Isn't it the role of Tier 5 to provide the gear for T6 content?

I mean, T5 helps farm T5 content quicker, but it surely isn't the only reason for it. But especially when T6 content begins easier than the end fights of T5 (a pattern which has been reasonably consistent since BWL->AQ40), T5 should be more than enough.

Pre-BC we had four tiers of equipment (1, 2, "2.5", 3) in four tiers of content. Right now we have four tiers of equipment (offset stuff in t5 instances, t5, offset stuff in t6 instances, t6) in two tiers of content. Either stuff gets replaced in two weeks or we get a lot of stuff we can't use.

Stat distribution on individual items is an important but separate issue. I would gladly trade all of my current armor for T6 if it meant deleting all of the non-set armor from the loot tables. The fact that non-set pieces are better than my T6 is not an argument in favor of it existing, its an argument in favor of them fixing enhancement shaman T6.

You're exaggerating quite a bit. I don't think you realize just how far away some guilds are from attaining all of their desired upgrades. We have 0 Madness of the Betrayer, and we want at least 9 of them. In fact we still need a bunch of rings, necks, cloaks and trinkets for all classes. Removing unnecessary non-set armor from the tables will help, but it's not going to make the content obsolete in 3 months. I mean, we've been raiding BT and Hyjal for 5 months now...

If all the non-set slot matching items got removed, that's nearly half the loot removed in T6 content. Of course that provides for some bosses, a HUGE impact on loot. Illidari Council drops down to 3 items to drop, trinket, cloak, belt. Now of course some bosses are barely affect, 2 items removed, so a redistribution would need to happen. But again, you get the loot you need nearly twice as fast, or should, cutting down on the time spent waiting for the random items to drop.

I can understand the need to not have more than 1 offset piece of armor for those slots, but no hats/chest/legs seem pretty silly, since getting to those bosses will take quite a while. It will be at least a couple months or more for most guilds from entering T6 to killing Illidan.

Right, you would definitely need to re-distribute loot. Also, the loot tables open up for more options, so you can create some new items to reduce the competition on some of the highly contested items like necks/cloaks/rings/trinkets.

Was it a problem in Naxxramas? Use T5. If you're feeling undergeared for the content, go back and get more T5. We do not need items in BT and Hyjal to gear us up for BT and Hyjal(Besides SR gear!). This is what SSC and TK are for.

Well, in theory the last chest/hat came from corresponding end bosses in the last tier so it should work out. It's a bit of a turn-off to get something from an early boss that pretty much makes your tier piece a minor upgrade, or removes interest in it completely.

If guilds are trying to use the excuse that they "need" T6 non set pieces in order to complete T6 content then they shouldn't abandon T5 content. Because in reality, it takes roughly 4 weeks from zone in to the Illidan kill if the guild was correctly prepared for it.

Maybe for a top of the line guild. For the ones a bit behind in skill or time committed, it will take a bit more time. Like right now for us Archimonde is holding us up some, but we've kept doing T5 somewhat so T6 dropping the legs have at least been good for us, since those are very well itemized anyway. Plus there is always new recruits and of course people getting stuff for offspecs. Now I'm sure in a few more months when our guild has things on farm I'll probably feel more like you guys, but for now I've been pretty happy. It's difficult mustering the energy to do Vashj and Kael for their hat/chest when we seem to shard 70% of the non tokenized loot in the zone.

Like I said earlier, isn't that more of an issue with the relative ease of the earlier BT/MH bosses?

You're right. You looting shit like [Leggings of Channeled Elements] or [Sun-touched Chain Leggings] instead of items like [Hammer of Atonement] or [Kaz'rogal's Hardened Heart] is going to make all of the difference in the world for killing Archimonde. "If only I had a weaker weapon and better pants, we would be killing this mob!".

I'm doing my best to not be sarcastic and rude(and obviously failing right now), but these arguments are pretty terrible. We do not need non-set armor. It needs to be removed from the game. All it does is reduce the chance of good loot dropping. A few of the current non-set items being better than their set counterparts is irrelevant and a different problem all together.

I mean, is too many [The Maelstrom's Fury] and not enough [Guise of the Tidal Lurker] really the cause of your progression problems? Seriously?

The entire debate over speed passing T5 to T6 content would've been moot if things were the way they were at release, when Vashj and Kael only had a limited number of vial drops. Enforced farming!

