you see in global, almost everyone asking for 5.8k gs, or 6k gs to join icc25N, but i wouldnt even need to do 25N with 5.8k gs,
same for icc10, like, you can do icc10N with 5k gs, and everyone asks at least 5.5k, why is this?
also, is it the same in alliance? or only in the horde?
There's people asking 6k+ for toc25 and even garbage like os10 if it's the weekly on both sides.
They just want massively overgeared people in the hopes their gear makes up for the flaws in gameplay the average player brings to the table. Also chances are the player might have done the raid once or twice already and is dimly aware of what's going on.
If said player ends up actually doing well even better. He might carry the two slackers operating at 5 APM you caught too.
Over the the past 10+years 5.8 seems to have established itself as the middle ground between "people actually answering", "acceptable performance" and "no need to invest too much attention weeding out obvious *****s" for pugleaders.
If that's an issue you're free to skip all of it and join a guild or organize your own pugs.
That gear score is actually the amount needed for a pug to be successful in the raid. An ICC 25 requiring 5.5k won't make it past PP. An ICC 10 with 5k no different. Keeping in mind gear score is only a general measurement of gear, the actual gear used by players at 5k or 5.5k here is terrible. They didn't progress through TOC and get the good trinkets and stats and tier sets. Most of them barely know how to play their class and ICC content is basically their first raid experience.
Getting 5.8k gs is a joke though. You can buy half the gear off the AH. Go farm dailies while you sit in RDF queue. Do your weekly quest and VOA and rep ring. It will happen pretty fast with minimal effort. A lot less effort than actually playing the previous content.
A higher gearscore usually signals that a player has actually put some effort into his character. They usually finally have the important stats soft capped.. Sure, you can optimize a 4k or 5k gs character, but 90% of the time when you inspect them, their setup is terrible. Missing or wrong gems, no enchants (because they don't feel like spending 1k gold on Berserking enchant for a ToC weapon), also not even hit or expertise capped, and sometimes even wearing PvP offpieces just to inflate their gs.
Yeah i kinda noticed this too. When you start out all the pre raid stuff you can cap out at from grinding dungeons to a few select emblems of frost tends to get you around 4.8-5k gs pre raid for full vendor ilvl 232 t9 from the east platform ToC / Tournament vendors and i232 heroic pit of sauron / forge of souls gear.
Then you kinda spend a few weeks seeing people ask for 5.5k-5.8k gs for runs that end up like 4/12 bailing on mechanic checks for bosses that are having dps checks met and dying in 1-2 attempts. But you see **** like warmane pug leaders assembling 9/10 melee str/dps groups as solo healers so they can roll and reserve all the int drops and swapping from 5.2k-6k gs +- 20-150$ probably bought(?) ilvl 284 heroic lich king gears with ilvl 178s lvl 78 dungeon blues and int mail on to 3.4k gs alts.
Then the raid will stall on stuff like deathwhisper adds or later mechanics, or the warmane raid leader will die on their 3.4k gs alt while trying to solo heal to reserve all the gear or rage on mechanics like Festergut's spores where when they build a group with 9 melees and 1 them, you'll see them ragequit and turn toxic from melees not peeling away from boss to give them the spore in a 1 ranged caster group. With 0 explaination or communication.
I did do some heroic and mythic raiding in retail and i do admit features i forgot to take for granted like boss explainers/manuals or even retail leaders usually posting 1 line snippets like "Spread spores to get -30% dmg resist for the 1 shot mechanic, tanks taunt swap on X" are often pretty much missing. There are some wonderful guides out there like the 30 second guides / yt videos i find pretty handy like (30 s icc guide: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=STZls4wcbFY )
But for the most part it does seem very hit or miss on what you get. Some people do very good dps and the guides on wotlk and wow has had 10 years to mature so i do see more ployers doing higher 7-15k dpses than 2k-5k low dpes.
But it seems like many people on warmane just zerg bosses and either assume wotlk has been out for so long, everyone should know the fight or they don't know the fight and don't want to get kicked or noticed for asking questions.
Compared to my memories of retail it does seem like yeah, some people have already maxed and just level alts and even if a fight is 1-2 shot vs the 5-23 shots i remember on progression retail with 10g vs 249-500g repair bills x1-5. 1-3 people will often leave on 1 wipe / item not dropping / 3-4 bosses done or squabbles over healers and mages wanting int rings or the hunter rolling on the weapon the Feral druid wants for weapon dps scaling 20x higher than agility for dps getting won by a hunter who rolled on a ilvl 264-284 to disenchant it or use it as a crit vs haste statstick.
It is kinda true that there's a catch 22 where people want full 5.8-6k gs heroic gear to enter the raid that drops normal gear that'll get you to like 5.5k gs. But it does seem like some people are emblem of frost farming icc10-25. Or they want to not even bother with 1 wipe and just pug along. To be frank i kinda feel like it's a harder challenge to spend 1-3 hrs to get people to stay and do mechanics and not leave than it is for a 2m wipe explain 1 line/watch 30s video and retry.
But all it takes is 2-3 leavers without replacement for a run to die and then the raid stagnates and dies. Honestly i don't even know if it's purely gear score again for the catch 22, but probably at least a blunt acknowledgement that the pugs have already done a little bit of icc or bought ilvl 264 boes/played long enough to afford them or cash shopped a 20-150$ ilvl 284 weapon if they're playing a character they don't know how to play.
I have definitely seen many who did well and then things like players entering raids in lvl 178 blues with heroic 25 284 weapons auto attacking and auto poisoning for 80% + 15% for 95% of their damage, sometimes flat out afking bosses that dropped loot they rolled on lol that nobody could trade. Or people joining for 2-4 bosses and then leaving without notice for work/evening shifts.