The Mists-era LFR loot system is a vast improvement over the one that came with Dragon Soul and LFR's introduction. If you were ever frustrated by loot ninjas, like Balance Druids taking your Rogue gear, or a Warlock taking the Priest's spirit cloth - or a super-well-geared tank Needing on a blue tank piece because he or she "needs the gold" (which nowadays is a blatant lie,) imagine that multiplied by five, with cartels of players needing on everything to distribute it to their friends or people taking pieces they don't want just to trade it for those they do.
By making all loot individual, the notion of competition for gear is a thing of the past. I used to prefer to get Druid co-tanks because I wouldn't have to worry about them taking my plate or shields. Now, if I run with a Warrior or fellow Paladin, it's no problem. We can now wish each other luck instead of hoping that we are the one to get the gear.
The real problem, though, is the frustration of getting a Fail Bag. Now, in my experience, the acquisition of loot has not actually felt any worse than it did with the old system (in fact, I think I gear up faster.) The only real difference between a Fail Bag and just not seeing the item you want drop is that you don't get something that says "this is why you didn't get what you wanted." These days, the answer is always simply that the random number generator did not favor you this time.
Granted, even when something you wanted did drop, you could still get screwed by the RNG. If you're one of four Mages in a group, you only really have a one in four chance to get that nice robe (not to mention all the Warlocks and Shadow Priests.)
Yet despite all this, the Failbag is pretty unsatisfying. Maybe if gold were harder to come by, getting 30 would be a decent consolation prize, but when you consider that the average piece of epic gear sells on the auction house for tens of thousands of gold, 30 doesn't seem like much.
Admittedly, the problem could be mostly fixed in 5.3. Firstly, the more times you kill a boss without getting something, the more likely you'll be to win something off it next time. So persistence will be rewarded. One of those problems with statistics is that if something has a drop rate of 5%, you'd think that on the seventh kill, you'd have a 35% chance to have gotten it. However, this isn't true. First of all, over the whole seven attempts, your chance at getting the piece would be closer to 30%, as what you're really calculating is the chance of you not getting the item seven times in a row, which is 95% to the seventh power, and you then find the other part of 100% to get your chances. But also, if you're already on the seventh attempt, your chance at getting that piece is still just 5% - as soon each of those previous attempts occurred, they ceased to be statistical probabilities and simply became fact.
Anyway, the point is, this will make those long slogs of getting no loot feel less painful. If you've killed every boss multiple times with no luck, you can expect a pretty big haul in the next few attempts.
The other big fix is that you'll be able to choose a different loot type than what spec you've come in as. Now there will be no reason for tanks to run signed up as dps, or dps running as tanks (though in the latter case, what do those people expect was going to happen? Almost all bosses need two tanks, and if you don't down bosses, how are you expecting to get anything out of the run?)
I really think the crux of what people don't like about the LFR loot system right now is those damned Fail Bags. The fix is easy though - give us something better out of them.
Two clear options, in my mind, would be Valor Points and Reputation Boosts. Right now, Shado-Pan Assault rep is still quite valuable, especially if you haven't been clearing every ToT wing each week (I don't think it would even be possible to be exalted yet if you only did LFR.) So handing out some rep-boosts, like half a boss' worth of reputation, would be a good way to feel like you'd earned something better. Valor Points are an even easier thing to implement, and given that VP is closer to being a real, power-raising currency than Gold is, it would be quite welcome.
A more radical approach would be to somehow change the way that currency worked. I proposed a while ago a system that would really help you deal with rotten stretches of loot luck - make the bosses' loot tables available from a vendor, but make it so that in order to purchase things from them, you would first need to beat the boss. This way, a person who got lucky and got their item off the boss the first go would not have any unfair advantage over someone who had killed the boss many times. These items would be expensive, and of course you would still be able to get the loot quicker if you were lucky with the drops, but it would be a great solution that would not invalidate the need to progress through a raid or dungeon. In order to have that Heroic version of Lei Shen's shield, you would still have to beat Lei Shen on heroic difficulty - this system would not change that. It just means that if the other tank won the roll, you'd still be able to get it even if your guild moved on or just never managed to repeat the feat.
This new system could work across difficulties, from Raid Finder to Heroic. You would still be limited to those bosses you beat and the loot corresponding to the difficulty on which you beat the boss.
It might even make a separate inventory of Valor gear totally unnecessary (well, we'd probably want some pre-Raid VP gear still, but that's what Daily Factions would be for.) And if you still wanted some reputation gating, you could easily put certain bosses on certain thresholds. For example, the Zandalari bosses in ToT could require Friendly rep to buy their gear, the Forgotten Depths could require Honored, the Halls of Flesh Shaping could require Revered, and the Pinnacle of Storms bosses could require Exalted (though this might be a little unfair depending on where weapons are placed. One solution to that would be to arrange things so that the end boss of a raid segment would have just weapons.)
Anyway, that's a pretty radical re-think of the whole loot system. But changing what we get out of the Fail Bags would probably make them feel a lot less fail.
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