A good set of rules, regarding off-spec loot, is going to be pretty important, particularly when you consider that the (arguably) three most viable hybrids all share a single token. 3 Pure DPS classes all share a second token, and 2 potential hybrids and a pure DPS class share the third. So basically any rules have to account for that fact that some hybrids have to bid against 'pure' classes, some pure classes only bid against other pure classes and some hybrids will be competing with other hybrids.

So for example, should DPS warriors have equal rights with a resto druid for their second token, if the Druid wants a PvP moonkin set which he rarely (if ever) uses on raids, and the DPS Warrior wants a secondary set for tanking? Will the paladins and shamans every get a shot at off-spec loot, while your 7 raiding rogues are trying to complete their full dps sets? Will the Warlocks, Hunters and Mages be able to quickly pick up their single token for each slot, and then get first choice on Trinkets/Cloaks/Rings etc?

Also, I've seen several suggestions that hybrids need to pick a spec and gear up appropriately. I was a 'DPS warrior' in Naxx, yet I ended up picking up far more Tanking gear than DPS gear, simply because when I was required to tank, without a Plague Bearer, Dreadnaught etc I simply couldn't have performed that role that the raid required.

The flip side is, should I have equal rights to a Gressil as a DPS Warrior, when I'll only be using it on 60% of the boss fights? Techincally I'm a listed as being a primary DPS class, yet one of our Sword rogues will be putting it to use on every single fight, whereas I'd have been using my Widows remorse on any fight I need to Tank.

1) Healers don't need high-end dps loot for raids.

2) The purpose of the high-end loot from the most current raid instance, to any serious hardcore guild, is to make it easier to kill bosses in that instance and the next.

Thus, it seems obvious to me that this isn't a problem for any serious raid guild. A healer doesn't NEED access to the best dps loot ALONG with the best available healing loot. If they claim that they do, then they're being pretty selfish. Yes, this means that it's harder for such a healer to farm, but face it, if you're specced for healing in the first place, that choice alone is going to make farming far harder than any gear issues. If you are REALLY concerned with farming, or pvp where you don't like to heal, then you really need an alt. It may suck, but that is the way the game is designed.

Finally, given the quality of loot available from 5-mans and crafted epics, a healer that claimed they need to have an equal chance to get top-end dps gear from a 25-man raid is basically a liar. If you need to keep your healers happy by allocating them dps loot from the highest quality level you have access to, you should really find new healers who don't put their personal soloing dps, already gimped by spec, ahead of raid dps.

Because that's just fucking stupidity any way you dress it up.

I think you missed several posts in the thread. He isn't describing a system that guarantees healers cutting edge DPS loot and healing loot. His system allows healers to split their point accumulation between DPS and healing pools. If they dedicated enough points to regularly compete for DPS loot, they would not be able to compete for healing loot. More importantly, they'd be less likely to get invited to raid in healer roles. This just lets the healers make the hard decisions for themselves (and possibly screw themselves out of a raid spot), instead of depending on fortune to someday smile and let them loot their first piece of DPS gear 8 months down the line, if they still happen to have a raid group interested in visiting an old instance to gear up off-specs.

We had a similar problem with this issue but it derived more from the zone DKP caps we implemented.

Since it was universal for all classes (ie. 1500 for MC/Rag, 2500 for BWL/Nef), casters always ended up with a surplus of DKP, much more than warriors, rogues, and hunters, primarily because they spent much less on their weapon/ranged slots. We have a simple upgrade/sidegrade/downgrade system that allows tanks to get multiple weapons, and pay upgrade from a 1H mainhand to a 2H, but in the end, they still had to pay full price for 3 slots -- mainhand/2H, offhand/shield, and ranged. While casters also have to pay for 3 weapon slots in our system, very few need to pick up anything but their mainhand weapon, and even for those that do bid on all, off-hand items and wands/relics are generally much cheaper in price than an off-hand sword/shield and bow. The DKP difference was usually about 200 between a caster and melee class.

I must admit I'm quite biased towards an open bidding system without any rules. Those who play the most, will have the highest chance on getting the gear they want and if the raid leaders feel that a certain person's choice of gear doesn't benefit the guild, it's time to reconsider this person's position.

But this dicussion is not about fixed vs. open bidding, I know, so I'll just throw in my 2 cents, for what it's worth...

Some people suggest that at the end of an instance's lifecycle (let's say, 6-9 months pre TBC), pretty much everyone should've paid equal amounts of DKP in there. People who focus on one set of gear (MTs, DPS, Pure Healers) will have spend the same amount of DKP on a lesser amount of gear compared to hybrids (OTs, Paladins/Shamans/Druids, PvP Priests perhaps), who will spend an equal amount of DKP on a more items.