Part of the problem now is that Blizzard has embraced a constant ilvl throughout a tier (aside from end bosses), whereas before gear was distributed in a range of ilvls leading up to the final boss, in roughly the order that progression through those zones would take place. BWL had a ilvl range of 6 between trash drops and Chromaggus (a 7.8% difference in ilvl), while AQ40 had an ilvl difference of 8 between Skeram drops and Twin Emps / Ouro drops (9.9% difference in ilvl). Naxx also employed the same ilvl difference, with non-wing bosses dropping ilvl 83 (81 for weapons), wing bosses at ilvl 85, Sapphiron at ilvl 90, and KT at ilvl 92.

Compare this to the TBC paradigm, where aside from endbosses, the ilvl remains constant throughout an ENTIRE tier of progression. Despite this, Blizzard is still designing items that appear like they are meant to be upgraded from in a single tier (non-set set-slot items to the tier sets), although even in this line of thinking, some items are placed / itemized poorly (the infamous Illidari Council leather healing shoulders).

Non-set set-slot items are forgiveable if they can be substantially differentiated from their tier piece equivalents, but are wastes of space if they can not. This phrase could probably be generalized to all loot in general, in that there exists a lot of "wasted items" in the game, by virtue of multiple analogues existing for any item. While Blizzard may be justifying these items in an attempt to smooth out loot acquisition issues, they merely make the issue worse since they increase the variability inherent in each individual bosses' loot tables, thus allowing more streakiness to occur as a result of the random number generator.

The RNG concept, when viewed from a vacuum, is not necessarily a bad idea, especially when it is coupled with more or less set drops for the more contested items (turn-in tokens for set armor = good thing). In fact, loot should be tokenized in one of two situations:

1) More than 6 people in a given raid would compete over this item, examples being quest items with multiple turn-ins for different roles, and tier armor pieces.

2) At most 2 people in a given raid would ever compete for this item, thus it should get tokenized along with 2-3 other items that fall into this category into a single drop, so that the result is more than 6 people would compete over it. The best example of this occurred earlier in the thread, when someone made the suggesting of placing the three relics items from BT as a quest reward from a "corrupted relic".

Applying these two standards to loot tables would result in a lot of the less competed-over items removed and tokenized, as well as tokenizing (and thus, increasing the drop rates of) the highly desired items, such as [Shadowmoon Destroyer's Drape] and [Madness of the Betrayer]. Thus, the remaining items, while still operating under a RNG system, are now present in loot tables that may be at most 4-5 items deep, reducing a lot of the variability in the system that currently exists.

Blizzard also needs to make sure that any one loot group does not exceed (at most) 4 items. In this case, I am referring to loot group as a list of possible items that a boss may choose to drop when killed. A boss would choose one item from each group, and the union of all the loot groups would represent the total loot table of the boss. Looking at the set piece dropping bosses, you find that their loot groups are too deep. Council can drop a possible 6 non-set items. Assuming equal chances to drop, in 10 kills you have a 16% chance of not seeing one of the items. Bring the loot group down to 4 items, and all of a sudden that chance drops to 5.6%.


Apologies for the multiple trains of thought in this post, but I feel it's a nice summary of where loot delivery fails in the current state of Warcraft.

I like the idea of removing almost all non set armor.

Naxx rocked, heres why (removed FrR since it's invalid):
Anub'Rekhan: one non set armor piece, cloak, ring, offhand
Grand Widow Faerlina: x2 weapon, neck
Maexxna: one non set armor piece, x2 weapon, neck, trinket
Patchwerk: wand, x1 weapon, shield, ring, cloak
Grobbulus: x2 weapon, gun
Gluth: one non set armor piece, shield, offhand, x1 weapon, neck
Thaddius: two non set armor pieces, x2 weapon, trinket
Noth: x1 weapon, ring, offhand, x1 relic(since it wasn't split at the time)
Heigan: x2 non set armor pieces, x1 neck
Loatheb: x2 weapon, x2 ring, trinket
Every boss: Chance to move towards a guaranteed legendary.

Anyways, I think you get the picture. Blizzard's move from 8 - 9 pc sets to it's current 5 was a bad move. Assuming they got their acts together, making larger properly made sets would be a step in the right direction. Obviously my example excludes FrR, but I doubt people really cared until they were killing KT weekly (which didn't last very long). To me it's baffling, the move from 40 to 25 mans while increasing the items from each loot table.

As Sebudai said, the non tier armor needs to go, and soon. Some is ok, but come on. I hate bringing up vanilla wow, especially naxx's glory, but what else can I compare it to? <Generic tbc loot and it's RNG is an abomination comment> But hey, I'm obviously biased in this since I'm an enh shaman, with a terrible T6 set which is trumped by leather in every socket.

