LFR Looting

News this past week saw the announcement that loot in the new Looking For Raid versions of the Dragon Soul being introduced in 4.3 will have new loot rules. 

Whilst players will still be offered the existing options we have now of Need/Greed/Disenchant/Pass, items will now be flagged as Tank/DPS/Heals and maybe a combination of 2 for items that are not aimed squarely at one role. So if a spirit dagger drops those pesky mages/warlocks won't be able to steal our loot. The reason is such an item would be tagged as a healer item and therefore our rolls would be enhanced by adding 100 to them, so even if a mage needed and rolled 100, we only require a need roll of 1 to beat their roll as 1+100 = 101. Although at the moment its not sure if such an item would be able to be equally rolled on (and rightly so) by our shadowy cousins, shaman and those big owl type things druids morph into from time to time. Now while this is all good I really think Blizzard are missing the point here because even this system is full of flaws. 

Lets take a look a potential situation:

A nice juicy spirit laden mace has dropped lets say Ko'gun, Hammer of the Firelord, now if me and all the other healers already have this item (yeah I can dream) and therefore we all select disenchant, our emergency backup healer is a ret pally and he sees that item and being an honourable chap he rolls greed as its for his off spec nobody else in the raid can roll need so they too also roll disenchant. Now our poor old retadin now has a 1 in 25 chance of winning the item which is a measly 4% chance unfortunately the other 24 people have selected disenchant so there is now a 96% chance that Ko'gun, Hammer of the Firelord will end up as a worthless Maelstrom Crystal rather than a nice fat upgrade to someone's off-spec gear because he wasn't an ass.

This issue has been a bugbear of mine since they brought it in simply because Greed and Disenchant are the same in terms of priority and that means that to stand a hope of getting items for off-spec, players MUST roll need and this has caused lots of drama in Dungeon Finder pug groups.

Now I know what you're all thinking, that this new system fixes the problem, well yes it does but in such an obfuscated way that we are educating players to continue to roll need for off spec items. I'd like to see the UI modified so that we get a Need (main spec/current role), Need (off spec), Greed, Disenchant and Pass. This would make it clear to the people rolling what the priority was and prevent the situation of good honest players losing out on off spec items.

Now the other issue with it is there are some weird anomalies with gear for certain class/spec/role situations, for example us priests need spirit regardless of our role and does this new system mean that those shadow priests will be forced to roll as off spec for spirit gear even though the talent Twisted Faith gives them hot based on their spirit? Likewise, druid tanks are unique in the tank role as their primary stat is Agility will they be allowed to roll on on an equal footing with rogues, and will the game be able to determine that a dodge trinket with +stam and dodge eg Vial of Stolen Memories, should be able to be rolled on by a feral druid as well as prot warriors/Pallies and blood DKs? 

Blizzard have already admitted will not be solved in time for the introduction of teh raid finder and also that they want to retrospectively apply this into the 5 man dungeons which will be great but until they perfect the system to actively check talent builds to determine people's roles there is still going to be a lot of drama caused by this.