Better gear rewards from runs and raids

Not that type of gear! Damn it.

Another enhancement (adding to a post about Need vs Greed by class & role) which would not hurt the Warcraft game at all would be to constrain the types of drops to at least the classes present in the run/raid. This an old idea, but a feature which seems blindingly obvious as a value add to players. It is the kind of assumption that a new player has, which is adjusted when the gear drop discussion happens.

Would you rather play for a slim chance of reward to your team, or a consistent reward to the team? Is there a significant disadvantage to adding this?

The suggestions is to mod the loot system mechanics so that:

• Don’t drop gear for a class that is not present. Especially the class tokens, or class specific gear.
• Don’t drop the same item, unless there is more than one of the class.

How will this be done?

At a basic level, create the loot table from the classes present, using their presence alone as a method of randomisation. Its cheapish, but would be an improvement. 2 Pallys means Paladin gets added to the loot table. 4 Druids means Druids get added once. This leaves the stacking of classes out of the equation, which is a messy issue. It could potentially be further enhanced by looking at the spec the characters are using, but I think that starts to add some messy rules and too many assumptions.

Another solution I considered was to look at the presence of item slots for the  raid which could benefit from an upgrade, and create a loot table from that list, re-rolling duplicates. A character has up to around 11-12 slots for gear, look for item below the item level awarded by the run, add them. Then roll from that list.

This means it is very likely that the gear will be useful, almost certain that everyone would want to go. It also means that as the same raid gears more and more, there is a better chance that the bad items they have will be replaced. The downfall of this solution is items which duplicate an ilevel the character has form another source. Eg. A character using a pvp item from Baradin Hold would not see an upgrade in this slot. So it would be basically be as non-viable for the wider community as the Spec locking idea mentioned above.

It also would not handle trinkets well, or items where you could use more than one of an item, such as one handed weapons. So pretty much strike the slot based loot table idea for now.

This brings me back to a simple class filter. Simple and a direct improvement.

Is this making gearing easier?

Yes. Gear is not a game, the content is, the competition is, the interaction is; but the gear itself is not the actual point of the game (to me). I might need the gear to play at a challenging level, but it is not the real driver of progression.

Do you think the degree of random is part of the game, therefore something to be preserved?

No. It might have been a part of the flavour of the game in years past, where an Alliance raid could watch Shaman gear go to DE while many members scream at the keyboard. I’d argue that it was present, but totally not intentional. I believe the coders made the loot system simple because there was a time crunch.

We’ve had recent improvements to loot (Orb need rolls, armor based Need rolls, etc) so why not this?

Happy Rolling, may all your rolls be 99-100.