I do not think this system will work. It won't, because droprates are and always will be random chances: for example, most hunters would only want Ashjre'thul from Blackwing Lair (upon entering BWL, FotF + Warblade was superior to any melee combo from BWL). Ashjre'thul then, would have had to cost as much as, for example, Reinforced Elementium Bulwark and Ashkhandi (because warriors both tank and dps, this also assumes that all tanks had Quel'Serrar... what about the tanks without QS or TF?). That's a lot of "ifs" already, not to mention many guilds only ever saw 2-3 Ashjre'thuls drop ever. This would mean you would balance 1 Chromaggus drop for 1 class against a million combinations possible for other classes and what about the Tier items? I saw 3 mages in full Netherwind and multiple gloves sharded before half the other classes even had the chance to complete a set.

My conclusion (and rather an open door): trying to make the DKP spend in an instance for all classes equal (taking multiple roles into the equation), will not work because droprates are, still, only chances.

The suggestion, then, to ask players to chose a primary path, slightly alleviates the problem of the randomness but still does not take it away. This still would only work if you can depend on the droprates (and you still can't). If you have a team of 6 warriors, 3 chose tanking as their primary path and 3 chose dps as their primary path, you'll need to have a warriors dps item drop for every warrior tank item that drops, to make it fair. Sure, the tanking warriors will have to wait for the dps warriors to get their 2 hander before they can, but if the odds are in your favour and 2 handers drop like rain drops during the rain season, those who chose the dps path won't be very happy that the tanks got nice 2 handers almost as quick for less DKP!

I'm doing my best here to stay away still from the fixed vs bidding system, but really, I can't see any system work unless it favours time played, rather than class played. If a player plays 5 nights a week, he deserves the loot he wants more than the player who plays 3 nights a week - if the 5-nights-a-week player turns out to be a mage and the 3-nights-a-week player turns out to be a druid who wants 3 sets of gear, then it's too bad. You didn't order him to roll hybrid and you can't help that he plays less, the druid knows the rules of the game and if his DKP earned can't pay for the gear he wants, he'll have to make choices.

And if any player makes choices you don't see correct, you don't necessarily have to implent a loot council straight away but rather talk to that player and see if he can be persuaded to chose for guild progression rather than his own.

In the end, reward the player that plays most, not the class that has most choices and just make sure you are very clear on what gear you expect certain people to take. That's all that matters for item distribution balance.

Resist gear is always a bit icky, because people don't want to spend DKP on something they use for one fight the whole game. I would just put the resist gear into the pool it belongs most ignoring resist (ie if it had spell damage it would be in the DPS pool) and let bidding sort out the pricing. I would deal with warlock tanking gear the same way, because I do not think that such a rare case warrants special attention. That is just put it in the DPS pool and pretend the tanking stats wont exist. Since the items are only useful to tanking warlocks anyway, bidding will make sure it ends up in the right hands.

An interesting challenge for any such scheme are tokens that lead to loot in more than one bucket. I think it would work best if you classified such items in both pools that is let people bid with either one (but not both at the same time) on it. Yes that would mean that you could in rare scenarios use heal DKP to outbid someone who is using DPS DKP, but other than the logical oddity I do not see too many problems with it since ultimately its the same DKP anyway.

Aux, rewarding the player who plays the most doesn't mean using a bidding system. It's done just as easily in fixed priced or preselected bid systems. With fixed price a tie is easily broken by either attendance percentage or total earned dkp. Both of these resolutions favor the person who played more. A bidding system just forces the guys who play more to pay more in order to get some item first.

It just seemed counterintuitive to me to say "We are rewarding this item to you first since you have shown more dedication and have attended more raids, But we are still going to charge you 10 times what joe slap is going to pay for it next week."

More closely related to the original topic, I'm only looking at this topic for possible solutions to the rather annoying build up of dkp some classes get either through randomness of loot drops or low class numbers. I honestly think with 25 mans as the new large cap it might well be worth pursuing some combination of council or just employing a 'Don't be a dick' policy to rolling.

Frankly I think it's hard to theorycraft too much about dkp systems because 25 and 10 mans is outside of my purview of raid experience between wow and EQ.

Such simplification comes at the price that for example a druid who wants to gear up for both tanking and healing cannot do so since he cannot split his points evenly. Is that price worth it? That is a matter of opinion. As I stated earlier, simplicity is a virtue of a DKP system that can even come ahead of optimal loot distribution. I believe that I have found a way to administer the system I described with minimal effort, which is why I personally put the tradeoff between performance and simplicity of the system there.

