Having played the game for quite a long time now (I've begun to realize that there are now players who think of Wrath of the Lich King as that mythic, prehistoric time before they or anyone they play with began,) it's easy to forget some of the things that really surprised me about the game. One of them was randomized loot.
I never played Diablo before WoW. Instead, most of my RPG experience was in JRPGs like Final Fantasy, and one of my all-time-favorites, Super Mario RPG (which, made by Squaresoft, was really a simple Final Fantasy game with Mario characters.) Gear in those games was typically less important than character level, but it was a factor. However, gear was something that would come to you at fixed points in the course of a fairly linear story. Many pieces were fairly obvious - Bowser's best weapon in Mario RPG was bought off a vendor. Sometimes there were secret, powerful weapons, but typically you'd have to do a side-quest to get them. If I recall correctly, Magus' best weapon in Chrono-Trigger was just in a chest in one of the dungeons.
In WoW, you kill bosses in dungeons, and they have a set list of loot, but they will only drop a certain number of those items. Before Mists, this was how all boss loot worked. You kill a boss, and if you're in a five-person dungeon, one item drops (or two if it's the final boss.) If you're in a 10-man raid, you'll get two items, and perhaps get some tier tokens in addition to the items.
It feels great to get your loot. When you kill that massive abomination and then you get a kick-ass shield that looks like a flaming skull, it's a great feeling.
The problem, however, is that more often than not, you don't get that shield. The flip side to the joy of seeing your piece drop is the frustration of not seeing it drop.
And it's not even symmetrical. The first time that shield drops, you get excited. The other tank's a Druid, so he's not going to take it, and that means that the shield is for you and you alone. But next week, you down Patchwerk again, and that shield drops. Your group's Arms Warrior shrugs and says, "well, ok, I guess I can take it for my Prot set." But Patchwerk heard your wishes for that shield two weeks ago and feels he just hasn't given that thing up enough. Meanwhile, the three Mages in the raid all really, really want that cloak to drop, but it just won't drop because that stupid shield is dropping instead. At least you guys brought an enchanter who can turn those excess shields into shards for enchants.
Though not with personal loot.
Personal loot rolls were introduced in Mists, and don't get me wrong: Personal Loot has done wonders to reduce the amount of drama in groups of strangers. LFR during Dragon Soul was nightmarish when it came to loot distribution. There were the jerk-needers ("I need the gold I'd get from vendoring it,") or the guild-cartels ("All our Mages are going to need on that staff so that we can give it to the one among us who actually wants it") and hostage-takers ("I needed on that tier shoulder token whose corresponding piece I already have so I can trade it for something I actually want.") But Personal Loot has created its own problems as well.
Nowadays, there are more random numbers being thrown around. First, we find out whether we get a piece of loot from the boss for making the kill. Usually that's a no, but if it's a yes, then we get a randomly-selected piece of loot that could theoretically be useful to us, regardless of whether we actually want it (such as giving a Prot Paladin the dodge/parry helmet rather than the haste/mastery one) and regardless of whether we have that piece already. (I have gotten four of the tier 16 pants off the celestials on my Tankadin, and still have my Lightning Emperor's Handguards.) It actually makes us hope that a boss only has one thing we want from it, for fear of getting the wrong piece.
But then there's bonus rolls, and this is where I start to get worried. Bonus Rolls give us more interaction with the personal loot system by giving us a choice. We work hard to get them, gathering 50 (though it was 90 at the beginning of the expansion) Lesser Charms to get a maximum of three bonus roll coins per week. We are then presented with a choice: do we spend our hard-earned Warforged Seal or equivalent in the hopes of getting a piece of gear? The problem is that what this does is simply repeats the process again. Again we roll to see if we get anything at all (and again that's usually a no,) and again, if it does roll favorably for us, we then get another roll to see which piece we get.
Another anecdote: Today I ran my Monk through Gates of Retribution (I go back and forth on whether he's a Windwalker or a Brewmaster, but I think it boils down to Windwalker in LFR and soloing and Brewmaster otherwise.) For a long time he's been in mostly Timeless Isle pieces. So I get in on the Dark Shaman, and I'm happy to see that the tanks are good and the raid actually kills the adds, so we wind up one-shotting both the Dark Shaman and Nazgrim. I get the cloak off Dark Shaman and use one of my Seals to see if I can get a trinket or one of the many other pieces I could use. But no: I get the exact same cloak. On Nazgrim, I get a pair of shoulders. Cool, I think. Now let's see if I can get my 2-piece bonus... oh, it's those damn shoulders again.
