Are you really claiming that Retribution paladins shouldn't get any itemization? Surely I'm misunderstanding your point here.

Specialist items have a tendancy to be the ones that drop most often when you don't want them to and punish the other players. What they're basically saying is stuff like that shouldn't come at the expense of other players. I remember what the loot was like when questing on my warriors at lvl 60 and I rarely found a single piece of plate armour that didn't have paladin stats, I'd hate for that to be a common occurence during raids...hell that was one of the main reasons people hated the loot from early AQ40, it was always the pally/moonkin loot that dropped or at least seemed like it.

I'd prefer a system where the dropped items are fairly generic, i.e. plate chest with str, sta, crit/hit and gem slots. The Warriors can gem/enchant it as appropriate and equally so can the Paladins. Specialist items with +spell dmg can then be used to supplement the extra requirements of each class via heroic tokens etc, that way the drops are less likely to get DE'd and both playstyles get their gear just perhaps in a more roundabout manner.

Blaiming your bad luck on off-spec classes is hardly a valid argument when we all know the reliability of blizzard's "random loot system". For every Ret paladin, moonkin or kitty DPS piece of gear, there is another for something that you consider a class that is worthy of gear. When you either get stuck at a certain point in the raid game (can't make it past that one boss) or if you are on farm and have given up on older content (BT guilds not touching SSC/TK) there will be gear that you don't want that drops all the time because of the loot tables. Consequently it could be the opposite for someone else in your guild.

Regardless of whether or not one class is as useful as another on a raid level right now, there are changes incoming (including a reduction in the reliance on +dmg gear for paladins). That means that raid utility will go up, and you might start seeing more of those off-specs in raids. What is a better idea: revamp all the old items so that they fit the constraints that you suggested, then release new items everytime you rebalance a class OR offer off-spec loot, spread out over several instances and tune classes as they need them?

You know, I do have to agree that there was a strange abundance of weird paladin plate put in as quest rewards in TBC. I chalk that up to Blizz's itemization team being sinister and alcohol dependent.

Is there a reason that there are two consecutive " 2.3 " threads? Can we get one closed please?

This is all bullshit with no basis in the numbers. A simple WoWhead search shows 87 plate quest rewards in TBC without INT on them, and 39 of them with INT (in practical terms, the existence of INT defines a paladin item, as there are basically no items that are paladin-oriented without INT). More than double the number of plate quest rewards were warrior-oriented.

With evidence like that, your argument against paladins receiving unique itemization sure doesn't hold a lot of water.

About half of the quests and drops my L60 warrior encountered in early HFP quests/Ramparts loot were Paladin plate heavy on Int, mp5, and +dmg. Of the blue plate quest rewards she's encountered so far, they're so paladin focused that they were not an upgrade to green Azerothian loot.

It was slightly frustrating, though my paladin didn't have much fun with the no Int warrior loot while leveling in the Outlands, either.


But anyways, we're talking about leveling loot from pre-TBC instances. This stuff doesn't have gem slots for you to customize, and a casual player would be lucky to run them more than a few times without grabbing a higher level L70 friend.

Shifting to generic loot that's useful to multiple specs/classes for those instances sounds like a good idea.

You can safely assume that every raid has mages, warlocks, rogues and hunters. All of them can only choose one type of gear, and it is annoying as hell if your bossloots are blocked by some spelldamage plate or healing mail because your raid doesn't even have retribution paladins or restoration shamans and the loot gets disenchantet right away.

Let them be trash drops, or heroic badges rewards, i don't care. But it's really frustrating to wait a couple of weeks for one specific item to drop because the boss has a lot of "offspec-loot" in his loottable, which gets disenchanted ten times in a row.

The ultimate solution is more emphasis on token-based loot, or something that lets you choose one of several items at loot-time. But to my knowledge, Blizzard hasn't expressed any plans at all about making a system like this commonplace, or expanding on the token systems they have now.

So whatever the case may be, it's pretty obvious that they can't just exclude specs from loot options. Anybody who played a hybrid class knows how terrible this was pre-TBC. Suggestions that they do so are just plain greedy.

