Loot is the single biggest headache involved with raiding. The past few weeks it has been something I have been focused on heavily as I prepare to move my guild, Exhumed of Shadowsong EU, into Mythic raiding. We decided a while back to move to Loot Council but hadn't considered the nuts and bolts of how to do this.

We looked at addons and they really don't add any benefit to the process. therefore I have looked around and come up with a system that I feel will work, be easily managed and simple to explain. One thing that I had to accept was that nothing can avoid disagreements over gear.

I have also set up the Loot Council to have an odd number of members to avoid a deadlock on a piece of gear. The aim is for loot to be distributed as fairly as possible. I have asked that our raid team do not contest our decisions in the raid and this will mean that we won't be changing our decisions. I have asked that anyone who feels we made an error to discuss it AFTER the raid.

The only situation whereby a person will have to pass loot to a different person is if the loot Council decide that "person A" should win an item but the Master Looter hands the item to "person B". The correction will be announced by the Master Looter and we then expect that the item be handed immediately to the correct winner by the incorrect winner. This will mean that we have had to ask that people do not gem/enchant/transmog an item for 15 minutes as this may make the item soulbound.

How to express interest

Bidding for items will be done in raid chat, to ensure that nothing is missed, raid chat should be kept clear while bidding is in progress. To make sure the raid is not slowed down during this process each item will be open for 15 seconds after the item to bid on is linked during this time you should do 1 of 3 things in /ra:

• Say MAIN link your equipped item – If the item is a significant upgrade for you in your current spec and role. If this is a piece of Tier and it will activate a set bonus add 2pce or 4 piece to your "bid"
• Say OFF (no item link) – If the item is a minor upgrade or you’d like it for an off spec.
• Say nothing – If you have zero interest at all in the item.

After the 15 second countdown, there will be a "Bids closed" statement. Interest expressed well after this point will not be considered into account (unless there was no one interested at all during the countdown). The council will then write the name of the person they feel should be awarded the item in a private channel and the master looter will then announce a winner. Bidding on the next item will then commence.

This does of course rely on the bidder being honest when linking their equipped item, this will be policed and anyone found cheating the system will be dealt with very harshly.

Who will be on the Loot Council?

The Loot Council will consist of 5 people. These will be 3 officers and 2 of the raid team (decided by a /roll each raid). The raid leader will always be on the council. They each have their own individual personality and are 5 different players. Each council member has 1 vote used to decide who receives an item if there are multiple players interested in an item. ALL loot council members will vote on ALL items, even if a member of the loot council is interested in an item.

6 Influential factors

Current rank and position: Players not holding a raider rank will not get loot assigned to them if a player holding a raider rank has bid MAIN. This is to prevent people from joining, getting a few pieces of loot, and then leaving. It is basically a form of DKP. It forces people to have a vested interest in the guild and raiding regularly to receive gear. This may be overlooked based on performance, attendance, or the amount of loot already received during that raid.

Attendance: Raid attendance is extremely important. If players aren’t here to raid, they’re not going to be able to contribute. Remember that loot drops will be awarded in order to be as effective as possible. This means there is a higher chance that a player who attends 80% of raids will get an item over a player who only attends 50%. This doesn't mean that a person with lower attendance will never get loot, just that persons with higher attendance but equal gear level will get loot earlier.

Effectiveness: Is it effective for the guild as a whole? Will the raider be able to utilize it and ensure that it does not become useless? We want to ensure that items aren’t going to be wasted by being awarded to alts or off specs unless there is no main interest. A guardian/boomkin Druid looking to obtain a spirit item aren’t going to get it if they’re in raids to only to tank or DPS. It doesn't maximize the effectiveness of the item if it is not being used.

Current items: A player still wearing gear from the last tier or from a raid difficulty lower than that being run is going to have a higher chance of being awarded an item. Keep in mind that this will not always be the case. In certain situations, while the item in question may be a larger upgrade for a newer player, it could be awarded to a veteran player who has been in there for weeks or months on end trying to get the item.

Equal distribution: Loot will be distributed as equally as possible to the appropriate classes that need them (at least, we’ll attempt to). It is unlikely for players to receive more than one item from a boss. But it is entirely possible for players to receive multiple items in one run. We cannot control what items a boss drops. The last thing we want to do is shard a piece.

Set bonuses: If you have an odd number of set pieces (like 1 or 3 set pieces), we want nothing more than to help activate them.

Self improvement and teamwork

The main tanks in the guild are able to talk amongst themselves and figure out who needs upgrades over the other first. They do this purely through communication and cooperation by figuring out their weaknesses and identifying the items that benefit them the most. When tank items drop, they are able to compromise.

