Now before I start I don't want this to turn into a flame war of raiders vs PvPers or whatever.


Okay so for better or worse the Arena system has implemented a new form of acheiving epics. Whilst this is excellent and truly deserved by the top PvPers its arguable that the much over stereotyped casual who loses 10 games a week to pick up welfare epics doesn't deserve this. But it takes a long, long time for said player to do this. A 5v5 team of these players losing every week and recreating at 1500 team would get a S2 weapon in around 13 weeks (assuming ~300 rating that 1300-1350 a week will give). They've also attempted to solve this, albeit as usual using a nuclear missile where a pinhead hammer would have been more appropriate, with the personal ratings and requirements for rating on shoulders and weapons.

But that said I don't have that many problems with this. Its the more dedicated teams I want to look at. The above average teams, the ones that get a 2k - 2.1k rating consistently. These players are much better pvpers than the aforementioned group. With the advent of Arena Points Calculators and the ability to predict what points a week you will gain and plot your purchases accordingly the PvPers can know what epics they will be getting, how many weeks in and plan accordingly. There is also a very high personal gains factor. This is a big difference when comparing Raiding rewards to Arena rewards.

When Johnny McRogue raids BT there is a chance he might get an item. The chance is based on whether the boss has anything on his loot table he wants, that he lucks out and it drops and that no one else in the raid can beat him to the drop depending on his guilds loot system. When he does Arena after his raids finished he knows that hes going to be getting his own loot regardless of what items the other players take in his group.

Now with items of Tier 6 quality available in Season 3 many people are giving up the raiding game to go Arena full time. For some this is because they now realise that raiding is no longer the path to ultimate epics like it once was, a Tier 6 geared team will likely get trounced by a S2 geared arena team. Raid epics now only serve one purpose, to get further into raid content and more raid epics in an endless cycle. Right or wrong, thats how it is now and for many people the inability to compete vs pvpers with the highest raid gear has turned them off raiding in favour of pvp and arena.

For others though they feel they are forced to pvp due to being screwed by the RNG system repeatedly. Its not just loot either. Look at the R+D forum of you're preffered WoW forums (shudder) and it won't be long before you find a complaint about the Opera event throwing up the same boss 20 times in a row.

My question is:

Is the Raiding RNG Loot System in Need of a Change?

Whilst this may be an extreme, there is a rogue in a guild on my server. The guild is called In Excelsis and was around the 15th to 20th Illidan kill world wide. At the time he died this rogue was still wielding [Latro's Shifting Sword] as an offhand item due to two factors, one being the 'wackyness' of the RNG system and the second being that he really didn't enjoy PvP/arena and didn't want to be forced to do x games a week to be able to play in raids. I believe this situation has now been rectified as his [Blade of Savagery] eventually dropped. Is this situation how it should be?

Now I realise that this was an extreme example and that maybe I picked on a particular itemisation gap but I think it serves to highlight an issue that is prominent throughout the raiding game from Kara on upwards. How many Illidan killing guilds still run the odd Gruul or Leo night for their much coveted trinkets?

Patch 2.3 shakes this up a bit by introducing a form of gear progression in the ten man instances in parallel with their normal drops. This is the heroic Badge system which mirrors arena an awful lot. Each game/instance you play nets you some rating/heroic badges. These points/badges can be used to purchase shiny items. Should your team suck it will take you longer to get these. This introduces a very interesting mechanic to raid instances. Whilst Heroic Badges aren't a new thing, the fact that the items are of such a high level means that they now serve as a backup/alternative to the Kara/ZA drops. Your helm not dropped in 10 clears? Buy the badge one instead. Keep getting outrolled on a chestplate? You have a backup/replacement option. A guild farming these instances can now act just like an arena player, in that he can plan and plot accurately how many heroic badges he will gain vs time invested and then see which items to purchase. This is however a secondary system compared to what drops in ZA. No weapons are on heroics except the odd secondary weapon like a caster offhand or wand. Its very much an "as well as" system in that you're kind of meant to use both together to gear up in slots that the other sytem doesn't provide for.

