Big Dan's Big Proposal for a Better Loot System

(I thought I'd post this separately from the previous article because I think it's a good idea and probably shouldn't be stuck, buried under my ranting about Souldrinker and Gurthalak.)

This is a proposal for a solution to the problems inherent to both a random-drop-based loot system and a fully currency-based 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 (he's a gnome.) 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 as much as that warrior did, but rather than just get all of it immediately, 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. The high valor costs would make it so this was really for getting that one damned piece that never drops for you, rather than just getting every piece off every boss you wanted quickly and easily. One could even create a new currency to discourage people from just running the raid once and grinding valor in dungeons for all the other pieces, though I would advise agains this, as I think keeping currencies simple was a good achievement in Cataclysm.

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.