Blizzard will be throttling the queries sent by Gearscore and similar mods, in an attempt to reduce lag (from the mountains of requests being sent simultaneously by all the GS users out there). Hooray! Lag is always an issue for me, as an Aussie, but anything that helps to reduce it is okay in my books.

Lissanna from Restokin has a good write-up of what it will mean – so I won’t go over it too. Here’s the part that explains the crux of it, for me:

Gear-score and other mods that are being throttled by this change will still work. They will potentially just take longer to load all the information that you want (or the mods may even be changed to be more picky about who they ping). That’s fine, since you didn’t instantly need to know the gearscore of all 1,000 people standing next to you in Dalaran when you go to get something out of the bank.


There’s really no need to be sending out the majority of those automatic requests – but they keep happening, and it adds to lag. So Blizzard is going to throttle the number of requests, and hopefully improve server lag (particularly in crowded places, like Dalaran).

You can find more info about the change at wowinterface and wowace.

Rather than go into why I like the change or what it will mean for all of us, I wanted to suggest that instead of using Gearscore, why don’t you try WTFismygearscore.com. Instead of running an addon that causes lag and adds to your addon memory total, this nifty little website will give you a super quick assessment of someone’s gearscore, plus you can mouseover the instances they’ve done and see exactly what experience they have.


As you can see in the examples above, Keeva has a GS of almost 6000 (I logged out in my resto gear, I swear it’s over 6000 in my boomkin gear, STOP JUDGING ME), which means that she would be allowed into a heroic dungeon, *cough*. You can see that she just needs heroic Putricide, Sindragosa, and LK on 25. You can compare with Kiiva who is under 5000 and only halfway through 25 normals. Disclaimer: GS ratings and boss kills don’t necessarily make a skilled player, and lack of the same doesn’t necessarily make a bad player, etc etc.

It’s probably not practical for you to swap to using the online version if you’re setting up a GKP run and need to assess 24 people in a short period of time – mouseovers will be better in that kind of situation. But if you’re only using Gearscore to check your own score periodically, or to check someone else out, just out of curiosity – you can ditch the mod and use the website, rather than bogging yourself down with unnecessary addons.

I just thought I would share – since I’ve only been aware of the website for a couple of weeks, and I think it’s a really handy thing. I don’t want to install Gearscore purely to check what my own score is (if I want to get into a PuG or something), but this simple website lets me check whenever I like.

And, if you’re so inclined, it will also show you server and region rankings, so you can check who is “winning” at Gearscore. ;)



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