I encourage other players to do the same with the other classes or other players wearing similar armor types. As an example, I try to work with the other healers to see who can benefit more.

During our 10 man days many of the loot drops were handled in this informal way and hopefully that spirit will continue with the new larger raid size, everyone takes turns in passing and are aware who can benefit items the most. It’s the times where there is no informal agreement where the Loot Council will step in and make a decision rather than let the RNG of /roll decide.

That is the approach we are taking in Exhumed, if you have any comments regarding this I'd love to hear from you either via comments below, email to evlyxx at evlyxx.co.uk or alternatively in game evlyxx@shadowsong.eu.

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I'm back, well I never went away to be honest just a whole lot of real life, preparing for Warlords and if I'm truly honest whole lot of writers block caused by generally feeling run down due to the real world stuff. I haven't stopped playing WoW though and have been really busy working towards a very big goal which I hope to cover soon so i won't spoil that just now (yes, I know I'm teasing you all).

Anyway the biggest thing that is stressing me in game is the matter of loot in our soon to be Mythic raids, Exhumed has been a 10 man raid guild all the while I have been there, this has meant loot has been a simple affair as we have a fixed squad of 15 people and use /roll. Sure it isn't perfect but 9 times out of 10 the RNG gods didn't punish people to much as the chances of rolling against the someone for loot more than 2 times was almost nil and only our 2 enhancement shaman were rolling against each other for the same stuff as our hunter didn't want mastery and they didn't want crit, sure healers competed with our boomkin on some gear and I even competed with the mage and lock on an item or two but mostly it sorted itself out (unless you count the Prismatic Prison of Pride trinket which has dropped only 3 times for us on normal or heroic and our druid is still using a flex version despite having 33 kills (7x normal and 26x HC) and rolling on it each time too while I've got the normal version in my 43 kills (20x normal and 23x HC) and yes I roll each week as well and have all 5.4). Anyway I digress, the point is loot was drama free and fast to deal with.

As we move to Mythic, we end up staring down the loot drama boss, RNG can play a huge part the options were all admin heavy and time consuming out of game and nobody wanted to do it and I wasn't getting burdened by that on top of everything else I do for the guild, I simply don't have the time.

A few months back we polled the guild to see what they wanted from raiding in Warlords and one question we asked was which loot system they wanted, the majority chose Loot Council, but even that doesn't come with admin problems. The biggest one is the time it takes to do in raids, I'm assuming that Mythic will give us 5 loot items per boss kill and I'm assuming that each item will take a minimum of 2 minutes to deal with, that's 10 minutes per boss! With there being 17 bosses in the first tier of Warlords raiding that's 3 hours per week just spent on dishing out loot and our raiding schedule is 2 nights of 3 hour raids which makes that 3 hours 50% of our raid schedule spent handing out loot. 

I've looked at addons to help, they're either broken (not working cross-realm even for connected realms) or just don't add up to a time saving as they don't handle the loot council decision making process at all. This means I'm stuck looking at ways to make the process efficient. I've tried researching Loot Council and all I can find is what loot council is and how much better or worse it is than DKP, EPGP, /roll or Suicide Kings. One of the better articles I found, on World of Matticus, is a bit old but still relevant and I've used this as the base for the overview of how I see Loot Council working for Exhumed (I won't go into too much detail of the differences as it is still a discussion for our officers).

So this post is really aimed at people that are running a loot council already as I'd love to hear from you about how you deal with the bidding and decision making process without spending too much time per item, particularly from 25 man raid teams.

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So the big announcement is out, flexible raids that scale on difficulty based on the number of people in your group s that it is always somewhere in between normal mode raids and lfr. Sounds good but I'm actually not so sure I like it.

I have been saying in /g that I wanted 10 man pre-made lfr so I could run lfr with a full guild group and in a way this is that but if we have 12 people we don't need to kick 2 guildies out and that part is therefore awesome as it is what I wanted and more. However, it doesn't replace my lfr lockout it adds to it.

Like it or not raiders will now feel the need to run 3 versions of the same raid for that chance of loot upgrades especially as the ilevel will sit between normal and lfr modes this is especially likely early in the tier. This all sounds very familiar. This sadly sounds all too familiar and reminds me too much of Trial of the Grand Crusader. I ran that place 4 times per week on at least 2 toons for the duration in the hope of small upgrades pushing me and my guild through the next boss and that lead to a lot of folks burning out. It is bad. It is this very reason Blizzard removed the gear gap and lockout difference between 10 and 25 man raids. 

