Yesterday, before the reset, I finally got my hunter, Ordenar (who had been my secondary Alliance toon for a long time, but was bumped back to three by my DK, four by my Worgen, and is now kind of hanging back with the "eh, sometimes I'll play them if I feel like it" toons) geared up for LFR. Despite the fact that he's got a pair of one-handers with expertise on them (needed to replace a blue staff) and still has the 333 Earthen Ring shoulders, Ordenar is now the proud owner of both a 2-piece tier 13 bonus (gloves and helmet) and Vishanka, the Jaws of Earth - the very best weapon a hunter can get in this expansion (though it is the least powerful version of said weapon.)
This morning, I took Jarsus, my main, through LFR's Fall of Deathwing, and, like the now four previous months of LFR, he has not even seen Blackhorn's Mighty Bulwark drop, nor has he won a Souldrinker.
Obviously, there are several factors at play here. For one, there's the very notion of random drops. This is something that's been part of WoW since the beginning. When you kill a boss, it's purely luck whether the piece you want drops. Now, probability is one of those things that we often misunderstand. Yes, in the long run, the more you kill a boss, the more likely you are to get that drop eventually. However, having never seen that shield drop off Blackhorn after x attempts, (let's say 10 or so, to account for all the weeks where I've gotten a Fall of Deathwing that was already on Madness and I didn't feel like queueing up for the whole damned thing again,) my chance of getting that shield has not improved at all, because all those previous kills may as well have never happened.
Another factor is other players. I love it when I get a DK or Druid co-tank in LFR, because it means that if the shield does drop (and it never does) I'll win it, guaranteed. I don't know if they adjust drop rates depending on how many specs could use the piece (if they did, why do I ever see Vishanka or Kiril drop?) but that could account for how rare the shield is.
The other factor is that Blizzard really needs to fix the unsophisticated way that it determines Need+ rolls. Souldrinker is a piece designed for 2 full specs and 2 half-specs. The healing side of the proc makes it a tank weapon, and the damage makes it a dps weapon. I realize that going in to actual talents is probably asking a bit much (and that come Mists, all Frost DKs and all Fury Warriors will be specced to take 2handers or 1handers,) but the only people who should ever win that freaking sword are Protection Paladins, Protection Warriors, Frost Death Knights with Threat of Thassarian/Nerves of Cold Steel and Fury Warriors with Single Minded Fury.
And yet the people who get a Need+ roll also include Arms, Retribution, Blood, and Unholy. Going by talent specs alone, that means that half the people who get a Need+ bonus for that piece aren't going to use it for their spec, and if you include Titan's Grip Fury and Might of the Frozen Wastes Frost, it's more than half.
The worst part of this is that even if everyone was honest and only needed if they wanted things for the specs they had (needing things for offspec and trusting in the Need+ system to only give them those pieces if the mainspecs passed,) they still might get the wrong piece (which is how I wound up with a Gurthalak on Jarsus - and a bug with it not going into my inventory prevented me from trading it to a Ret Paladin guildie who had been along for the raid.) In fact, greeding on offspec gear essentially screws you, because then you've all but assured that it will either go to someone else who isn't so deferential or it'll get sharded. When I run Madness on, say, my DK or my Arms Warrior, I still roll need on Souldrinker, and I just hope that if the tank (or one of the aforementioned dps specs) actually does need it, that they win it instead.
So: how do we fix it? Well, the first obvious thing to do is not make a weapon that can be counted as both tank and dps (and do something to make an exception for Blood.) The next step is to make the Need+ system smart enough to actually know what spec you are, and not just your role and class.
But going back to the problem of drop rates and popular vs. unpopular gear, there is the notion of changing things to a VP/JP system entirely.
There are advantages to a fully currency-based loot system: You never feel like you wasted a run. You always feel like you've made some progress. You will never get screwed by the RNG gods. Loot drama goes away in a puff of smoke.
However, there are other problem that will arise: If everything comes from points, then everything's a grind. There is little personality to a boss' loot table if every drop is 100 VP. If everything's on sale for VP, there's no gear advantage for a guild that's clearing the the whole raid over a solo player grinding VP in Dungeon Finder. This next one's a bit cynical, but if everyone can get all of their gear at a predictable rate, they might stop playing as soon as they've completed their set, thus losing Blizzard subscription money.
So here's an idea that I just came up with (actually in the process of writing this) that I think might alleviate some of these issues, while avoiding some of the problems that would arise:
Dan's Big Happy Proposal for a Better Loot System:
Each boss still has a loot table. If you ever want to get, say, Blackhorn's Mighty Bulwark, you still need to kill Warmaster Blackhorn (and there's still a better one for each higher difficulty.) However, let's say you're unlucky. The shield drops, or worse, some Warrior takes it. The warrior would get that shield right away, and you'd fume at him for a bit, but despair not! Under this new system, there would be a special vendor inside the raid. Let's call him Shastablab. Shastablab would have a lot of items there that look awfully familiar - Blackhorn's Mighty Bulwark, Vagaries of Time, even Souldrinker - but they're all red - you can't purchase any of them yet. Once you've killed Blackhorn for the first time on that toon, the shield, along with every other piece of gear he drops (including tier tokens,) lights up in the vendor's inventory. Having killed Blackhorn, you've clearly earned the gear he drops, but rather than just get all of it, guaranteed, you now have to spend your valor points. That shield's quite a nice piece, so you'd probably have to pay 2200 valor or something for it, so you might hold off and instead spend your valor on, say, your tier helmet, or one of the non-drop valor pieces. Maybe you want to try your luck again and hope the shield drops next week. That's fine, it's still going to be there from the vendor in case it doesn't.
Essentially, this hybridizes the random loot drops with the VP system. It still encourages people to try their hand at new bosses rather than just grinding endlessly through heroic after heroic. You still need to kill a boss in order to get the loot you want, and you're still encouraged to continue killing that boss on the off chance he actually drops the piece you want, but bad luck with RNG is compensated for by allowing you to get the piece "the slow way." The loot isn't "free" for newbies - if they haven't killed anything in there, they can't get any of the loot, and if they've only killed Morchok on LFR, they can only get the stuff he drops, and only of LFR quality. Your gear still shows off what you've been able to accomplish, but you are no longer (as) frustrated by the cruel RNG gods.
I have no idea if this is something Blizzard has thought of, or if they have any intentions to fundamentally change the way that loot distribution works after about eight years. I'm sure there are problems with this system that I haven't thought of, but as with most things, I think a hybrid approach (here blending boss drops and Valor) would make for the most enjoyable system.
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