I liked having 8pc sets. I also don't mind off set loot at all if it does two things: looks different ( and I don't mean a recolor) and is significantly different enough in some way.

Well, the move from 8pc sets to 5pc sets is just a reaction to all those complaints about the fact, that sooner or later everyone is just going to look like each other. But anyway, I think Naxx was one of the best instances ever, when it comes to loot. This is as Igniter mentioned, because for nearly every class there was more than one loot per itemslot. For example, if you didn't have the luck to get the Faerlina healingmace, you still could look forwart to Kel'Thuzad. But this system is only possible, when there are so many bosses, as Naxx had. And i think, Blizzard had a clear statement, that they're not going to have something like this again. - Of course, Naxx 3.0, but this should be a kind of Pre-instance i think.

So, the solution would have to be, just as Karakas mentioned, to have simply smaller loottables, because only one item less can be a great percentagechange in the chance not to see a specific loot for many kills.
One way, of course, would be a kind of badge-system like the Heroic Badges as it's going to be in Zul'Aman. But I, for my part won't really ever get along with this. It just seems a bit "strange", if Illidan (or Zul'jin) is droping tons of heroicbadges for everyone in the raid. As well as the special "feeling", when the lootmaster is posting the drops or the lootwindow is popping up, would get lost.
So I'd specialy like a kind of extended tokensystem for non-setitems, as long as it doesn't come to "historical" items, like for example the Skull of Gul'dan, Robes of Rhonin or else. This would as well give a chance to move against the bad itemisation for speccs like Moonkin or RetPala, without having incredible big loottables.
But before the Badgesystem is getting lost totally, I still have to bring the idea of Zul'Gurub back. Just remember all those smart Bijous and Coins, didn't they give a quite special touch to this Instance? You even could trade them, so could earn really good gold, just by raiding. As well from ZG I also like to remember the "alternative" sets, stuff like rings, necks, trinkets or weapons in addition to the regular armorpieces.

BT and Hyjal are one zone as far as itemization is concerned, and they have nearly as many bosses as Naxxramas anyway.

Non-set items are not a bad thing. Having them + bonus at 4 pieces allows someone to get their full t6 bonus and fill the last spot with an item of their choice. For me, I use 4 piece t6 + gorefiend gloves for threat and 4 piece t6 + illidan helm for tough hitting bosses.

The big problem is having too many of them.. Why does Naj'entus drop leather dps shoulders when Kaz'rogal has leather dps shoulders? Other examples:

- Kaz'rogal pants and Shahraz pants
- Kaz'rogal hunter shoulders and Shade of Akama hunter shoulders.
- Anetheron caster belt and Supremus caster belt.
- Anetheron priest boots and BT trash boots.
- Anetheron healer shield and Supremus healer shield.
- Rage Winterchill rogue bracers and Teron Gorefiend rogue bracers.
- Archimonde mail chest and Bloodboil mail chest.

Having a caster belt with sockets and a haste caster belt is not enough reason for both to exist. We've hand 6 caster belts off supremus and zero tank rings and we've been killing supremus for 4 months now.

Too many off set pieces only helps us disenchant more items and fills bosses with useless crap, making it less likely you'll find the items you're looking for. It was good when casters had Leggings of Polarity and Rime Covered Mantle as decent alternative to their t3, imaging if 2 other naxx bosses had dps caster legs and shoulders.

Less off set legs/chest/helm/gloves/shoulders, more rings/neck/cloak/trinket...etc. Overall we'll have less items in t6, which results in smaller loot tables for bosses, which is why naxx itemization was good.

Again, you don't see people complaining about the +armor caster chest off naxx trash, or the worthless shield from trash, or the mp5 offhand from gluth, or the resist trinket from loatheb. The reason is no one felt "cheated" out of their good drops they wanted from the zone. The off set, situationally useful items existed. They were just well placed in there.

Heh, I suppose there's an alternative which nobody's yet proposed - which is to make an 8pc set that's very definitely not quite the best in slot, but radically increase its drop rate. That way the tier gear would be the "default set" that everyone gets (and future raids are tuned for), while those who put in the time and effort can put together a more distinctive outfit that's noticeably better.

I think the worst part is that we can say 16% of guilds farming an endgame boss for 2-3 months won't even see an item. I don't see how that is remotely acceptable to Blizzard.

