With the recent look at some of the gear problems there are several solutions that I'd like to examine. These will range from removing drops entirely to changing the way gear itself is designed. Please keep an open mind as I know some of these are terrible ideas, they still need to be examined.
1 - Turn everything into a point based system. Imagine valour points working for every single piece of gear. It lets you control which items you get first, which items you upgrade fastest. There is absolutely no RNG. This sounds like a great system when you first think about it, however there are some glaring faults that *really* crush this way of designing drops.
First you have to consider that the fun part about seeing what loot a boss drops is gone. I know it's exciting, especially the first time you kill a boss, to see what items it drops. Second there is no longer a restriction of what loot you can get farming, for example, morchok week in and week out. That's an exaggeration but imagine a guild working on spine heroic for a couple months and eventually getting enough tokens for heroic spine level trinkets. The difference between normal and heroic points are also a problem. Sure you could stipulate that each boss has it's own set of tokens but then again you have some crazy problems that come up with distribution and so on.
Second is that your entire raid is going to gear up at the same time, basically. Lets say you get 100 points when you kill a boss, you then notice that the amazing weapons (or shields for tanks or whatever) everyone wants are exactly 2200 points. 22 bosses down the road (give or take a few for raiders who are mia some weeks etc) your entire raid is going to get a gigantic boost in gear, imagine a boss dropping 25 pieces of loot and each one goes to a raider who will greatly benefit from it. This just doesn't work. There are more reasons this doesn't work but from what I've already mentioned you can see why it doesn't.
2 - Tokens (not points). Imagine your tier tokens, but they apply to every piece of gear you have. A ring token, a mail boot token. This makes the disparity between armour types more relevant but stats and comp much less relevant. It retains the nice part about loot "dropping" and the speed at which the raid gears up. Makes it easy for raid leaders to organize raid to make sure that all of the bosses drops go to someone instead of having to ask who needs what.
It's not quite that elegant in that you still don't get the same form of "oooh loot" as other people. It also suffers from being able to be funnelled at certain people in the raid like tanks or healers to the exclusion of all else which is sometimes good and sometimes bad. This already happens somewhat but to a much smaller degree. For example, during DS most guilds threw tier tokens at their tanks for the 4p bonuses. This sort of system would make that happen every tier. An added advantage is that you could design more set bonuses (like the old school 8p bonuses) but does that really add things and still let you choose gear?
It's a decent system but leaves a lot to be desired. I should've mentioned earlier but only thought to now, I really like the idea of the gear being available in game for you to see and examine before it drops. The Dungeon Journal does this already but something like a vendor where all your int rings, for example, are beside each other and you can look at them all real nice. This has ups and downs but ultimately I like it.
3 - Change the way you design gear. After guessing at an average raid comp I went back to my guild's website and checked our raiding roster. We're down to 28 right now but at 30 we had the following: 4 strength dps, 6 agi dps, 2 tanks, 9 healers and 9 int dps. From this I took a quick glance at how the classes were distributed among armor types. We had 2 non-cloth int dps. Our agi dps was spread 3/3 among mail/leather. Healers are pretty well distributed. So perhaps some re-arranging of things is in order.
My first thought would be to merge mail and leather. This solves a lot of problems and I'm not entirely sure it's a bad thing just yet. After doing that my other thought was to make all healers wear mail. I don't like this second choice at all but it's an option. I would like to emphasize that mail and agi are virtually indistinguishable outside of the way they look and the tag that says "leather" or "mail." Both use agi or int. Both have 1 healer 1 int dps and 4 agi dps specs tied to them. This is before mists and in my opinion make even more sense with the addition of monks.
The down side to this, which is a pretty big one, is that we lose a lot of class flavour. The idea of wearing a leather jerkin and a mail shirt is a very noticeable one. Sure you could still make the art to match the intent of the class and transmog exists for those who would prefer it otherwise. You'd lose some of the armour balancing of the two but you could bake that into a class bonus if you really thought it was important. Examples being that hunters get something called "ruggedness" increases armour from gear by X %.
You could also do something like change spirit to the primary stat of healers. There are enough of them in the raid at a given point such that they almost constitute more than any other dps primary stat, int being the exception. That is why I thought putting them on their own armour set would be nice but that just makes things feel weird. I mean you could let them mog back to what they normally feel like but you'd lose something when all your healers are wearing the same gear. That said, I still think leather and mail should be merged. Would save a lot of problems. Alternatively you could change the available weapons to some classes. Let ferals/guardians use daggers. Lore it by making it part of their claws or something, makes sense to me. I'm a bit curious to see how they handle hunter weapons now that they are going to be even more unique than int on plate. Lastly you'd also have no conflict of classes feeling similar among the two armour types the way mages and warlocks already feel similar.