The strange thing is the addition of an extra level of loot (is this why there is an 20 ilevel gap between ToT lfr and ToT normal? Was this meant to be in for 5.3?) as this only adds to the stat inflation. Another potentially bad side effect of this is that as normal mode raiders get gear drops from the flex-raid and normal raids they will eventually have no reason to go into lfr for loot and this could mean that the only people that end up in lfr are those needing to gear up which as the raid tier gets older, fewer and fewer players that currently provide the boost to the lower geared/skilled players will be there and that could lead to some people not in guilds and scared of trade pugs to simply quit the game as they experience queue times that actually extend beyond their normal gaming session and cannot get in let alone complete the raid which too may become an issue. It also removes a vital step in the catch up mechanics of the game.

My final negative thought on this is that I really wanted this "unannounced killer feature" to be a top notch content boost, this isn't extra content at all it is just another version of the same content. For raiders, it is like watching your favourite TV show with the colour changed to black and white. I'm not going to bury this feature before it is live and am hoping that it will open doors to more content. There is still the hope that my desire for this feature to be either enabling old raids to be brought upto date by the scaling technology and/or enabling all previous dungeons for challenge modes as that would have been truly awesome.But the I guess this may not be the killer feature of the patch.

Of course there is a lot of really positive possibilities. The first is that it won't be given a tool to form the group as the group must be premade which is good for guilds and server communities. The extra difficulty will help people bridge the gap in difficulty of lfr and normal which newer players often find it difficult to cross and that will ultimately lead to better raiders. For raid teams that cannot clear the raids on normal mode it will enable them to finish the latter half of the raid instance on flex-raid which will give extra drops that may just provide the extra power boost to get the boss down on normal mode next time. The real beauty though is that it could lead to a pair of 10 man guilds combining forces to raid and that ultimately could see a revival of 25 man raid guilds.

What are your thoughts on the new flexible raids? Is this even the big feature of 5.4? Will they be the next killer feature or the next voice chat? 

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WARNING: RANTY POST

Finally I have had enough of this Random Loot crap that we're getting with both bonus rolls and the RNG loot system on world bosses and Raid Finder.

A bit of background, I've been killing Sha and Nalak almost all expansion so far I have a combined 26 kills and as I'm a raider I've used my bonus roll hoping for a piece of Tier Loot. That makes a total of 52  chances of loot. So far I have won 2 times once from the drop and another from the bonus roll. Both wins were on the same glorious day that I purchased my 522 legs from the Shado Pan Assault and what did I win? 2x tier legs. These were both downgrades and I have therefore never equipped the 1 pair of pants I didn't disenchant.

I have had better luck in normal raids with my bonus roll but thus far in the expansion I had not actually owned 2 pieces of tier loot that were worth equipping because the non tier loot I have had drop in normal raids has been better even allowing for the 2 set bonus until I got a Raid Finder tier 15 helm to upgrade the 489 rep item I had to go with my tier 15 gloves that I won last week. /cheer

Now this week the bonus roll has screwed me over, on our Megaera kill I decided to use one of my Mogu Runes of Fate as I was hoping for the Inscribed Bag of Hydra Spawn while accepting that this was a 1 in 3 chance I could at least have won the got unlucky and won the Gleaming-Eye Shoulders and used them for my shadow off-spec. The 3rd option is a set of bracers that come with a random enchant, the Frostborn Wristwraps, which while they do not have a spirit option they do come with crit and mastery which are still beneficial for a disc priest so not a total loss.

So when I won loot I was overjoyed, then a little sad when I won the bracers, then angry when I realised that I had won hit items. No fear I'll raise a ticket and get them swapped, not for the trinket I wanted but at least a healer compatible set of bracers. The reply to my ticket is shown below:



That simply is NOT good enough. I'll be appealing against this not because I expect it to be overturned but to make Blizzard aware that I am not pleased with the system overall.

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It has been too long since I did a non themed blog post. Today I am going to break that pattern. I have moaned and whined about the game for too long and think I can do a better job than Blizzard and that Greg Street dude. So today I'm going to imagine that I have been given the role of Blizzard's Lead Systems Designer and have the power to fix three things that are wrong with Warcraft.

The three things that I would fix are heirlooms, instance loot and reputation grinds. My fixes are my own personal opinion, I don't expect everyone to agree. In fact I don't expect anyone to agree but it would be great if you did. Either way I'd like your thoughts on my "solutions".

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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. 

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