Every major raid comes with a price. There’s new content to explore, your core group is no longer top dog when it comes to gear and everyone wants to improve. On top of that you have several loot distribution styles and nobody can ever seem to agree on what is best for the guild as a whole. The worst part is, new gear and new instances can tear a guild apart. How exactly do you manage to make everyone happy and keep the guild together at the same time? Today, we’re going to find out.
Loot Distribution
There are three major systems of loot distribution, each with its own pros and cons. Not only that, but each of the three types is drastically different. I’m speaking of the Roll method, DKP and Loot Council. The one I am most used to is Loot Council simply because that is what my guild uses. Let’s briefly go over each of the methods just in case you’re not familiar with them.
Rolling For Gear
This is the most common form of loot distribution when it comes to PuG groups because it’s the most impartial system for a group of random people. As loot drops you do a simple roll, typically 1-100, and the person with the highest roll wins. Simple right? For a PuG, yes, but for a progression guild it could cause too many issues. Between tier tokens and gear that works for multiple classes (like Enhance Shammy/Hunter gear), few would ever be happy with such a system. Plus, it has the potential for one person to win all of the gear due to lucky dice. It wouldn’t matter if someone else needed the gear more or not, which could also cause problems for a raiding guild.
When it comes to the most common way that the rolling system is used, the raid leader tends to use Master Looter. This means items wont be ninja’d and it also means that you won’t have to track all too much. The raid leader should be making sure that rolls go Mainspec and then Offspec and that only the correct classes roll. This is all visual so it doesn’t require any AddOns or setup of any kind.
Pros:
- It’s great for PuG groups
- Very simple with no tracking (other than numbers) involved
- It’s “fair” in the sense that anyone can get the gear
Cons:
- It relies on “luck” if you believe in such a thing
- Assuming you use Master Looter and tell people to roll, you don’t know if someone really needs the item (unless you check)
- Without using Master Looter, the game handles the rolls and people can ninja gear
- If someone gets a lot of high rolls, they win all the gear
DKP
I believe this is the most common loot system for raiding guilds. You get points for being present during a raid and for downing bosses and then you can spend those points on gear through an auction styled system. A piece of gear drops, the Loot Master says to send in your bid and the person with the highest bid wins the item. Those points are then subtracted from the winner’s DKP and they have a new current value of DKP. It’s a decent system because the people who raid consistently can be rewarded with gear. However, the DKP system can also lead to one person who saves all their DKP to win every item and it can also lead to some gear rotting in the instance because people want to hoard their DKP rather than roll on potential upgrades.
To help track DKP, you can use AddOns or a site with a host like dkpsystem.com. DKPSystem sites allow “screen shots” of your attempts/kills of bosses and you can set specific values to be associated with bosses. You can also set the value of gear in DKP and it will automatically be deducted when you upload gear received.
Pros:
- It’s a defined system that relies on points
- DKP is well-known and as far as I know, quite widely used by most guilds
- It’s very specific and easy to track. Even a spreadsheet would be sufficient
Cons:
- People may not roll on gear causing it to go to waste
- People who raid all the time can take all the gear for themselves
- You have to make sure you don’t miss the fact that someone was in the raid/online
Loot Council
Loot Council is one of the newer forms of loot distribution from what I’ve seen. I’ve been told it’s used by top progression guilds now and it seems pretty fair in concept. This system is similar to DKP in that it relies on attendance for part of the criteria behind receiving an item. The way Loot Council works is that your guild leader and officers choose who gets an item out of the people who have shown interest in said item. When an item drops, the Loot Master links an item and those who are interested do a roll. This roll only shows interest and doesn’t have an effect on who wins the item at all. The Loot Council then gets together and decides who should receive the item based on raid attendance (attendance meaning you were online, even if you weren’t in the raid), whether or not the item an upgrade (and how big of an upgrade), and when you last received an item. It works fairly well in my guild, and nobody really ever complains although we do ask questions if something weird seems to be going on. For instance, in Ulduar, the Loot Master was asking if tier tokens would lead to a 2 or 4 set but that was because the Loot Council had to take that bonus into account (for the upgrade criteria).
Loot Council can be tracked similar to the way DKP is tracked, but only the attendance portion is really necessary. DKPSystem.com, mentioned above, is great for tracking attendance as well as when a person last received loot and what it was.
Pros:
- Gear goes to the person it will help the most
- The system is structured and handled by officers
- You have to be active if you want gear, meaning some new applicant to your guild/raid wont have much of a chance to steal your gear
Cons:
- You have to be active if you want gear (yes it fits both)
- If your Guild Leader/Officers aren’t fair, then you may never get gear
Who Deserves the Gear?
Now that we’ve covered loot distribution systems, I’m going to go over the idea of who deserves loot. I’m going to be doing my comparisons while assuming a Loot Council distribution system because that is the system I am most familiar with.
