I know a lot of different guilds run tons of loot distribution styles. In our guild it's mostly towards fairness and open rolling with a few caveats. Essentially, it's MS first, with people expected to know what's a better item for them. An example would be the haste/str trinket from Will of Emp encounter dropped: The Fury warrior wants it, but doesn't roll because it is way better for the Ret. Next week it drops, if the Warrior hasn't found an upgrade comparable he will get it, otherwise it would go to the DK for Off.
We are a small (mostly) stable guild that has been going for 2 expansions and people are good about letting others have a better upgrade. I guess you could call it loot council, but only so much so that it involves only the people who are even able to use it. We occasionally will need the Hybrid casters to switch to heal, have our Blood Tank go dps, or our Warrior go prot spec, but only as last resort because some one can't make it.
I say all this to get what people think is fair, or perhaps how you guys are dealing with blood spirits / crafted items and Tier. Now that people are starting to get a lot of the same gear out, we've gotten to about 10 blood spirits. We are a bit behind in progression, but we're clearing MsV 6/6 in 1 night, spending 2 nights on HoF now. Tier isn't a huge issue yet, but it will be soon as we progress.
Essentially, I have it figured to a 3 roll system. If you want Off Spec gear, you shouldn't be getting first dibs on Crafted gear. If you want Crafted gear, I'm not going to let you roll on a tier "side-grade". I'd rather you wait your turn since you've already gotten a 496. If you don't want OS and you don't want Crafted, you should get the 1st chance at tier, assuming its your token. Does this make sense? I know it seems a bit structured for us since we usually just do rolls, but I'm trying to be efficient with our gear. We have a nice make-up in our guild with little overlap on gear.
Plate- Blood DK, Fury Warrior, Holydin
Mail- Enh Sham, Resto Sham
Leather- BrM Monk, Boomkin, Resto druid
Cloth- 2 Locks (1 favors demo, 1 favors aff), Shadow Priest
Tokens loot like this-
Conq- Pally, Priest, Lock x 2
Prot- Monk, Sham x 2, Warr
Vanq- Death Knight, Druid x 2
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1st thing I'm asking the guildees is, is your 4 set awesome or just kinda nice. I'm not 100% familiar with which sets are getting good bonuses so I will rely on people to figure out ahead of time, if off tier will give a better stat allocation than a bonus would. Assuming they want tier over a crafted item, it would go like this.
Pass on Crafted > Gets 1st priority on Tier.
Wants Crafted > Waits til other get their Tier.
This also brings up the problem of off-spec. Since the only way we can get Blood Spirits is De'ing stuff and if people want OS, we won't get those mats. So it gets a little clunkier.
Wants OS > Wants Crafted (waits for others) > Tier (when?)
Wants OS > Doesn't want Crafted > Tier (when?)
Maybe I'm over-thinking it a bit, but maybe someone else could give me their insight on how they're doing it.
Thanks!