All that said, I really think this is the least intrusive way of handling this problem I perceive. This solution offers a solid response to the problem while changing the least drastically. The one greatest problem I feel, which I realise is almost a slippery slope fallacy, is that it's a really short hop from here to making everyone wear one type of armor with only a few stats on it like "awesomeness."
4 - Quests. There's a few ways to handle the idea of loot via quests. I use the term quests loosely since you could also treat this as sort of a vendor system.
My thought is have something like a quest for every item that people want. yes it's a lot of quests but you don't need to put a lot into them since the idea would be someone is crafting you the gear and all they need to do is tell you what they need. So something like the "hand of morchok" axe would require you to get 2 hands from morchok or something like that. Of course only morchok is going to drop it but you can tune the way things drop to desired rate of gear gain. You could also have gear require multiple boss kills. You would also have multiple people able to get the same gear with the same drops, or also use the same item to get crafted into multiple items. For example perhaps the same item that is required for a str+haste proc trinket would be used for an int or agi+haste proc trinket. You could really really add some flavour to the game with something like this.
There is the problem of added dev time and the idea that you want multiple items might make it frustrating to see things that span multiple bosses when you haven't killed all of them. They could set it up in various ways to alleviate some of this. Another major problem is that it requires players to check things out before they enter the raid and adds time outside of raid that is basically required if you want to have a shot at loot. I'll guarantee you every raid leader will give one of these items to someone who knows what they're getting out of it than to someone who doesn't. I think similar items like the algalon quest or similar were very interesting and wouldn't be that out of place.
I really like this idea because it really breaks the idea that every raid boss is hoarding these items. It made sense with classical western dragons hoarding loot, which I'm fairly certain is where the idea came from, and brings it more in line with the idea that you can salvage mystical materials from extremely powerful foes. It also makes people a bit more attached to their gear when they know that the giant two handed sword they're swinging was once the incisor of deathwing or that the trinket they're using that gives them amazing haste or crit is really an old god minion's tentacle that's infusing them with strange power. That sort of thing I feel is missing from the game. This may also help remove the whole "you got gear and I didn't" thoughts from LFR. Sure you see them get a bracelet from hagara that will turn into gear but you have no idea if it's something you also wanted that they're getting from it.
I think this idea has a lot of problems the least of which is the extra dev time putting the quests and deciding how things will drop. It's another layer of loot to concern themselves with. It has another problem in that it requires people to look around outside of raid to examine gear. They could still just look up BiS lists if they really wanted and check out the mats for each of them.
The last part I wanted to mention in this is the opportunity for quests. You can put these quests basically anywhere you want. You can have them on faction people that only unlock once you hit some reputation level that's either associated with the raid or anything else for that matter to control how gear flows in. Imagine as a dev you got to control, even later into the expansion, the rate at which people could get into instances. You could toggle rep gains such that as the expansion progressed it was easier to rep up the first raid instances. The amount of control you have over this system is phenomenal.
5 - Alter drop rates of items to match representation. This means that, if you expect x% of the raiding community to play enhancement for example, you'll make those weapons drops in the appropriate %age. There are some really really obvious problems with this system including varying raid comp, lack of addressing RNG since it still will happen and ultimately punish people for playing unpopular specs. Using tanks as an example, I'd never get a shield. Since less than half of a role that is 1/5th of the raid in 10m and 2/25 of the raid in 25m the chances of a shield dropping would have to be astronomically small to be fair for the raid, which would make it pretty unfair for me. Also think about a group that uses 2 shield tanks, for which they would fight to the death for the first shield since they may not see another one.
This is, in my opinion, a heavy handed approach and one that I feel has been used (that or we've gotten horrible RNG with the shield) to a minor degree if at all. I don't like this solution because it acknowledges a problem with loot design but goes for the first solution that might occur to them.
The only benefit I can see is that in the grand scheme of things drops will be consistent. This however doesn't help the guild with 2 shield tanks that hasn't seen the shield for the entire tier.
I want to mention that I'd like to see some acknowledgement of the problem with weapons right now. Specifically with agi weapons. 1 class likes fast agi weapons. 1 class likes slow agi weapons. 1 class likes 2h agi weapons. 1 class likes ranged agi weapons. With monks it appears like that'll change slightly but since I don't know much about brewmaster or windwalker monks I'm going to leave them out for now. I only know they don't like fast agi weapons, or at least I don't think they do.
With the changes to tanking stats str weapons are much more rounded, as long as they stick to hit/expertise/mastery on them. That would be uninteresting but it's still miles better than us tanks have had so far.
If you guys have any other ideas on how to fix the RNG problems with loot or even interesting ways of handling loot generation and distribution please leave a comment. I find this sort of thing extremely interesting and would love to hear the way some of you might approach this problem. I haven't covered all of the ways, just the ones that occured to me that I thought warranted some sort of discussion, or that I at least thought was cool.
Until next time, just keep rollin'
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