Changes & Experiments to Raid Rewards in Dragonflight Season 1

[saixilein]

I was in this kind of mindset before. But seeing your friends leave because they feel their achievement is downgraded by the fact anybody can just pay for it is actually impacting. And I'm pretty sure it prevents people from joining the game when people tell them the game is P2W.

But if you say so the game was always pay2win. Just spent your money/gold on people who boosting. Nothing changed, just you can buy gold now legally and more people pay for boosts.

[Scrysis]

In all honesty. . . what cesspool are you guys all raiding in? Because I really want to avoid it.

A few points:

1) We had over a decade of Need/Greed/Disenchant, and now suddenly people are going apeshit about the idea of going back to it? It's really not that bad, guys, especially since they implemented restricted categories so that you can only roll on things that you can use. Unless your buddy is playing the same armor class, weapons, and role as you, there is a fair chance that if you win something, you still won't be able to funnel it to them. Same thing for PUGs.

Not every person is a douchebag. Even back in the day when there were no restrictions on Group Loot, people used to pug raids all the time, and the occurrences of someone magically ninja-looting everything was rare, even with Master Loot. This is Group Loot. If some hunter rolls on a piece of mail gear to give to another buddy hunter, do you really thing that makes a huge statistical difference between all of the mail wearers in the raid? If you're the only mail wearer, sure, it might be annoying, but if there are like eight other people, do you really think it would have made a difference?

2) Crafting. This is going to make it WAY easier to get enchants. PERIOD. Sure, some disenchanters might be assholes, but on the whole, it's going to allow for a lot more disenchant materials to float around in the economy. If you're an enchanter hoping to make bank on materials, you'll have to look towards recipes instead, which is how it should be. It should also make it easier for enchanters to level. That's something that has been an issue since personal loot took over.

3) Increased sources of gear. Raids aren't the only game in town any more. We have M+, which you can spam (I mean, seriously, this is huge when it comes to the speed of gearing.). You have the Vault (bitch about it all you want, but it's amazing to have a selection of higher ilevel items to pick from at the beginning of each week). We have crafting. And we have the creation catalyst making a return. Between those things, you'll not only be able to target weak areas, but you'll still be able to get your set bonus, which is where a lot of extra power is from. With those sources of gear, you're actually going to be gearing FASTER than if they didn't exist and you had personal loot.

4) Shaping behavior. This is probably the primary reason they're moving to forced group loot. They don't want excessive amounts of class stacking. Sure, they don't like the deviant behavior of world first guilds doing 5000 split runs, but who cares since that's only a hundred players out of millions. No, this is something that is much more important and it's class stacking. This idea is reinforced by the devs mentioning that they're including items that have class restrictions on the loot tables of raid bosses. They WANT groups to take a diverse set of players, and not just stack boomkin, warlocks, or warriors, or whatever is flavor of the month at the time. For most people, this is a good thing. This is incentive for raid leaders to not bench you for not playing whatever class is the popular one at the time. Because if they do, they're going to set back their progression due to having a lower average item level in the raid. With personal loot, raid leaders are incentivized to stack whatever class they think is doing the highest amount of dps because the raid will automatically drop more of that loot type since it is matched to the composition of the raid. Not any more. Are you an amazing player who just happens to like playing feral druid? Great! Because with group loot, the raid leader is going to be more incentivized to take you instead of pressuring you to reroll warrior which does 0.0005% more damage than your particular class is doing.


tl;dr -- There are legit reasons for going back to group loot. This isn't going to be the original ffa group loot; this is going to be the restricted group loot. We had it before and the world didn't end. And so the world won't end now.

[dragonflight10]

Not a fan. Plate boots will drop, 10 people will roll need, but only 2 of them actually need it. The rest are just guildmates who are going to trade the item to their friend. So it's a 1 in 9 chance instead of a 50/50

What kind of raid that has 11 plate users xD ? very uncommon

[Ealyssa]

Not a fan. Plate boots will drop, 10 people will roll need, but only 2 of them actually need it. The rest are just guildmates who are going to trade the item to their friend. So it's a 1 in 9 chance instead of a 50/50

Then don't join that fabled "half guild pug raid with 10 plate classes"...

- - - Updated - - -

Now there are two layers of RNG - hoping the items I need drop, and then hoping I can win a roll against X number of other people

How is that different from the current "Hope the item drops for someone" and "hope they can/will share it" ???

And before you say "i cAn DrOp iT mYsElf", that's just the same has winning the roll in DF...

[Echo of Soul]

Eh, so we won't even be able to choose for ourselves if we want personal loot? Guess I have to tell my raid team that I'll be sitting out at the start of DF.

Can Blizzard PLEASE stop listening to the top 1% of players and stop designing the game around them??

[phattsao]

Comes as a surprise that they spent this much time and effort trying to "fix" something that wasn't broken.