Now I guess my next question is:

Should a similar system be adopted to 25 man raids?

I know a lot of purists will be aghast at the very thought of it but I'd like to go into a little more depth on the options available before people judge it.

The first step is a decision. You would need to decide what the system would be for.

Is it to eliminate drops all together and add them to a badge system vendor?
Is it to supplement drops with other buyable parts ala ZA and the new heroics?
Or is it to provide a base line of gear that will help soften the blow the RNG can have on a raider/raid when bad luck streaks occur?

Now whilst I'm going to discuss the possibility of all three, I'm a fan of the third choice. I feel it steps on the current systems toes the least of all three, doesn't remove anything from the raid game and only has positive impacts other than possibly somebodys epeen being stepped on (which I don't care about).

System 1 - No Drops, All Badges
This system would involve the large majority of loot being removed from bosses and added to a badge vendor. You would still have some items dropping that were either lore items or specifically fit that boss and the last boss of each zone would probably have a pretty much an unchanged loot table but the rest of the stuff would be moved to the vendor.

The badges could be done in any fashion. I know a lot of raiders would instantly have a fit if they thought a guild could far, VR and Lurker each week to get Kael quality items but that system is easy to get around. You simply have different levels of badges. Lets say Hydross, Lurker and Morogrim drop your beginner level Illidari Brigadier Insignia. Karathress and Leotheras drop Illidari General's Insignia and Kael and Vashj would drop Illidari Field Marshall's Insignia. That way you can alter the requirement per item to ensure that certain waypoints have been passed before certain items can be bought. Alternatively you could possibly do it more elegantly with a faction, so if you kill any of the level 1 bosses I just listed you get full honoured but can't go higher than that. The tier 2 ones get you full revered and a kael or vashj kill gets you exalted. Its not a grind, just a system of limiting the stuff you can buy and much less cumbersome than having a ton of tokens knocking about in your bag for different bosses.

Pros

• - Easy to manage, almost eliminates the need for DKP. With so few actual loot items dropping a loot council for the odd drop would be a much better system.
• - Allows players to bypass the RNG system and purchase the upgrades they want and need.
• - Near Impossible to exploit. Rep/badge levels prevent scrub guilds buying Vashj loot without buying a raid spot for a kill of her from a higher up guild.
• - Allows offspecs to be completely itemised because there is now no longer any issue of polluting loot tables with 1 spec of 1 class items.
• - Allows Blizzard to gather much more effective feedback of what items they have that are working and what just suck. [Living Root of the Wildheart] for example might be bought by 1% of raiding druids. Blizzard can see these stats easily and adress the issue if they saw fit too.

Cons

• - Many players, myself included, might be disappointed by the 'buzz' you get after killing a boss. We all know the feeling as we wait with baited breath to see what items dropped from a freshly downed boss. It may cheapen it a little if After weeks of trying to take down Mother Shadowres you do and get the same as when you took down Supremus, a couple of badges.
• - There are bound to be complaints from players who find this to be a cheap system of acheiving items similar to the arena and Heroic Badge complaints of late.
• - Raiders may become as homogenous as Arena players are now who all look identical to one another. I guess one of the positive sides of the RNG system is that no two players in youor raid are going to look identical (except at the real high end where you're just farming content).
• - Another loot/bank slot gone.

System 2 - Half Drops, Half Vendor
This system would be similar to what was said above. The difference would be that the badge vendors would be providing items like wrists, belts, boots, rings and items like that. Raid boss loot tables would be dilute to include only Tier items, Weapons, Tier Item Equivalent Armour pieces (chest, head, legs, shoulders, gloves) and trinkets.

You'd be expected to get a healthy mix of both the badge vendor gear and the drops to be able to compete in raids. This system probably better works as rep rather than vendor with boss milestones for rep barriers.

Just picked a random boss Winterchill(Rage Winterchill - NPCs - World of Warcraft) and his loot table would go from 11 to 3 items. Okay confession time, he wasn't random, I picked him because he was 'The Bracer' boss to show an extreme. Picking a random SSC boss like Lurker you cut his loot table from 13 items down to just 4-5 depending on which way you swing with librams.