This should clear up some confusion:
Law of Large Numbers (Wikipedia)

You can't exclude specs from loot options using the current system. However, you can certainly tweak the drop rates, if nothing else. For example, the standard raid group brings 0-1 elemental shamans but around 7-10 mages + warlocks + spriests. I see no reason why a mail spell damage gear has the same drop rate as a cloth spell damage gear. Even if each tier has 2 cloth spell damage gear for every 1 mail spell damage gear for the same slot, the mail spell damage gear will still get sharded an awful lot while the cloth casters are waiting for theirs to drop.

I think this is where Blizzard dropped the ball on itemization the most. Druids have 3 specs which require different loot, so they each have them. So do shamans and so do paladins. For the 3 cloth dps, there's really only 2 kinds of gear needed (damage/hit for dot based dps and damage/hit/crit for dd based dps) with significant overlap. But the gear doesn't drop more even though there are more classes sharing it. The end result is that the cloth dps classes have itemization holes on almost every single non-set equipment.

A quick WoWhead search reveals 43 boss-dropped cloth items in the (belt/bracers/feet) slot with non-zero spell daamge, and 17 mail items of the same characteristics. Relaxing the search to all slots, I see 85 cloth items and 32 mail items.

Kinda looks like they already do what you're talking about.

Actually, if you exclude Zul Aman drops (which was specifcially designed to be good for off-specs) and if you exclude items that show up as non-zero spell damage but in actuality are just healer items with the added spell damage they will get in 2.3, the number of mail spell damage boss drops is actually much, much lower.

Those ratios are nowhere near the ratios needed. 85:32 cloth vs mail is not even 3:1. The ratios of mage/warlock/spriest vs. elemental shaman in your standard raid is easily 9:1 or more.

If there are 32 mail items for an elemental shaman, there are around 32 for enhancement and resto as well. That means there are roughly 96 shaman items for 85 items total for mages + warlocks + spriests.

See my posts above. First of all, there is only one item that I can think of as being specifically for "enhancement shaman," which is the belt off of morogrim as it contains strength and not AP.

Second of all, the search he conducted includes both items that are new in 2.3 (zul aman is supposed to drop a lot of off spec loot) and healing items that will now include spell damage.

There is a grand total of 28 nontiered mail items with spell damage that drop off of karazhan or higher level instances currently in game:

Mail - Items - World of Warcraft

Of those 28, 22 are healing items that wowhead simply shows as having some spell damage because of 2.3.

In other words, there are 6 TOTAL mail spelldamage items that are specific for shamans in the game currently. i somehow doubt that it is those 6 items that hurts itemization for other classes.

If anyone is curious, the items are:
Big Bad Wolf's Head - Items - World of Warcraft
Windshear Boots - Items - World of Warcraft
Bands of the Coming Storm - Items - World of Warcraft
Boots of Oceanic Fury - Items - World of Warcraft
Chestguard of Relentless Storms - Items - World of Warcraft
Flashfire Girdle - Items - World of Warcraft
and one of them drops from trash.

It's not just elemental shamans. It's all items that can only be used by 1 specific spec of 1 specific class. That includes resto shaman gear, enhancement shaman gear, warrior dps gear, pally dps gear, bear tanking gear, pally tanking gear, spell damage leather gear, etc.

Talking with a resto shaman in my guild who specs elemental for Vashj, he already has 2, maybe 3, healing gear from MH/BT and 5 elemental gear. Some dps casters have 0. I have 3, one of which is a trash drop.

Sounds like anecdotal evidence. Exactly which items are presenting a loot hole to you right now?

One is boots. There's only 2 in MH/BT. One of them, Blue Suede Shoes, isn't very good as the 18 spell hit is excessive at this point. I have to stand in line for the Seacaller ones, which drop off Naj'entus. My guild has 3 mages, 4 locks and 3 spriests at the moment, so there's a very long line for them.

Another is bracers. There's only 2 in MH/BT. And 1 in TK. I'm just going to wait for the pattern.

