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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