There may not be another issue revolving around World of Warcraft than loot and its distribution.  Once you get your character to max level, the only "leveling" beyond that is through loot.  It’s no surprise, then, that so many people take it so seriously.  I’ve always been somewhat vocal on this issue in my guild and elsewhere, and for a long time I’ve wanted to discuss it openly on the blog.  Before we get started, realize that this post will be chock-full of opinion, and I both expect and hope for much disagreement in the comment section.  Everyone has their own ideas on what is most "fair" and I’m sure I’ll rub at least one or two readers the wrong way. 

The good thing, though, is this:  I love a good fight.  Let’s get to it.

In the simplest terms, loot systems are designed to make the random distribution of loot less random.  Before you even get to the question of who should get a particular piece of loot, Blizzard’s calculators in the background must determine what will drop.  Therefore, before the players can even get involved, loot is already incredibly random.  With loot systems we normally try to remove as much of the randomness as possible. 

The goal of the many loot systems is to make that non-random distribution method "fair."

What is "fair?"

This is the crux of any loot system, and therefore the number 1 stumbling block.  Before you decide what loot system you should be using, or if you should use one at all, you have to determine what is "fair," at least in terms most of the people involved can agree on.  You won’t find a loot system where everyone agrees, otherwise there wouldn’t be so many out there!

There are many different ideas on what is fair when it comes to loot distribution, here are just a few:

• People who put in more effort are more entitled than those who show up occasionally, if at all.
• Everyone who participates in a particular raid should have the same chance at any loot that drops.
• Loot should go to those raid members who will benefit themselves and the raid the most.

I believe a lot of what makes a particular philosophy fair depends on your guild and membership.  If you aim to create and foster a hardcore, bleeding edge raiding guild, chances are you value who will benefit the raid most along with those who put in more effort.  If your guild is more casually focused, you are more likely to focus on a more equal distribution of loot that skews things less to the top end raiders.  Fair is too subjective a term to label any one system superior to the others in all situations. 

The problem is that many guilds could not classify themselves as either extreme:  all hardcore or all casual.  There are many gray areas, and trying to find where your "fair" should rest is questionable.  What if most of your guild is casual, but you have a hardcore contingent that wants more progress?  What if your guild is mostly hardcore, but you can’t seem to find all hardcore members, and have to pad your roster with more casual players? 

The Long View vs. the Short View

In the long view, the regular, random /roll is a fair system.  Over 100 raids, the numbers will normalize.  Sure, there will be spikes here and there, but a random  system is fair by definition.  The problem is that players don’t get the long view, and we rarely raid anything more than a dozen times or so.  Also, in my experience, the more a particular instance is raided, or the longer it is "on farm," the more loot rules tend to loosen.  Where in the beginning everyone is often interested in drops, as time goes on, and people begin to get focused, the pool of people interested in particular items naturally shrinks.  Toward the end of our Karazhan raiding, loot could be just short of a free-for-all, with new 70s getting many drops on their first run.

In the short view, /roll can be horribly distorted.  Because this system is truly random, each /roll is a separate entity, so individual players can (and often do) get high rolls an entire run, or for a few runs.  Obviously this is potentially quite irritating for other players who feel, for one reason or another, that they have put in more effort  and therefore deserve more.  It’s sort of like clearing the spawns around a couple of resource nodes only to watch another player swoop and in and take the rewards. 

In the short view, then, people understandably feel some kind of loot system is necessary — preferably one that rewards their level of effort.  Really, with the way raiding works in WoW, there really only IS a short view.  So how do loot systems try to address the problem?

The Question of Effort

Most loot systems try to translate your level of effort into gear.  If you raid more often, you will have more DKP or whatever your system uses in order to have more leverage when it comes to gear drops.  Conversely, if you raid less often or give less "effort," you are likely resigned, at least at first, to the drops that those with more points or what not don’t have an interest in or already have.  It makes sense.  If you raid more often, you should get more and better loot.  It’s good for you, and it’s good for the raid when a reliable raider gets better gear.