In a raid, everyone has to do their part and everyone contributes even if they are the last person on the DPS charts. If you are in the raid then you are eligible to receive loot obviously, and this, of course, leads to the question of who deserves an item over someone else and why? I recently had an experience in Naxx where we were gearing up new applicants and getting those last pieces of gear for the Active Raiders where a staff dropped. To be more specific, Journey’s End dropped. The item was an upgrade for me and would have increased my DPS. I tend to pull 3-3.2k DPS which is fairly low for my guild and I would have loved the item, but instead it went to another hunter who already pulls 4-4.5k DPS all the time. I’ll admit I was annoyed. I had given up another staff earlier in the raid because the raid leader (also the guild leader) mentioned that if Journey’s End did end up dropping, then I had a pretty good chance at getting it. Now, we run Loot Council as I’ve said before and it’s based on several factors. Both of us hunters are on for just about every raid and the item was an upgrade for both of us. His DPS was higher than mine by quite a lot, so it would have helped me more than it helped him, but his staff was worse than my polearm. Because of the “upgrade” criteria, he got the item, or so I’m assuming. I can live with that, but I began wondering if there should be other ways to look at “upgrades.”
In my mind, an upgrade would be more than just a single piece of gear. I feel that to make a raid and a guild more successful, then everyone should be fairly evenly balanced. What I’m getting at is upgrade the lower DPS first. Imagine a raid of 25 people. Assume 18 of them are DPS. Now assume that 4 of them pull 5k DPS each and the other 14 pull roughly 3k each. That’s a total of 62k DPS. That will be our starting point. Now let’s say that your guild raids for a few weeks and the top 4 DPSers get all the items and they go up to 7k each. That brings the raid total up to 70k DPS. Not bad seeing as that’s an 8k increase overall. Now, go back to the starting point of 62k DPS and assume your guild raids a few weeks and bumps up 7 of the 14 lower DPSers to 4k each. That’s 69k DPS overall. You’re only 1k short of the 70k mark from bumping up your top 4 DPSers, but you gave less gear to more people. Assume another few weeks and you’ve managed to get all 14 of the lower DPSers to that 4k mark. Now you’re pulling 76k DPS overall. That is quite an increase, and that still leaves the other 4 on top. If you can balance everyone out then the raid DPS increases drastically. I’m also assuming that those top 4 DPSers have top gear to be pulling the DPS they are and that any upgrades would be minimal for them.
Remember, different situations call for different numbers and different outcomes, so anything could happen. I used a very basic example to prove my point, and yes, it’s probably a little biased, but I also showed the math behind it. As you can see, my opinion is that it’s best to keep gear distributed evenly amongst a guild/raid for the best results.
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Our guild uses Loot Council and as you said above, it’s working fairly well. However one difference is that we don’t take item upgrade into account really at all, it’s one of the last factors we look at (after attendance, performance, attitude, etc.)
But ya, Loot Council is really great if your leaders don’t get power hungry.
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One system we’re using in the 10- and 25-man raids I’m in is called Suicide Kings. It’s a fairly simple list-based system. At the very first night of raiding, everybody there /randoms 100 to initially seed two lists, one for tier tokens and one for other stuff. After that, the raid goes on master looter, and whenever epics drop, the loot master asks for whispers from people interested in a piece. Whoever’s highest on the list gets the piece and goes to the bottom of the list (called a “suicide”). That’s it. We added one rule for offspec, if you’re asking for something offspec (like me as a prot warrior wanting a DPS piece) then you only get it if nobody wants it for a main spec, or you’re the highest on the list that wants it offspec. And either way, it’s still a “suicide,” you still go to the bottom of the list. New people come into the raid at the bottom of the list, and if you don’t attend one week, your initial position doesn’t change but people who are there will move up around you, so you’ll tend to “settle” to the bottom if you’re not there for a couple weeks.
It works well, it tends to distribute loot well throughout the raid, and it tends to gear undergeared folks up quickly because loot just naturally falls to them. The officers can still step in as a loot council and ask someone to pass a piece of loot off, but I don’t think they’ve actually done it in almost four months so far.
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@Linedan and Euripides
Never heard of those loot systems. Main spec rolling is typically a given (or rather ‘roll for spec youre in the raid as’) for the methods I’ve experienced. Both methods you mentioned are quite interesting because they both cause people to think of what they want. I feel like gear could still rot, however, especially in the Suicide Kings method where people may not want to get bumped down. Interesting stuff though…something worth looking into
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Your example (upgrades for high-performance vs evening out everyone) depends on the attendance and skill distribution of your raiders. It also depends on how different classes scale with gear; as an obvious example, a ret paladin would scale better with a Cryptfiend’s Bite than a Hunter if both were upgrading from e.g. Runeblade of Demonstrable Power. Conversely, a hunter would scale better with Arrowsong than a Rogue, despite the fact that the weapon was an upgrade for both of them. (This applies to other stats as well, but weapons were most-obvious.)