The problem is that even when you see the wheel stop on the little loot-bag, you're still highly likely to discover that you didn't get anything useful.
So what do we do about this?
In the past, this has been the purpose of Valor Points and its forebears. You get a bad luck streak, that's too bad, but at least you can pick up a nice piece of gear at the vendor.
But since 5.4, Valor Points have shifted from being a fantastic anti-bad-luck mechanic to being a pure, boring grind. With no new valor gear equivalent to the SoO gear, the only viable use of the points is to upgrade their gear, which they first must be lucky enough to see drop.
Personally, I advocate a robust selection of valor gear. Yes, maybe the late tiers of Wrath, where you purchased your entire tier set for Emblems, was a little excessive, but on a personal and subjective level, I found the fully-predictable Emblem grind to be a great supplement to WoW's traditional random loot drops.
But if you're worried that people will just grind easy, old content to get that gear, instead of challenging themselves, you can simply make use of the already-implemented tiered currency system. If Valor was only awarded by beating bosses in the current raid, you'd still have plenty of people motivated to raid that content, but they would be less likely to tear out their hair after Thok refused to drop that stupid freaking trinket again.
The use of bonus rolls is, I think, somewhat problematic, but has room for improvement. Ultimately, while they can be used in content that does not use personalized loot, I saw them more as a mechanic to replace the usual need or greed decision that a player makes when receiving an item. Perhaps it's a psychological trick to make us feel like we have more control over our rewards, but I think that, with some tweaking, it could feel more like a real bad-luck protection mechanic instead of just giving us another way to feel unlucky.
We now have loot lists in the dungeon journal. The loot table of a boss is now open knowledge, and not something you have to hunt down on WoW Head or use AtlasLoot to look up. Rather than simply subjecting us to the same frustrating RNG fest as the first roll - one roll to determine whether you got anything and one to determine which piece you get, there could be a more predictable system.
Let's say you're a Frost DK and you really, really want that axe off of Garrosh. You have taken the Warchief down twenty times, and you just can't get it. Here's what you'd do under this hypothetical system:
You go into the dungeon journal and selected Xalatoh, Desecrated Image of Gorehowl and check off a little box there. The next time you take down Garrosh, you use one of your Warforged Seals to bonus-roll for it.
The first change is that this bonus roll would only ever give you Xalatoh. Not anything else from the loot table - just the axe - so you know you are shooting for a specific goal.
You spend your coin, and... nope, you didn't get it. You let out a wild scream of unholy fury.
But next to your bonus roll window, a little circle fills up. It's now a quarter full.
What this means is that the next time you roll for this item, you get an additional 25% chance to get it. The next week, you down Garrosh, and you get that Stamina/Crit trinket that is maybe good for Warrior Tanks? But not for your DK. No, you still want that Xalatoh, so you spend another Warforged Seal.
Blast! Again, no luck. But oh, check it out, that circle is now a full 50% full.
You return to the Siege of Orgrimmar. You're a good little Death Knight, and you immediately switch targets when people get mind controlled and you kill all the adds from his Empowered Whirlwind. Now, with 50% on top of your innate chance of looting the axe, you spend another Seal, and this time it finally drops! Whoohoo! But you're also secure in the knowledge that if it hadn't dropped, you'd have a 75+whatever innate chance% next week, and the week after that, it would have been a guaranteed drop.
There's still a thrill of seeing the loot drop, and it still requires you to keep coming back to that boss. This eliminates the two biggest critiques of the pure currency model (where people could simply do one wing of ToT to unlock all the SPA gear and then run dungeons to get a near-set of 522 gear.)
Personally, I still think that VP gear should remain an option (some people, ahem, like to run content in smaller groups,) but I think that this proposal could make Bonus Rolls a serious anti-frustration feature, rather than adding to the problem by cruelly mocking my need to get the damned tier gloves off those damned Celestials.
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