I'm surprised no one has mentioned using the "Slot Modifier" when creating item prices. Going back to the OP, this would go a long way towards resolving weapon/offhand costs across classes.

I've seen some DKP systems in which all items in a given zone are priced nearly the same, as most of them have the same target ilvl. Including the Slot Mod would make 2H weapons cost the same as a 1H+Shield combination. (Or, if your system already includes this... do it again to increase the effect? Your dual wielders will love you, anyway.)

This balances item pricing quite a bit without your DKP admins needing to manage an exception along the lines of "class X pays differently than class Y," plus any system which uses "clean" math makes price generation a snap for new items that you've never seen before. This does not touch on the sub-discussion about classes who want two sets of gear, but it does at least get a warrior his sword and shield at a fair price. He won't be flat broke when he goes for that 2H Axe of Excessive Bleeding.

By contrast, weapons cost much more than armor in some systems; this made sense in BWL days when we had "that one perfect dagger that every <insert class> should have and keep forever," but killed anyone who wanted an Ashkandi. Hopefully the greater number and variety of zones in TBC will help us avoid that scenario.


A brief refresher: In addition to the stat budget for an item, each slot on your character also has a percentage value. Here's the full list for reference.

2h Weapon – 100%
Off-hand/Shield – 55%
1h Weapon – 42% (?)
Ranged/Wand - 30% (This seems low to me for a bow/gun. Not sure about idols/librams)

So,
Casters... pay the same for a 2H staff as
casters who pay the same for a 1H dagger + offhand as
warriors who pay the same for a 1H sword + Shield as
DPSers who pay the same for a 1H + 1H.

Head – 100%
Chest – 100%
Legs – 100%

Feet – 77%
Shoulder – 77%
Hands – 77%
Waist – 77%

Wrist – 55%
Neck – 55%
Back – 55%
Ring – 55%
Trinkets – 70%


By the way, I've used an open bidding system, and firmly believe it is harmful to the guild's well-being. Bidding creates competition between people who should be your friends. (and in our case, the system had serious inflation.)

When buying loot feels like waging war on your own guildmates, the system has to go!

Seped - sorry for the confusion. Because some people refered to fixed vs. bidding, I just admitted I'm biased towards bidding. I tried to avoid saying bidding will solve most issues (I do think it will), hopefully my point that DKP should focus largely on time played, came across. Item distribution between classes is a matter of kindness towards each other and a matter of making clear what you expect from your fellow raiders, not a something DKP can and should handle.

Guilds need well-geared healers who don't burn out and quit. If your guild has low healer turnover despite giving no damage gear to healers, congradulations. You're pretty much unique, and once your current healers do quit, you'll probably have trouble replacing them.

With token loot, giving your healers dps gear could theoretically even improve the quality of your dpser's gear. If giving up 10% of your caster gear to healers reduces healer turnover by 20%, you suddenly have 20% more set tokens to give out. You also suddenly have healers who can farm (it's not very fun, but I could farm faster with my full healing spec in my damage gear than I could on my badly geared hunter alt), and as a result are likely to use more consumables... resulting in bosses being easier to kill.

The slot mods work fine for armour, but they're slightly illogical for weapons since AFAIK only stats count towards budget, not weapon DPS.* I'm actually pretty close to coming up with a load of mods that tie in properly now (and have made-up but more realistic mods for weapons). If I can finish it all off surreptitiously at work tomorrow maybe I'll post them.

*EDIT: presumably caster weapons that sacrifice DPS for huge amounts of spell damage also have at least a portion of that unbudgeted.

I believe the iLvl formula does actually take DPS into account in a roundabout way when calculating weapon DPS. That's why caster weapons have such low DPS: the portion of DPS sacrificed is proportional to the how far their stats are over budget for their level.

I'm curious, would it hurt to just have people always having some points allocated to a separate "Resist Gear" pool? As long as everyone is forced to put the same small percentage of points (2%?) into it it would fit into the system neatly. Of course I suppose it would still hurt any classes that need to collect more DPS gear than others (warriors vs casters for example) but blizzard does occasionally switch things up and make unexpected people suddenly need to buy resist gear. ANd I've honestly never seen people fighting over resist gear so even when one class does need it more, I could see the system sorting itself out to award it to them cheaply anyway. Any item that people want for things other than the +resist on it (e.g that FrR shield in Naxx) would be in higher demand, but wouldn't come out of Resist DKP anyway.