The problem with this thinking, in my opinion, is that those who raid more often already get more and better gear naturally.  Your effort is already rewarded by more chances at whatever piece of loot it is that you want.  In a way, loot systems will punish those who put out less "effort" when the RNG that determines what gear should drop is unkind to regular raiders.  I think the issue is with drops that are more rare than others.  No, I’m not talking about Legendaries like the Warglaives of Azzinoth, but just pieces that drop with less frequency than others.

These excessively rare pieces are often sought by many.  Does someone who raids more often really have any more right to it than anyone else?  I’m not sure.  I’m really not.  But I do know that chances are the people who raid more are better geared than those that raid less.  In fact that’s one of the only things of which I am fairly certain.

The Fix

So what can be done?  How do you make everyone happy?  Well, like I already said, you really can’t.  Loot systems are designed, for the most part, to try to appease both groups of players in some way.  The difference is in how the systems are managed and how much they are slanted either way.  Straight, capitalist DKP systems favor the hard core more heavily.  More liberal systems like weighted rolling systems and Suicide Kings tend to favor the more casual contingent, as they reward loot a little more evenly. 

In all honesty, there are only two systems that I believe are both fair and honest.  Loot council systems, and /roll.  Loot council systems at least don’t try to hide behind the machinations of a fictitious bureaucracy – real people make real choices.  There is blame to be had, yes, but at least those systems can be honest.  If your goal is to gear up regular raiders first, my opinion is that you should quit hiding behind a mechanical "system" and come right out and assign loot as you see fit.

That’s just me, though.

The regular old /roll system has its drawbacks, honestly, but it does give everyone a fair shake.  If you were in a group that helped kill a boss that dropped loot, you have as good a chance at anyone at getting said loot.  You don’t have to hear "sorry, player A tried more, so you can’t have it."  If you win the roll, you get the loot. 

I’d also like to add that I believe in the context of 10-man raiding, you should be able to just work things out without a system.  Honestly, if most of the loot that drops is only of interest to 2 or 3 people most of the time,  can’t we all just get along?  Especially if you are in a good guild?  Don’t you know that Player A has been begging that the loot Gods let that particular epic to drop while he’s around?  I know I would.  I know I’d step aside and let him have it, no matter my level of interest.  That’s just me, though.

I suppose part of me likes to rock the boat.  Part of me enjoys the random, slot machine nature of /roll.  I’ve been as burned as anyone else, but I’ve also come out on top.

My name is PTD, and I have a WoW jealousy problem.

And it’s high time that I admit it.  If you haven’t guessed from the blog’s title or from previous posts, I don’t have a whole lot of time to play WoW.  Now, I’m not a 2 hour a week guy, but my play time usually hovers around 10 hours or so a week.  Not a bad amount, but it comes in fits and starts, an hour here, two hours there.  I also have trouble scheduling raids with my guild, as their times just plain don’t mesh with mine.

I can’t blame them, though.  My times kind of suck.

Anyhow, what happens is I spend time wishing I had the time to raid.  I sit around and wish I could run back to back to back heroics, too.  But it just doesn’t happen.  It’s nobody’s fault, I just happen to have a family and, well…

Family >>>>>WoW

It’s a pretty simple equation.

Still, I can’t help but be a little jealous sometimes.  You see, I like to think of myself as a fairly SKILLED player with an absence of TIME.  I routinely beat out those better geared than I on the lovely little meters.  (And yes, Matticus, I know what you think about meters..)  I’m also very, VERY good at staying mobile when healing (I am a Tree, after all, a Tree that stands around too much is not a very good one in my estimation!) and I tend to pick up things very quickly. 

Honestly, there’s no way through the blog I could really illustrate my skill, but the most I can say is that I think I’m pretty good. 

So when I see people far better geared than I, I sometimes get jealous.  You see I may have grouped with you, and outhealed you, yet I don’t have all the shinies you do.  That just gets me thinking:  How much better could I be if I DID have another 400 spellpower to play around with?

There’s the jealousy.  I wish I had more time to farm heroics, but I don’t.  I wish that I could raid 3 nights a week, but I can’t.  And when I see other people that can, I sometimes get irrationally jealous.

I know it’s irrational, but that doesn’t stop it from happening.  Sometimes I get overly critical of other trees, poring over meters and thinking "this guy doesn’t use his tools!  He never even uses Nature’s Swiftness!"  Then I feel kind of bad about it, and I really must stop.  Hell, maybe that player would be jealous of my family, or my job, who knows.  I just need to knock it off.  So I ask myself, what’s the real problem?

Success in WoW is Nearly All About Time

And I won’t kid you, that bugs me.  This whole hardcore versus casual argument, for instance.  It’s rarely about real, measurable skill — chances are one guy just has a lot more playtime than the other.  After all, what constitutes leveling past the cap?  Gear!  How do you get the best gear?  Some kind of grinding!  Be it heroics, raids, farming, PvP, what have you.  The way you get better gear is spending a lot of time grinding for it in one way or another.

And time, my friends, is something I flat don’t have.

Think about this for a second.  You’re a raid leader, and you get two apps for one spot.  Both are tree druids, and just for the sake of argument, let’s say their gear is roughly equal.

Tree #1:  Able to raid up to 4 times a week, a total of 16 hours.  Can guarantee at least 3 nights per week.  Performed well, though not exceptionally, in a trial heroic run.

Tree #2:  Can only raid once per week, period.  Can’t guarantee more than that.  Performed well beyond expectations in a trial heroic run, same group, same instance.

Who gets the spot?  Tree #1, of course.  No questions asked.

In fact, in today’s WoW, I doubt it’s even a competition.  Unless there are some sort of mitigating factors, like Tree #1 being a know asshat, Tree #2 is out of luck.  He hopes to find a guild or some kind of outlet that will allow him to raid, but the prospects are dubious.

I am that Tree.  And honestly I can’t outright complain, that’s just the way things are.  WoW is a game that’s built as one giant time sink, in the end the guys that have more time to dump into it will come out on top.

This mentality spills over not just from basic game systems but to guild structures.  Besides, there are few good ways to accurately measure WoW skill, if there are any at all. 

So never mind me, I’ll just head back to the corner and snark about your play time.  Gripe to myself about how I wish I could run 4 heroics right in a row.  I’ll just envy your pull of 25 Heroic badges from one solitary play session, a number that takes me 2 weeks sometimes.

Oh well, I have beautiful kids. 

They said it couldn’t be done, but they were wrong.  PTD now has TWO max level toons.  If you recall, when Wrath hit I was busy leveling a Warrior who was in his early 60s.  At release, I played my druid as a Boomkin up to level 71, and I hated it.

HATED it.

Too scripted, too much of the same thing over and over.  Moonfire, Entangling Roots, Insect Swarm, Wrath, Starfire.  Rinse and repeat.  Ad infinitum.  Bleh.

But, that’s neither here nor there.  The boomkin spec soured me on the Druid for a bit, and I went back to my low 60s warrior, and leveled him all the way to 77.  Then I heard in guild that we were kind of hurting for healers, so back to the Druid I went, spec’d to Feral IMMEDIATELY and powered my way to 80, enjoying the whole ride.  I went back to Resto immediately, busted out my leaves, and started the heroic grind.  That’s when I remembered something I had all but forgotten –

Soloing as a Tree SUCKS

It may very well be the least fun you can have in WoW, and I mean that in all seriousness.  I’ve already established that I did not like the Boomkin spec.  Well, soloing as a Resto Druid is kind of like that, only without the big damage numbers and extra tricks.  It takes horrendously long to kill anything, and it is incredibly boring.  I can only hit my "2" key (Wrath) 1.5 million times before I tire of it. 

I can hear the counterpoints already.

"Yeah, but it sure is better than it USED to be, at least you have decent spellpower!"

Well, just because it’s BETTER doesn’t mean it’s good.  It still consists of crap repetition with crap damage.  Just because the damage is slightly less crappy doesn’t change much. 

"Well, I can take any mob one on one.  I literally cannot die."

To an extent, sure.  The good thing about soloing as a resto druid that’s nice is my ability to keep myself alive.  Basically forever.  Still, I’d trade survivability for some decent DPS in a heartbeat.

"Why do you need to solo anyway?  You can group at will!"

Sure I can, but that’s mostly based on instance runs.  I still need to be able to quest for cash, and I especially want to finish off the Northrend questing achievements.  I’ve cleared Borean, the Fjord, Dragonblight and Grizzly Hills thus far.  It’s hard to find a group for general questing, as it’s faster for nearly any class to quest alone.

Now, I don’t know how a lot of other solo centric class/spec combinations solo, but I know many of them got some new tricks.  Prot Warriors now have decent damage output AND can take many, many mobs on at a time.  Holy priests can gather a few mobs, shield, and Holy Nova them all to hell.  Resto Shammys still get Chain Lightning to throw around willy nilly.  Holy Pallys…well…I have a feeling they are in the same boat as Resto Druids.

So, enough about the Tree, let’s talk Warriors.

Tankin’ Ain’t Easy

I hit 80 with the Warrior 2 days ago while questing in Storm Peaks (much like his Druid cousin.)  Leveling him was both as easy and as enjoyable as leveling the Druid, perhaps even more so.  The quest design in Wrath is excellent, and it was just as enjoyable the second time around as it was the first. 

Anyhow, with the Warrior things are a little different.  My Druid had good BC end-game gear, and started out with a little advantage.  Heck, I still haven’t replaced a couple of my BC epics, (my belt and bracers) but I’m sure I soon will.  The Warrior, on the other hand, was a fresh 70 for the Wrath content.  So while a lot of you are just picking the most expensive quest reward to sell, I’ve had to equip most of that stuff you’ve thrown out. 

I also leveled him as a Blacksmith, which I believe turned out to be a good choice.  I’ve crafted a lot of good gear for myself as I leveled, and by 80 I had the whole Tempered Saronite tanking set, along with the Daunting Legplates and Daunting Handguards.  Heck, my whole tanking set, including my shield and weapon, came via crafting.

So I had a good but not great tanking set.  It put me around 19k unbuffed HPs, 20k armor, and 513 defense, and I respec’d right away to 15/5/51.  This is the in vogue "deep wounds" tanking build.  Supposedly it has all you need from the Prot tree for mitigation and such along with good DPS output. 

I wouldn’t know though, I just yank this kind of stuff of forums, I really do.

Thus far I have tanked UK, the Nexus, Azjol-Nerub, Drak’Tharon keep and HOL all on regular.  As of last night, I’ve also tanked UK in heroic mode.

Tanking is hard.  I don’t know if you know.  Sure, healing and DPS have their challenges, but in my estimation, tanking is the hardest job there is.  As a tank you have many expectation:

• Lead the run
• Mark targets
• Manage CC
• Pull
• Explain Boss fights
• Manage loot rules

And that’s before actually getting into the actual killing.  I won’t kid around, it’s tough to manage.  It’s hard to get the attention of 4 mobs and keep it.  It’s hard to hold aggro on four different mobs while bloodthirsty, frothing at the mouth, big number hunting DPS are chomping at the bit to let it all out to try and get the top spot in the damage meters.   

In the interest of comparison, here are the other people’s jobs:

DPS

• Kill stuff in the right order
• CC, maybe
• Accept everyone’s criticism for your poor DPS and/or poor aggro management

Healer

• Keep everyone alive
• Cure poison/decurse/etc.
• Accept everyone’s criticism of your lackluster healing abilities, and accept blame for any and all wipes

Now, you all know a healer is still my main.  You should also know that my main WAS a Hunter back before BC hit.  I’m not demeaning the role or difficulty of playing a healer or playing a DPS class.

I’m just telling you, that from my perspective, tanking is harder than both of those jobs.

And you know what?  I’m enjoying the hell out of it.  I liked that we succeeded in heroic UK the other night (and I’m happy that I got a decent tanking sword as well as a tanking ring).  I also enjoyed being front and center and heavily responsible for the group’s success.

I’ll be tanking more heroics, you can bet your Abyss Crystal on it.  To close, here is the Listos version of the post you have just read:  PTD has an 80 Resto Druid and an 80 Prot Warrior, soling as a tree sucks, and tanking is hard.  PTD out.

They said it couldn’t be done, but I did it.  I got my druid to level 80 on New Year’s Eve.  Pretty appropriate, eh?  I dinged while doing the Sons of Hodir questline in Storm Peaks, specifically when turning in the quest that opened up Nifflehelm as a new town with dailies and such. 

I see rep grinding in my future.

Anyhow, at that point it was time for me to log, but the next night I went ahead with the respec to Resto.  I pulled out all my old healing gear, along with one or two quest rewards I had picked up, and a couple of crafted pieces.  It put me around 1250 healing or so in Tree form.  It’s funny how at one time that was a REALLY good number, and now it was iffy for most heroics.

Anyhow, I wanted to hit the ground running, and put out a call in guild chat for a heroic run, preferably an "easy" one, like UK or Nexus.  A couple of people wanted to do Heroic VH, and I said what the heck.  I feel fairly confident in my skill, and figured it to make up for any real gear deficiencies. 

So there I was, my first heroic Wrath instance, Violet Hold.  The first boss we got?  The stinking Voidwalker.

Ouch babe, very ouch.

He is one tough cookie.  As the fight wears on, it just gets tougher and tougher.  Though I have the use of Wild Growth for group healing, it can’t keep up with the kind of damage that guy puts out once he has a few of his adds spawned.  We managed to kill him on the first try, but I died, the only rezzer.  We reset and tried again, and the same thing happened.  On the third try, I basically ignored everyone else about 3/4s of the way through the fight to concentrate on keeping myself alive. 

That worked.  Only the tank and myself survived, but we had time to rez up and continue. 

The second boss was the Consortium dude you have to kite around the room.  Our tank had experience with that, so we plowed through him on the first try.  The last boss was also fairly easy, and we got it done.

All in all, I’m glad I had a tough job for my first heroic, it knocked the old rust off the leaves a bit.

This was also my first time really playing with some of the Druid’s new tools.  Wild Growth is helpful, but not overpowered or anything like that.  I found I was using a similar healing rotation from before 3.02.  The only real difference is I was keeping Regrowth up more often due to the nifty glyph.  I also found that my mana regen isn’t what it used to be, but I can keep up fairly easily with an occasional Innervate.

There is one spell, though, that is essentially useless in my early estimation.  Nourish.  I threw it in a few rotations to see what it could do.  it’s basically a fast, low return heal.  I get better numbers from Regrowth, and it has the added benefit of a lot of crits, the glyphed bonus, and the HOT portion.  Right now I don’t see a real use for Nourish.  If I need an emergency, fast heal, I’m using Swiftmend or NS+HT.  Nourish just doesn’t do enough healing to be effective, IMO.

Still, healing with a druid is just as fun, and I can see myself enjoying many more heroic runs and doing well on the healing meters in raid situations as well.

Since then I’ve also healed Heroic Nexus, which was a fairly smooth run minus a wipe on one of the four pulls in the flower area.  I also got a nice neckpiece off of Anomalus.  I also did a run of Heroic Azjol Nerub last night.  I had heard that this one was VERY tough, but I joined up with a very powerful PUG that was desperate for a healer.  The four DPSers (the tank included) averaged 2200, 2100, 1900 and 1700 DPS.  We blew a  frigging hole in that place.  From what those guys told me, having a shammy along made it easy.  The poison cleansing totem is the bee’s knees on the first two bosses.

So there you have it.  I have my first 11 badges, I’ve now crafted my first two epic LW pieces, the Earthgiving Boots and Earthgiving Legguards, and I’m sitting at around 1450 healing, and rising fast.  I should be in the 1600 range fairly quickly, as I have my eye on a bunch of easy upgrades.  Overall, I’m having a great time in game, and I’m happy to be back where I belong, max level and preparing to raid.  Thanks for reading!