This is actually a problem with the number of stat points Blizzard allocates for each item socket. If you remember, early in the expansion sockets counted for 8 stat points each, meaning that if you used all blue quality gems, you break even with non-socket pieces. Assuming you paid 50g per socket (at that time). If you got all the colors to match, you got roughly 2 bonus stat points per socket. Obviously this made all the quest item greens with sockets inferior to non-socketed counterparts, and many of the leveling blues. Who is going to spend 150g just to break even with something you could buy on the Auction House for 20g tops? So Blizzard redid all of the socket items in an early patch, budgeting each socket as 6 stat points, I believe. This was pretty balanced even through T5 content.

And then people got into T6 content and had a reasonable supply of epic gems, each worth 10 stat points. When Blizzard makes an item with 3 sockets, their itemization expects you to gain 18 stats from them, but obviously you'll get 30 stats from them, for a bonus of 12 extra stat points-- and they are always the stat your class wants the most! That's like gaining 10 item levels.

If you notice, the non-set armor people complain about are always the pieces with 0 or 1 socket, never 2 or 3. People might not want to hear this, but Blizzard needs to increase the item budget consumed by gem slots on higher item level items. 141+ needs to cost 10 points, 110 to 140 needs to cost 8, and below 110 needs to cost 6.

On that note, the bonus stats from the socket bonus need to be proportionate to the item points consumed by the sockets. For example, it 3 sockets on a green (18 points) give 5 stat points as a bonus, then 3 sockets on T6 (30 points) needs to give 9 stat points (5 * 30/18) as a bonus. You might notice that many people completely ignore their bonuses. That's because the stats you lose changing from you ideal epic gem to a color matching epic gem will never make up for the slot bonus. This change would give people more interesting socket choices. It would also take some of the sting out of losing stats on each socketed piece.

I agree that the problem with offtier items is just that there's too many of them. There's no need for having 3 t6 level legs, which is t6 from Illidari council, mother shahraz legs and kaz'rogal legs.

Same with dps shoulders, you have gurtogg shoulders, mother t6 shoulders, hatefury from Anetheron.

On the other hand, having 1 offtier item for each slot seems necessary to me. Not for completing t6, but for making sure your guild won't go into t7 instances wearing t5. We have 4 illidan/6 archimonde kills now and I am unsure if everyone in our raid will have a t6 robe/hat by the time sunwell hits. For guilds further behind, it's an even bigger concern.

And yeh, after the 6th maelstrom's fury/4th hammer of attonement I would rather get a guise of the tidal lurker for the druid who's still wearing t5 and is too low on dkp to get t6 or get the kaz'rogal leggings instead of the 4th kaz'rogal shield.

For example we have one mage who is still using a karazhan robe because he never had the dkp to get the t5 one before we stopped doing kael. It would have been nice if we had gotten a vashj robe for him. It wouldn't have been bad if we had gotten something else, but the way things played out it wasn't of any bigger priority.

The problem is just how abudant these things are, sometime it's just excessive. Just covering some gaps where t5 is pretty weak and you need to replace it would have been enough. Putting 3 caster dps shoulders and 3 legs is just overkill.

More farming time between instances deals with the problem of people being unable to pick up tier pieces. You do have a point, though, in that the chestpiece is often by far the rarest piece. Few guilds did Magtheridon for long, and even fewer did Kael'thas for very long before starting BT/Hyjal. Magtheridon, Kael'thas, and possibly even Illidan should honestly just drop more tier pieces. Ensuring that the tiered chestpieces are more common gives more leeway for removing offset items.

If they are desperate to add off-set items, the haste shoulder patterns show how it can be done without taking "good" loot slots and without taking "too small" an effort. Craftable loot can be distributed to recruits to gear them up to an acceptable level quickly. It doesn't need to be as good as the other loot in the tier, either - t5 or t5.5 loot would be fine for BT/Hyjal patterns.

Offset loot would be great, in a perfect world, but it's honestly leading to a situation that is simply out of hand. The Lurker Below has thirteen items on his loot table, and he used to drop two items. You had roughly a 1/6 or 1/7 chance of seeing any particular item each time that you killed him, depending on the loot table it was on. It's too much. Loot tables need to come down in size if they are to be kept on a random system, because low probabilities screw people over. People used to complain about Ancient Petrified Leaves and Eyes of Divinity, and those had a 50% drop rate! Killing Gruul each week when you're working on Kael or Vashj because your MT could still use an Aldori Legacy Defender is absurd. The first 25-man raid instance being cleared for shields and Dragonspine Trophies when you're trying to move into the final tier of 25-mans is just bad.

Smaller loot tables are necessary, and the most redundant loot is offspec loot.