Pros

• - Should keep people who dislike the system happy that the 'power' items are still boss drops and still subject to the RNG system. Trinkets and weapons especially are THE items for melee classes.
• - Allows offspecs almost a complete set of armour without polluting loot tables. The get their Tier gear from instances and their other items from the vendor without a single extra loot table slot going to their class. The only change needed would be to ensure that they had 1 trinket and a 2h or 2x1h weapons/shields per tier level. Not a major sacrifice at all.
• - With a lot of the trash and less powerful items moved to vendors it makes loot tables smaller and so although still subject to the RNG system the chances are much greater of good items dropping, especially if you code it to not allow the same item twice on a boss.
• - Players don't look too samey like the previous system. This is because most of the vendor items have very little affect on your characters appearance, all this is still held by the boss drops. This helps to keep a distinguishable feature between someone farming Vashj and someone farming Hydross.

Cons

• - Simplified loot tables may be slightly boring. Not a real concern but I was struggling to think of any cons.
• - Still have some offspec/non-raid spec items appearing as bosses.
• - Still some RNG element and whilst less likely the Latro's situation shown above is still possible.

System 3 - Hit Me with the Base Line
Okay this system would be different to the other two in that its main aim is not to provide equivalent or replacement items to those in raids. This system is to provide raiders with a base line upgrade that helps offset any horrendous RNG streaks. Due to a lot fewer items being available than the other two systems this would more suit reputation, or even preferabbly reputation level based instance quests.

The beauty of this system is that I feel no one can really have a problem with it. The gear gained is behind where the guild gaining it is on the progression curve so no welfare epic claims. The items would purposefully look plain and generic, kind of like the WSG weapon rewards so players will want to upgrade them if not just for the DPS gain but to prevent themselves wielding a lvl 10 lookalike sword (Yes I'm looking at you Azuresong Mageblade!).

To simplify it I'm going to take every casters favourite player, the shadow priest, as an example. Shadowpriests are relatively new to the raid scene en masse and only really became prevalent towards the end of Nax for some top guilds. The VT patch brought them into the mainstream and pre-nerf VE was used to great effect on fights like Loatheb. So you can be slightly forgiving on the design team for forgetting a few items for these guys, namely a 1h weapon. There are complaints that there is no upgrade from the Prince dagger till Tier 6 (lets ignore ZA for the second).

So lets say each boss kill awards rep in SSC. Halfway through SSC you've killed a few lurkers and hydross' and now you're at 5999/6000 friendly, unable to progress anymore. You get a quest from the faction hub to go slay Morogrim. When you manage this you get a list of quest rewards. One of them is a prince equivalent mace.

Pro's

• - There is no replacing of raid items, drops or large scale overhaul of the RNG system required.
• - Other than writing the quests and quest text (1 hour tops) and desiging the items which will be largely based on the previous tiers equivalent, there really wouldn't be much development work to do. As said above the aim would even be to re-use either old crappy green item graphics OR to re-use items that are very common with a slight rehue. This way you provide incentive to keep on upgrading other than just the DPS upgrade.
• - Quest system adds more flavour and feeling to each dungeon which further interests players, even if the items aren't needed.
• - Quests could offer 5 Mark of the Illidari if the player needs no item from it, nice boost of 5 flasks per player for the guilds that aren't already swimming in them. At Tier 6 level you could offer some Hearts or maybe a grab bag with a random BT crafting pattern in. Even failing all this a player who needs nothing still gets 25gold and a sellable or disenchantable epic.
• - As with the other systems, allows offspec items to be seemlessly sewn into the loot tables without any actual decrease or impact on other players.
• - Quests are easily added to past content to plug an unrealised item hole.
• - There is no power gain from these items as there is with the other two systems. For all intents and purposes the Tier 5 quests are providing Tier 4 items, the Tier 6 quests are providing Tier 5 items. So your rogue who just splashed out 3000 dkp on Talon of Azshara isn't going to be too pissed when his mate gets a Bloodmaw Magus Blade-alike for free.
• - The rep level and boss kill requirements can be tailored to the level of the item and to prevent scrubs from forming pugs to farm them. So you may set the bracer item quest at a Hydross kill (who lets face it is harder for pugs than solarioan, Vr, Lurker) yet the weapon requirement could be Leo (vashj would kind of defeat the point as the idea is to provide the tier 4 baseline to help you beat the Tier 5 end bosses).
• - As these incorporate a rep level you can also easily incorporate buyable rewards at the exalted faction that are Tier 5 quality, similar to the current rep rewards of kara, BT and Hyjal.

Cons

• - Once such a system were implemented players may become needy and demanding (more needy and demanding ) that Blizzard start piling in 20 quests into an instance to get them fully geared.
• - Could be 'exploited' to quickly gear up a green player to Tier 4 or 5 standard. Whilst I feel this is a good thing for big guilds who have either a long term player coming back on a new char, or someone who volunteered to reroll to fill a class gap or alleviate pressure on an overcrowded class, it could also be exploited by Johnny McScrub buying 5k gold off a website and paying a guild to run him through SSC a couple of times to get a lot of tier4ish gear for free. Although again with proper repurtation pacing you could prevent this and still allow the former of the large guild to easily gear rerollers to a reasonable standard.
• - Unless handled right there may still be some "I don't want to pay x dkp for that item when its only a 3dps upgrade from a quest item". Whether or not this is a flaw of the dkp system or the item design would be debateable but it is a concern that would need to be kept in mind of designing these items and slotting them in the right places.
• - People would still whinge about the graphics even though bad graphics were part of the original desing philosophy.

Some may be questioning the link to Arena but I feel its a very similar system, all three, to the current arena system. They all allow gear planning which is a good thing. If we take the Latro's example from the begining again. In the current system he has to either PvP or wait it out with his blue till the BT sword drops.

With the implementation of any of the above systems except number 2, he could see and plan when he would get his item. This gives the guy a much better option to just stick to PvE, which is what he prefers, rather than be forced to PvP or suck worse than the other rogues who do. Why PvP weapons are better for PvE than PvE weapons is another issue for another thread.

Conclusion

Whilst I don't think completely doing away with the RNG system in raids is a good idea, a kind of base line or buffer system could only be a good thing. It helps guilds offset the terrible bad luck streaks the RNG system can throw up at you and keeps your raid gear level roughly equivalent. It also helps to, if not eliminate, certainly lessen the need to go to Arena for PvE items either because of loot holes or sucky luck. With my proposed 3rd system, as well as getting less whines from everyone, they can also kill another bird with the same stone by quests which address the issues with bosses and instances having little to no story.

I realise the chances of Blizzard taking this to heart this expansion are thin but with yet another class with potentially three, definately two raiding roles the RNG system is only going to get more strained whilst the players will get more annoyed with it.


So what are peoples thoughts on this? Any pros or cons I've missed? Anything to add or a better system to propose? Am I just being stupid?

You missed an option IMO, a variant of your "Base Line" system. The new option could be classified as "Tier-behind tokens". Have bosses from one tier drop tokens that can be used to purchase loot from the previous tier. Set prices accordingly, so that a full clear of a T5 instance nets you enough badges to buy 1-2 items of your choice from the T4 instances, etc.

This lets the guild move on while still letting people fill in the gaps in their gear that happened not to drop for them. They could either make the full loot tables available, or reserve some "trophy" items that can't be bought for badges. But I would hope to see an item for most slots for most classes/specs be buyable.

This is pretty much how they're working the Arena sets - you can fill in the previous season's gear cheaply, or the season before that even cheaper.

I guess it would be hard to justify in lore terms though. Why exactly is some random bloke in Shattrath able to sell you Malchazeen in exchange for badges from SSC? Though I guess you could get round that with re-naming them so they're not "really" the same item, like they did for the Horseman's loot table.

I hope I understood what you wrote correctly but this example has a problem in my opinion.


Your proposition appears to have the same effect in the end as the OPs though with "a larger margin of error". With fully tokenised loot we would see vastly less sharded loot but with a tracked drop system you might get a drop when the target audience is not in the raid.


I don't really know how to formulate this sentence but bluntly put: does Blizzard even want a fully tokenised loot system that would greatly accelerate gearing up raids for the next level of content?

I think we're already seeing the change to a shared random drop / badge reward system for raiders in the 2.3 patch. The number and quality of the Badge of Justice rewards are increasing dramatically, and the fact that Badge of Justice tokens will drop in 10-man Raids makes it easy to get an item in a week or two of raiding. Just yesterday afternoon I compiled my list of gear that I wanted to have pre-BT/MH, and four of the items were badge rewards, instead of drops that I may or may not get by the time the guild is ready to go to BT/MH.

Would anyone really care though? I mean, why can some goblin in Area 52 sell me something on par with an Illidan drop to anyone with some arena points kicking around?

They can't, aside from a few strange melee DPS cases.

Your argument fails when you attempt to compare PvE looting to PvP looting. PvP provides a guaranteed but narrow choice of items. There's basically 1 item for each spec/slot, and that's it. 0 choices to be made, with the exception of weapon type. By contrast in PvE there's a vast variety of choices and items that you can mix and match. The high end PvE players (since you chose the high end PvPer as a baseline), can probably easy accumulate 20-30 different epics in a 25man style raid in however long the arena season lasts. And they probably all have some kind of use. PvP loot is guaranteed but that basically means you aquire your little set of items in 1 huge burst, and then have the affect of basically running pre-TBC content over, and over again while you wait for a new season to start.

Say you kill Illidan for the first time. You get 2 T6 Chest tokens and as according to the thread Thesis: How the loot tables work each items in Pool C and Pool D have a 30% chance to drop.

The 2 off pieces that drop on your first kill are Cursed Vision of Sargeras and Cowl of the Illidari High Lord.

Next week you kill Illidan again and 2 T6 chest tokens drop. Now since there is a system of tracking implemented the drop rate of the Cursed Vison of Sargeras and Cowl of the Illidari High Lord have had their drop rate reduced to 25% and everything else has had its drop rate increases to 35%.

See what I am saying? If 1 or both of those items dropped on your second kill then on your 3rd their drop rate would be 20%.

Obviously some cap on % would need to be implemented so that multiple items didn't get to 100%, say cap the highest chance at 50%, that would be 4 consecutive kills in a row without seeing it.

As far as any sort of token system, there is no point in discussing it as it will never ever happen in WoW. Even if the enitre raid populations in both the US and Europe stormed Blizzard HQ, Tigole wouldn't change to that sort of mechanic. No successful MMO I've ever played or heard of for that matter used a token system.


How does it keep it fresh? I don't ever want to go back to SSC/TK but I keep having to because my guild has only every gotten 1 of the Warrior trinkets from Solarian, we have never seen a priest trinket from lurker etc... I as well as a lot of other people in BT don't get all giddy when we see in the GMOTD-SSC/TK 4:30pm. The fact that we have to go back for 1 or 2 items further strengthens the argument for either poor itemization or a change in the system, or both.

That's kind of explained away with having the Steamwheedle Cartel own and run all the arena matches -- your being outfitted better so you can make more money for the Cartel.

The issue with the "Oh look, you'll provide no reason to go back and kill older content!" argument is that guilds drop T5 content as soon as they get into BT. The only reason T4 content is run is because it's relatively quick and easy to get.

Essentially forcing unlucky players to Arena in order to get weapon upgrades to be able to compete in PvE is not a good thing, and with the T5-level Heroic loots, they've indicated they're wiliing to give more consistency in gear upgrades to the player base.

It would be enough for me if they remove all those offspec items in bt/mh.
From a priest pov i mean all the cloth non t6 healing items which are usually a sidegrade to t5. Its just a wasted loot slot and another void crystal.