It probably would not hurt but I do not think that it is neccessary. Since bidding systems inflate the price difference between highly desirable and less desirable loot, resist gear usually goes for so little that its not worth having its own pool. Also, you get into trouble with items that are both resist items as well as items worthwhile in their own right, because then you would have to clarify when an item is in the resist pool and when in the regular pool. Which leads to again more rules.

So, just like it is with warlock tank gear I do not think that it is worth the complication to have extra provisions. You have said so yourself, nobody fights over resist gear. In both guilds that I have been in that use bidding systems, resist gear has never caused problems other than people complaining that a boss again dropped NR stuff instead of something useful (you know which dungeon I mean).

I find that hard to believe to be honest. I mean you only have to look at Wraith Blade (ilevel 83) vs Sapphiron's Left Eye (90) to see that the sword has much better stats. While I'm aware that crazy spell damage on caster weapons is directly proportional to the loss of 'expected' DPS, that doesn't mean any of it is budgeted. How else do you explain the sword having a 42% slot mod compared to 52% on an offhand when the blade has vastly superior stats?

Kalman, how do you handle priority with newer recruits/large guilds?

It seems like a priority system would work great assuming you have a small group of high attendence people with very low atrition, but would completely breakdown if you have a large playerbase and new recruits. Does a new mage get automatic priority on damage gear over a holy priest who has been in the guild a very long time?

What about respecs? How do they fit into the picture?

That's a very nice attitude to use when the raid items are barely an upgrade over the blue items. What happens in your system 6 months or 1 year down the road, when the raid drops are ten times better than the best possible 5 man drop / quest?

The difference will simply never be that big anymore. Just lok at the T4 and T5 sets. They are not as huge of an upgrade that it was from the first dungeon set to T2.

In any case they will be at worst looting from an instance 2 below what we are raiding. Easily more than enough to keep them competitive when they want to use their offspecs. dont forget when we are raiding for T8, we will be in full T6 and T7, so T6 and T7 drops then will start to open up to the players for use int heir offspec. It wont be "Oh, I need more T9, and we will shard anything below regardless and limit the offspecs to only using 5 man loot still". It will progress as we progress.

If in 6months you can link me a single item that is "10 times better than any 5-man dungeon item" I will eat my hat. The great news is, I will HAVE my hat, instead of a resto druid =).

That would work great, if you guys are going to be farming RaidInstance X-2 when all your focus will be on RaidInstance X. I'm not saying you won't, but I know from personal experience that most guilds tend to focus on new challenges.

Let me give you an example: Choker of the Firelord. Tier1 raid, yet still the best warlock/priest neck in the game pre-TBC. Were you guys consistently going back to kill Rag to give your priests a chance to grab it? Another example: Neltharion's Tear. Still the best DPS trinket, even after TBC. How often did you guys go do BWL, at the height of Naxx raiding? And when it did drop, how many mages/locks still needed that before the holy priests got a chance at it?

Obviously I have no clue what the 25 man raids loot will be like, but I won't be suprised if things will behave in the same manner for non-tier gear (trinkets/rings/necks/etc). And if that will be the case, can you in good conscience go and point your non-DPS specs to go to the 5 mans and just be happy with that?

"Your system sucks, mine is brilliant" is shit and has been done to death. If we can't keep to the point of the OP can we at least take it on a tangent that's vaguely interesting?

I agree with this statement; there is no perfect DKP system, or we would all be using it and these sorts of discussions would not exist.
That said I believe two of the better systems are; 1) Fixed DKP with enforced looting (i.e. you force people to take upgrades rather than sharding them); 2) Free (but secret) Bidding.

I also beleive that with class restricted items, there should be two seperate DKP pools; formerly we defined these as Class-restricted DKP, and everything else DKP. This was absolutely crucial in gearing up our raid group in vanilla WoW because it ment even our DPS warriors had excellent tanking gear because they couldnt spend their set-dkp on dps items, only tanking items; it worked just as well for healing classess who had DKP pools they could only spend on the tiered healing armors.

This will not work as well with the new system of multiple set style tokens, but I believe that if people have a set pool of DKP they can only spend on those items the guild views as benefitial to the raid you can still encourage your feral druids and shadow priests to pick up healing gear without feeling begrudged. Similar to the idea given earlier in the thread of splitting DKP, it might be best to have a fixed split (say everyone must split DKP 70/30 and declaire which pool gets the 70), not a variable split, so the guy who went for a 100/0 split on day 1 doesnt feel completely burnt out 6 months later.