A good friend of mine in a Naxx-level raiding guild uses a system that I quite like, even as a 1/46/14 Druid. Side-grades and gear used for alternate purposes (for instance, a Restoration-spec Druid who is interested in building a Nuking set, or a Tanking set) cost 1 DKP in cutting-edge content, and in older content (for them, say BWL or below) are free. The caveat is that those spending full DKP on the item (those who are upgrading their primary sets) will come first. That means that raid progression comes first, but hybrid classes are still allowed to easily gear up for off-spec roles without costing them DKP they might use for their primary one.

It's a pretty solid system, in my opinion.

Are there actually bid systems that use public bidding o.O? That would be horrific.

Yes and I have had excellent experiences with it.

Same here. Been in two guilds with public bidding and find it works great. So long as you have people that are willing to bid in good faith it's by far the least drama system you can have.

I am impressed then. I'm fairly sure our system would break horribly if bid weren't silent (our winner only pays what the 2nd highest bid was, not the highest bid, so public would make malicious bleeding very easy). Feel free to reply in a PM since it's off topic, but do you not have a high incidence of people bidding HighestCurrentBid + 1? I'm sure someone in our guild would perceive slights in the order people ramped up bids as well.

If every player of every guild were mature and reasonable, we wouldn't have long discussions about loot systems. :( Living through some poor systems gave me the pessimistic view that an ideal loot system has two goals: Reward honest players, and avoid abuse by those with... other agendas.

I was a guild that used open bidding and in a guild that used secret bidding. Both worked reasonably well. The open bidding system had minimal increments (between 1/2 and 1/5 of the DKP for one raid) and I never encountered a case where the bidding was dragged out to the point of annoyance. If anything there was always cheering when an item went extremely high so it helped lighten the mood.

Second highest+1 is more suitable for silent bidding systems since it alleviates the problem of someone bidding way too much, but I don't think it would be completely horrible for open bidding either. You can never bleed someone dry without their consent since nothing forces me to keep outbidding you.

I could not agree more. Right now there seems to be a massive shortage of healers. I was on vacation the first 2 weeks after BC launched so I am still far from 70 and last night a friend whispered me with "hurry up and get to 70, we need healers". It was a semi-joke but healers are in tight supply. The number of runs that happen are limited pretty much only by the number of healers on.

The lack of healers was not so obvious a month ago because most dedicated players have multiple 60s and so there was always someone who could bring their healer alt. But right now nobody I know is leveling alts when there is so much new content to explore on your main.

The fact that non-healing specced healer classes are now viable as offspecs only further reduces the number of actual healers. In that situation, being overly strict on your healers will get you nowhere fast. If you are the top guild on the server you can probably get enough people that are willing to be the guild slave for the sake of loot and progress, but if you are a second-tier guild, alienating healers is a surefire way to not be able to fill your raids. Now more so than ever before.

I levelled playing evenings and weekends with a holy priest (smiter build for levelling) and hit 70 on 24th Jan. There is so much +dmg gear in TBC that I went from +250 dmg to +400 in about a week and solo questing was no problem at all.

The way we do it, which I'm fine with, is that applicants go through three phases. Phase 1, you're an app. If we decide you're not horrible, and we like you, you get an invite and get the tag and all that. Phase 2, you're an initiate. This basically lasts 2-4 weeks, and is designed to show that you're capable of attending raids regularly, holding your own, etc. Phase 3, you're a member.

Member > initiate > app. If you're a member of 1 month and (we'll pretend we're just killing Nef for the purpose of the example) Mish' drops, as long as you're the highest DKP amongst damage casters and want it, it's yours, even if there's a 3 year member priest who'd like it. Full price always beats offspec price, and member > initiate > app. If it's a question of an initiate mage and a member priest, the priest still loses.

Once someone's been around for a month or so, they no longer feel like the FNG, and "losing" gear to them is no longer bothersome. Plus, honestly, most new members go heavily negative during the initiate phase, since there's probably a lot of stuff on rot or near-rot that's still an upgrade for them.

What's this "respec" you speak of? :p

Er, seriously, people generally don't respec for us. If they do, it's been done with consent of the officers, and in my ideal world (note: I'm not an officer, and we use a somewhat different system than the one I would use) a *permanent* respec in role is basically a request to switch mains, and should be treated with the same gravitas. I don't give a shit if you're 61 shadow, as long as you can heal effectively, if healing is your role. Typically during pushes on content, people are pure raid specs, and once stuff has settled down, people drift to whatever.