstream.