Gear is a barrier to content. If we all had the best gear in the game things would be a lot easier. Gear has so many functions it'd be hard to enumerate all of them. To include some of them:
- Making content you've already beaten easier.
- To help you get over hurdles you're having trouble with
- Prestige, it looks nice when you have gear.
- Game Lore. It just makes sense to wear gear and have it magically enchanted for things.
- Lets the game designers pace content
- Another facet of player strength to optimize, which leads to a more in-depth game.
Gear competition then becomes very prevalent because it directly increases your player power. This makes it so that everyone wants some of the same stuff. I'm going to ignore secondary stats because it's not entirely relevant in my opinion to the discussion on designing gear and how it drops w.r.t. class design.
Gear competition is a good thing. It gives you a reason to work harder for the gear and in a lot of cases work within a system of loot distribution set up by your guild. Most places use the term DKP though the initialism is fairly out-dated since, to my knowledge, it's from the old Everquest days where dragons where some of the most important things you were killing, and getting points for. That aside your raid still has to determine who gets the gear, and from a raid perspective there are a couple things that are really important to us.
First we want as little gear as possible to go to waste. Seeing something drop and get disenchanted when there are legitimate upgrades that could have dropped is almost soul crushing. To give an example ultraxion right now drops the plate healing belt almost every week we step into DS. We have had something like 2 or 3 windward heart's since the launch of DS, only one of which was heroic. Every time we see that belt we get a little frustrated, and it was worse when we were progressing through but now it's still a bit of an issue.
This issue comes down to how many people want a given piece of gear. There's been acknowledgements of the issue facing plate healing gear already and there's no elegant or good solution for it right now. Some have suggested making holy paladins wear mail or giving their talent tree a conversion factor to make ret or prot gear ideal for them. Both solutions are clunky and pose more problems than they solve. This is a specific case of a much milder problem that faces raids that I really wanted to examine.
I have a hard time imagining more than 2 holy paladins in a 25m raid. I'm sure it happens but if you're trying to progress you're really missing something with more than 2, lets assume you have 1 backup holy paladin on the bench as well. That means over the entire tier of content you want the item to drop only 3 times. Compare this to something like spirit rings. There are 7 specs in the game that desire spirit rings, 2 of which are dps, the other 5 (6 with monks) are healers. 25m raids usually have about 5-7 healers depending on the encounter, and on the raid team are likely to have 8+ healers. Throw in an elemental shaman or two and a boomkin or two and you have a huge demand for spirit rings, hell int rings in general are extremely high in demand. I'm exaggerating a bit in the example by comparing a 1-spec item to one of the largest samples of gear in raids, int gear.
So lets examine some more gear to see what we expect an average piece of gear to have in terms of competition, weapons are fairly common so I'll start with those. They're also some of the most saught after items in the game beside trinkets. As a side-note I'm going to consider things like SMF/TG as two different specs and look instead at how many of a given role we're going to see since 2h vs 1h str weapons is mostly the same when it comes to what class you're bringing. I'm also going to start considering MoP since it makes it a bit easier on me.
2h Strength weapons: Arms, Fury, Frost, Unholy, Ret, Blood. 6 Specs.
1h Strength weapons (including tank weapons): Prot, Prot, SMF, Frost, (not sure how desirable this will be for blood). 4 specs.
2h Agi weapons: Feral, Guardian, Brewmaster, Windwalker 4 specs
1h slow agi weapons: Enhance, Windwalker 2 specs
1h fast agi weapons: Rogues (technically 3 specs)
Int weapons: I'll cover this later since it's a big can of worms.
Huge spread on how many classes want the weapons so lets break it down some more. You're going to have 2 tanks in your raid at almost all times. Occasionally one will switch to a dps spec on a fight that only requires one tank but this is somewhat rare (1 encounter in DS, 1-2 in FL depending on how you did baleroc). So you're going to need 2 total of a 2h str and a 1h str. These may or may not be shared among the dps depending on secondary stats but I suspect that we're going to see less haste/crit/dodge/parry on weapons and more hit/exp/mastery/procs in the future.
You're going to use a mix of str and agi melee and mostly int ranged with a hunter or two (maybe three if they can all stay online at the same time). A health mix of thse catagories is helpful to raid comp. Lets examine a 10m raid and a 25m raid beside each other to check out how they stack up with themselves and against each other.
10m uses: 2 tanks, 2 healers, 3 melee, 3 ranged. 10m comp varies wildly and can't support a terribly large raiding roster because you change such a large portion of the comp with each change, it's hard to support all the buffs etc.
25m uses: 2 tanks, 6 healers (on average, fights change this number which is something I'll discuss later), this leaves 17 dps slots for a mix of melee and ranged so we'll assume that we err on the side of ranged with 8 melee and 9 ranged (I feel this is pretty typical of my raid though I don't have any control of who comes into raid or whatnot and I don't actively monitor it).
So we can assume that in a 25m raid there are roughly 4 str plate dps, 4 agi melee, lets say 2 agi ranged and 7 int ranged. Assuming that the raiding roster supports more than just a 25m raiding team lets up the numbers to say +1 for each category. This puts us with a raiding team of maybe 30ish people, 5 plate dps, another 5-8 agi dps (mix of melee and ranged thanks to hunters), and 8-9 int casters. Looking at weapons that means we will need roughly:
4 2h str weapons (1 tank, 3 dps)
5 1h str weapons (1 tank, 2 dps)
Some combination of int weapons that the various classes can use, at least 7 of which can't have spirit, and another 8 that may or may not have spirit, these may come in the form of mh+oh or staves but that's another layer of complexity I don't want to deal with right now, total of 15 items (yes, half the raid roster probably uses int)
3 2h agi weapons
2 fast agi weapons (1 rogue)
2 slow agi weapons(1 enhance)
2 (or more depends on how many hunters) ranged weapon.
0-2 str shields depending on which tanks you're using
Tally it up that's 32 items I've listed, not counting off hands for casters. 4 of these items are because of dual wielding, with up to 2 more for tank shields and a the caster off-hand issue I'll talk about later. This brings my fictional raiding roster down to 28 people, I'm also only considering main spec for now since you can essentially double-dip for off-spec items in the list and it's not that important for progression outside of healers/tanks also having a dps spec in a case where you can't just bring in a dps replacement.
The distribution of the weapons is something I find more interesting than exactly how many you need, and the interesting part doesn't come until you consider str shields and 1h agi weapons.
In my raid group we tank with a pally and a dk. One shield is needed. We have one currently raiding rogue. We need (ignoring legendary daggers) 2 daggers. If the rogue isn't there for that fight they go to waste. We need 2 enhance weapons, such as no'kaled. We don't always have a hunter in the raid even though we try to and we have only 2 raiding hunters right now last I checked.
So the problem is, lets say you get lucky the first month and all your agi weapons drop (lets even say on heroic so you don't have to worry about upgrading them). Any additional weapons are now basically disenchanted. Enhance weapons might go to the resto with an enhance offspec but the rogue daggers are worthless. Tanks might want offspec weapons, ferals and windwalkers might want healing weapons. These drops are now worthless for your raiding group. Crunching these numbers we see that there is a similar problem in plate int gear. In fact plate int gear is even worse because you essentially need to provide an alternative to tier gear which means you have just created 2 sets of gear for 1 spec instead of something like 3 sets for 4 specs in mail agi gear, this is where secondary stats are important to consider.
This is all just part of what it means to have gear drop from bosses and some of the benefits and problems with it. I haven't even gotten into the social aspect of distributing the loot and competition, this is just about how few want it in these cases. There are other cases where you run into too many people wanting the same thing, which can be a real problem in 10m raids where each piece of gear means a lot more for the raid and because of the limited comp options you are more likely forced into a situation where more people desire a smaller set of loot. So far mostly I've just wanted to demonstrate that random drops are random just by looking at weapons, which for the most part are shared between classes and a smaller number of them are available compared to say "chest pieces."
Next time I want to talk about int gear and show that has basically the exact opposite problem in some cases like weapons, trinkets, and jewellery.
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