What is gearscore in WoW Wrath of the Lich King Classic?

Since the dawn of World of Warcraft, the community has always found creative techniques to evaluate the character’s power. Initially, the evaluations consisted of detailed gear inspections that would, especially prior to raids. Retail WoW solved this challenge by implementing an item level system that automatically calculates the average item level and updates it as soon as you equip a new piece of gear. 

Since the Wrath of the Lich King expansion was the primitive era of item level systems that needed polishing, the community developed its own system that easily measures the character’s power. Today, this system is widely known as gearscore. Although the player base intensely discussed the value and role of gearscore, there’s no doubt that the gearscore system will exist in WOTLK Classic in one form or the other.

To relive the struggles of understanding how gearscore functions, how to calculate it, and why it is important, here’s a complete guide tackling the fundamentals of the gearscore system.

What is gearscore in WOTLK Classic

Gearscore is a community-designed system used as a tool to determine the character power during WOTLK easily. As the name suggests, gearscore gives a numerical value to all your currently equipped items that helps other players to determine your previous game experience, knowledge, and even your skill level. On top of this, gearscore takes into account your equipped totems and librams but does include your enchants and gems. 

Advantages and disadvantages of gearscore

Gearscore, just like any other similar method of measuring character power, is a rather controversial topic that has its pros and cons. On the one hand, gearscore transparency allows players across the server to see an overview of your past experiences, how geared up your character is, and helps them decide if you’re a worthy player to join their group. And on the other hand, gearscore promotes gear elitism and creates a large gap between the fully geared and enchanted players and casual players looking to join a dungeon run. 

Since no system ever is perfect, it’s absolutely natural that gearscore has its flaws. Still, it’s a good baseline to eliminate lower-geared players and find the players that can play a huge role in your instance run.

Importance of gearscore

Generally speaking, gearscore plays the lead role in helping both you and the WoW community to decide if a player satisfies the bare gear minimum to perform adequately in a dungeon run. To put it another way, gearscore is a simple performance tool that helps the player to estimate whether you’ll be able to dish out enough damage or healing to make the run as smooth as possible since no one wants to carry you for free. Although there is some controversy behind gearscore creating the elitist circles and dismissing casual players, gearscore objectively looks at your time and effort invested and gives the community feedback based sheerly on your efforts to be the best version of yourself.

How to calculate gearscore

Currently, there is only one main method of calculating your gearscore in WOTLK Classic— addons. Although you could calculate your gearscore via good old-fashioned and trustworthy hand calculation, you’d first need to get your hands on a formula used by various addons. So, it would be best to simply resort to addons like GearScore to reliably calculate your current gearscore.