Gearscore-fright.

I thought that I was a rather skilled warlock. Not super-skilled but atleast knew what I was doing. Ok, I could be better at PvP and use my instant-casts more and not just stand still. But in PvE I was confident that I had everything under control. Gems, talents, spell-rotation...everything. I had checked my theoretical output with Simulationcraft and I was a bit lower on dps than I could be but I figured that theory and real life was two different things. I was a good, warlock. Or so I thought.

Until last night.

The guild gathered to do an Ulduar achievment-run. Lots of new (to me) guildies and the warlock class-leader was there. First boss (after the tanks) I start my usual rotation, doting and aoeing for all I'm worth. The class-leader out dps'es me with over 2k. Nothing wrong with that. She is a good player and...then my cursor goes over her char when she is running by and her name tag and gs shows for a moment in the bottom right corner.

And the gs is blue.

Blue! Not red. I point at her again. 2.3k gs. 2.3! She has less than half of my gs and still I'm having trouble keeping up. I check again. Yupp, 2.3, scanned 1 hour ago. I reset recount. Try as best I can to do everything right. Still no luck. I go over the fight on recount to see if I'm missing anything. But, no, we use the same spells and basically the same rotation. Am I missing something else? I try to keep a close look on my cooldowns of Conflagerate and Chaos Bolt. Better but still far from good.

So I ask what I'm doing wrong and say I'm sorry for not being able to keep the dps up. "You are doing fine.", she says. "But you are doing so much more damage than me.", I reply. "Yea, but you have different gear. :)". Different gear...what did I miss? Ok, I'm slightly over the hit cap and could have used that on other stats. But it should not matter that much. Do I need more haste? More intellect? I inspect her gear. And everything she has is much much better than mine. Everything.

Then the gearscore addon decides it is time to update. 6k, it says after I close the inspect window. 6k not 2.3k. That made more sense. I wasn't getting my ass kicked by someone with half of my gs. I was still getting kicked by someone but at least she had better gear than me. :)

Moral of the story. Question everything. :) Addons may have old information stored. Your rotation might not be optimal, try new variations from time to time to test things out.

...And I hope she laughed with me and not at me... :D