I love personal loot. I was literally having a conversation with some people in a raid about how much better life is with it. And now they've decided to roll back to a worse system for reasons unknown.

Were hardcore raiders bitching about this or something? Seems like adding the OPTION to have group loot would have been a lot cooler than forcing it upon everyone.

This will lead to loot drama, smaller groups with only 1 of each class, etc.

And like most people, I think the BOE change is fine. The ilevel changes are fine I guess. But getting rid of personal loot doesn't make a lot of sense to me.

[Puri]

Returning group loot is fantastic news for our guild.

Forcing group loot on PUGs and randoms filling up our raid is just an atrocity, personal loot was drama free loot distribution there. Why not just allow the option to switch to personal loot?

[Shakzor]

Eh, so we won't even be able to choose for ourselves if we want personal loot? Guess I have to tell my raid team that I'll be sitting out at the start of DF.

Can Blizzard PLEASE stop listening to the top 1% of players and stop designing the game around them??

It is not the top 1% crying for this tho. It's usually the "EVERYTHING WAS BETTER IN EARLIER XPACS!" people that scream that stuff for multiple expansions until they finally give in.
Any studio making their game for the top 1%, is guaranteed to be dead very quick (see any of the countless "esports" titles that tried so hard to be esports at any cost)
Didn't they even announce that they'd tune the raids a lot better, regardless of how boring that might make the world first race? That's quite the opposite of "for the top 1%"

[Cyranis]

If personal loot is gone from raiding, so I am. As long as that stands, my friends and I will never raid again.

[Relapses]

The fact that this discussion has almost immediately skewed towards raiders vs non-raiders and which "voice" Blizzard listens to is already getting pretty exhausting. The ability to gear your raid the way your team sees fit should not be as controversial as it apparently is. I don't think this system -- ML with extra steps -- is the best way forward but it also isn't the End Days. (It certainly does no favors for people who prefer to PuG.) This system pretty much says to players: "If you don't like this, join a guild." This is a mixed message under the best of conditions and taking away PL for this is going to alienate a lot of players.

Personally, I think the loot paradigm from Legion was likely the least convoluted and the option to have PL is still there.

[LazarusLong]

I don't quite get the wording. Is this for a raid testing, or for a live game?

[antelope591]

PL sucked. Nothing felt worse than killing a full raid of bosses and not even having a chance at an item while someone else got 4-5 things out of pure RNG. That being said this system will be chaos for pugs. Not sure what Blizz is trying to achieve with that one haha

[Relapses]

I avoid guilds. My past guilds have been filled with people I'd rather not associate with at all and I doubt it's going to be any different in any other guilds.

Understandable. I haven't had a guild since Legion for largely the same reasons. I've been an M+ Andy for the the last two expansions. This may actually have me interested in raiding again because it seems like the M+ gearing alternative may be becoming more arduous as a result of these changes.

- - - Updated - - -

PL sucked. Nothing felt worse than killing a full raid of bosses and not even having a chance at an item while someone else got 4-5 things out of pure RNG. That being said this system will be chaos for pugs. Not sure what Blizz is trying to achieve with that one haha

They're trying to appease everybody with a system which ultimately pleases nobody. The ol Blizzard-aroo.

[Celement]

Understandable. I haven't had a guild since Legion for largely the same reasons. I've been an M+ Andy for the the last two expansions. This may actually have me interested in raiding again because it seems like the M+ gearing alternative may be becoming more arduous as a result of these changes.

- - - Updated - - -



They're trying to appease everybody with a system which ultimately pleases nobody. The ol Blizzard-aroo.

That overlooks the fact that pugs prefer to run in groups with reserves that have skilled leadership over personal loot.

They complain when people can do that but their actions rarely line up with their complaints. Most players will gladly surrender loot if it means they don't have to lead.

[Echo of Soul]

More BoEs means the whales are more likely to buy WoW tokens to purchase them.

Bingo! You win

[panda040]

i like these changes

[Ryzek]

I have no issue with these changes. PL was shit due to trade restrictions but this is fine since we are a stable raid group.

[Chilela]

If I'm forced to pick between forced Personal Loot and forced Group Loot, I feel like that on a personal level, forced group loot is the lesser of the two evils, outside of LFR, where Personal makes more sense due to the more "pick-up" nature of the environment. There should certainly be an option to choose between the two, as there was some xpacs ago.

[SinR]

More BoEs means the whales are more likely to buy WoW tokens to purchase them.

Its possible there's actually less as people can't just go in and farm trash. They're only going to drop off mobs that are possibly locked after a boss or two, maybe in the trash on the way to the wing bosses.

[cuafpr]

Personal loot was the best thing ever and I'm not looking forward to this change esp need/greed rolls. I hope they have more staff/a better process for complaints.