World of Warcraft wanted to return to the old loot system from back in the day in raids. But that leads to raid drama – at least in some raid groups.
With Dragonflight, Blizzard fulfilled several wishes of the community. One of them was the return to a somewhat more classic loot system in raids. Instead of characters receiving loot through “Personal Loot,” loot will again be rolled for traditionally. This includes the known options “Need,” “Greed,” and “Pass.”
I had thought that such a loot system would be well received. I personally like to see what others have rolled for and the small competitive luck aspect behind it.
But, by the Nether, apparently, the new system is a trial for my raid.
This may also be due to the fact that “my raid” consists of several smaller communities, and my guild is just part of it, which apparently takes the whole thing more casually than some other members. The raid has never claimed to pursue really aggressive progress. We usually clear the raid early on “normal” and then work our way up to the heroic final boss throughout the season. That is our goal and claim, and correspondingly we have always been quite relaxed in that regard.
But let’s take the item “Seal of the Brood Affliction.” This is a quite powerful ring that drops at a higher item level. The ring has a good amount of mastery and also a bit of haste, making it a really strong upgrade for some specializations. Druids and priests are keen on the stats – but so are many other classes, especially with the increased item level.
However, the ring has an additional effect as a bonus: When dealing fire damage, there is a chance that you are empowered and absorb ~50,000 damage for 6 seconds.
And that’s exactly the catch. Because everyone who wanted the ring rolled “Need” for it.
In the end, a druid won, who – usually – cannot trigger the bonus effect, but still gains enormous benefit from the ring. However, that didn’t sit well with the caller, who could have likely triggered the fire effect much more often, but is just a twink and lost the roll.
Suddenly, we had a loot discussion unlike any I had seen since Vanilla and the set distribution in Blackwing Lair.
From the whole drama, a fundamental discussion about how loot should actually be distributed arose in our raid. Are there people who have “more right” to loot? Should people get priority with tier sets who then receive their 2-piece or 4-piece bonus? Should a ring with an optional additional effect mainly go to people who can trigger that additional effect – even if they are twinks who won’t be coming back again?
I don’t want to sound condescending, but it suddenly felt to me like some part of the raid had been reverted back to elementary school age.
On the other hand, I also found it interesting how these conflicts simply never arose with “Personal Loot.” There, items were directly assigned to players. Here, it was simply rolled in the background by the game who would receive an item, and that was directly placed into the inventory. Essentially, it’s nothing different than now, just with the difference that everyone still has the pop-up dice window from the loot.
In the meantime, I’ve reached the point where I wish for “Personal Loot” back. Not for myself, as I can live with others getting something I also would have needed. But many others have apparently somehow forgotten that.
Do you also have such “loot drama” in your raid? Do you have clear rules for distribution?