Another is off-hand. Again, there's only 2 in MH/BT, and one of them will cause excessive spell hit at this point. There's 1 in SSC, but I found it inferior to the heroic badge drop. Again, there's a long line of casters for the MH/BT ones.

Waist would be another one, except for belt of blasting, which almost all our casters have. I'm thankful for this one.

Glove is one of the worst. There's no non-set gloves in SSC/TK/MH/BT. Mage T5 is actually worse than T4. I'll be stuck with spellfire until T6.

Another is cape. The upgrade from Maulgar/Malchezaar comes from Illidari Council.

Another is wand. There's only 1 each in the T5 and T6 dungeons. All dps casters share those wands.

Another is trinket. Sextant/Ashtongue is decent for an arcane mage, which I just specced into currently. I'm usually fire. For fire, Neltharion's Tear is better than all SSC/TK/MH/BT trinkets except Skull of Gul'dan.

Well, those certainly aren't loot holes, there's just significant competition for those pieces. Moonkin loot in pre-TBC is what constitutes a loot hole. There aren't many loot spots devoted to hybrid loot (it's not off-spec); there just aren't enough loot spots. The only way Blizzard could really remedy this without nuking hybrid loot entirely would be to rework the item system, or increase the breadth of loot options (i.e. doubling loot, but adding more cloth drops than mail spell damage drops), or just increasing number of loot drops altogether.

It's true that the current loot system leaves something to be desired, but a solution like "get rid of hybrid options" is just hilariously short-sighted.

Personally, here's what I'd do: condense the 'offspec' loot into a single token, which takes one spot on the boss's loot table. In other words, if the boss could drop a moonkin boot, an elemental shaman boot, or a shockadin boot, those all become a single 'offspec caster boot token' with an appropriate class restriction.

However, we may be ignoring that badges allow much the same function. In other words, Blizzard may consider rare specs well enough served if they can buy their items with badges, and simply not provide any further rare spec items through boss drops.

For instance, there's no leather DPS shoulder buyable with heroic badges. However, there are several leather DPS shoulders that can be gotten in Karazhan, ZA, etc. It may be that Blizzard doesn't see a need to provide the shoulder through badges.

I think you're confusing me with another poster. My point in my original post is that Blizzard needs to drastically increase the drop rate of certain pieces compared to the other pieces. They can tweak the drop rates because they are abysmal right now for cloth dps.

I think they're only abysmal for you because you run with 10 cloth dps types. Of course you're going to run into competition for spots. I'm pretty sure you could run a fair amount of SSC/ TK with 25 pallies (anything that doesn't need interrupts...), and if you're in that raid you're going to have an apparent abysmal drop rate on plate gear given how many fellow plate wearers you run with. My guild gets tons of cloth drops, much more than a certain ring of TW, or the fang of Leo.

Plus, your complaints are there aren't enough drops that match your very specific itemization choices, which is different than there aren't cloth drops. Compare cloth dps gear to prot warrior(and sometimes paladin gear): In SSC and TK, there are 2 boots, 2 chests, a belt, a shoulder, a bracer, a glove that are caster dps orientated. For prot tanks, there are a pair of gloves, a pair of boots, a pair of bracers and a belt. My guild often runs with much closer to 7-8 cloth dps, and 3-4 protection plate, which puts the total available non-set items in Tier 5 instances pretty much on par (drops/person that can use it). And clothies get more choices. At this point, I'd kill to have an SSC or TK protection plate chest drop. Mag is fairly well off our schedule, and kara's annoying to keep running for the 5 month straight.

I'm fine with the loot system the way it is. Life's unfair, and being in the right spot at the right time is part of the game. I find all the times that something useless drops and is sharded/sold are offset by those o-so-sweet times when that really, really rare item that you desperately want drops. Does it suck when the item you want doesn't drop? Ya. Does it kick major ass to fly around Shat with the Phoenix mount? I can only imagine yes...

Does the hippogryph still have no walking/running animation?
(stuck at uni and really eager to find out )