It may be hard (or impolitic) to admit it, but some players also produce better DPS from the same gear, talents, etc. Maybe they’ve got a better setup of addons to watch for procs, maybe they anticipate movement better (and can save a couple instants for use on the move, or pause just long enough to squeeze out an auto-shot), but whatever it is, they manage to do more DPS despite the same stats. This is the point where theory (spreadsheets, etc) diverges from practice, and some people just seem to do better than others. Loot council addresses this better than DKP or roll systems do, but you need people on the loot council (maybe or maybe not officers) who understand the classes and the contributions they provide. For example, a Warlock with Demonic Pact is giving all the other casters 10% of his spellpower as a buff unless you have an Elemental Shaman in the raid…
You list a “con” of DKP systems that people who have 100% attendance can take all the loot — this only works if you have a system where people can earn all that the dkp that they spend in a night. If not, then someone who has 50% attendance will get about 50% as much loot as someone with 100% attendance. The person with 100% attendance can outspend them at first, but soon they’ll have spent all their DKP, and the other person will be able to out-bid them. And, by your example, if the item adds 500 dps to either player, by giving it to the person with 50% attendance, you’re only getting 250 dps out of the item on average, while you get 500dps if the person with 100% attendance gets it.
Lastly, one other loot system you didn’t cover is called “EP:GP”, and it works by giving priority to people whose ratio between “effort points” and “gear points” is highest. This is a variation on DKP, because you can never reduce your EP or GP — you just adjust the ratio between the two. In the simplest form, if I go on 5 raids, and get 2 epics, I’d have a 5:2 EP:GP ratio. If you’ve been to 3 raids and got 1 epic, you’d have priority over me, but if you won an epic on your next raid, your EP:GP would drop to 4:2, and I’d have priority. If I get really unlucky over 6 or 7 raids, I might end up with 13 EP, but still only 2 GP. If that happened, I might be able to claim several items in a row in one raid, but once I’d gotten a certain amount of gear, I’d drop down in the priority list again.
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Another points style system that seems to be growing in popularity (and is used in my own guild) is EP/GP – standing for Effort Points / Gear Points.
Much like DKP you earn effort points for attendance, being on standby etc. (you could also dish these out for contributions to guild bank if you so wished).
Gear points are awarded as the cost of items based on iLevel, slot and class – the better the loot the more points are added to your total when you receive the item (or are given runed orbs from the guild bank etc.).
Priority for loot is simply the ration of EP:GP (hence the name). It all sounds fairly complicated but there are addons that do everything for you.
Pros:
Process is completely visible and you always know where you (and everyone else) are in the priority list.
The running points totals give an quantitative indication of peoples raid attendance and how much loot they have received.
Flexibility with points allocation for any reason.
No need to define costs for any and all loot as it is based on a formula.
Cons:
You can still horde points and save your points (although time based degredation can be configured).
Fairly complicated – although only the people running it _need_ to understand it.
The big one in the pro list for me is that the process is transparent – I have never been in a loot council guild, however I know people who have – and the idea of loot being dished out without having any understanding of the whys and wherefores really does not appeal.
Sythe
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We use Suicide Kings in my casual raiding guild and it is pretty good for our needs. It seems to strike a good balance between ease of use (for the raid leaders), fairness (everyone gets a turn at loot), reward for attendance and not penalising infrequent attendees too much.
As you say, Atkallen, people “camping” spots can cause problems. If everyone did that, it would completely break the system. Luckily we’ve only had one or two people do that, and in the end it was their loss because they missed out on loot.
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the thing u r missing out when u mention the gear should go to the lowest dps is the skill factor. i know that dps isn’t complicated, but i also frequently see huge differences in dps between similarly geared players of the same class. if a person got low dps becoz he is not skilled, then giving him the upgrade over the higher dps person isn’t efficient. this is especially important for tnaks. giving gear to a tank who has low alert and concentration is a waste of gear.
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Who deserves the loot??
ME ME ME!! MINE MINE MINE!!!!
On a side note… EPGP is the shiznit.
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In a guild I recently left we used a combination loot council and /roll. Arrowsong drops. It goes to the absolute lowest dps hunter guild (he previously had Nerubian Conqueror and was in most, if not all T7.5) His dps was 1.8k maybe on a good night in Naxx. Mine was rounding 2.5k with a Drake Mounted Crossbow, 3 T7′s and a host of blues.
Needless to say I threw a fit. Why? That bow could have pushed me past 3k easily and would have contributed to the guild more than to a hunter that relied mostly on his gear to push a measly 1.8k.
I’m still using my DMC, have upgraded most gear and am pushing 3.2k. The other hunter? yeah, 1.8k with Arrowsong. Talk about a waste.
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