Is grouping broken?

WoW Classic WoW Classic General Discussion
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Are the drop rates correct for Collect X Drops quests when grouped? I don’t remember it being such a negative thing to group for these type of quests before. Maybe I’m misremembering, but I seem to remember group questing being the best way to go. But now it seems like such a pain to group with people over these types of quests and people are expressing that they won’t group for them. That just strikes me as antithetical to the spirit of Vanilla.

It’s not about wanting things to be easier or more convenient. I advocate for things to be more difficult and more inconvenient, because I know a lot of these things in Vanilla actually promoted forced socialization. There was an intent to make things inconvenient in order to make us play together and make friends and connections…to have shared experience in the world. But the drop rates for these collection quests in groups seems to have an anti-social incentive. Instead, it is making people want to stay solo or in a group of only 2 and not work with others because it would just take them so much longer. I just think that’s either something that has been overlooked and is incorrect or there are other variables at play that did not exist in Vanilla that is causing a mechanic to have the opposite intended impact.

Is it possible that it’s one of these two things?

  1. Is there supposed to be a group drop rate modifier for quest items and this was maybe overlooked and forgotten? Or does it exist and the tuning of it is incorrect?

  2. Is the loot server having issues with the large population and causing quest loot to not show up when it should? I’m noticing a lot of loot sparkles that turn up empty. I kind of remember that from before, but it happens quite a lot. Is there a possibility that the loot server just can’t keep up and doesn’t give an item when it should periodically which artificially lowers the drop rate?

  3. are the numbers correct, but the original math in Vanilla did not account for the number of players we have now? I could see a line of thought that says that if you have 5 people, you can kill things 5 times as fast, so the drop rate doesn’t need to be increased to make grouping up for these quests an ok proposition. But with so many people, there are not enough mobs for a group of 5 t run around killing. A lot of times, they have to wait to try to tag a single mob as other individuals and groups are waiting to tag as well. This makes the original math not work out since the time spent on this is not in killing the mob, but in waiting for them to spawn and to get a tag.

I don’t know if it will continue to be an issue for much longer or not, but it seems to me that the things that are inconvenient and difficult should be funneling us into pro-social behaviors and not keeping us from them. The current way Collect X Drop quests are working, they are becoming a wedge keeping players apart. You can say #NoChanges, but I don’t think it’s in the spirit of Vanilla to incentivize people to refuse to group. Sounds like a retail thing tbh.

Blue, could you please look at this?

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Drop rates (even while grouped) are as I remember them. I would infact not group for collection quests from mobs that dont have a high drop rate (which you just found by doing).

This is just how vanilla was.

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They raptor quest and amulets in stv have taken 3x the time in a group compared to solo.

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If possible don’t do loot quests in a grp you’ll spend 10x as long if you were just doing it solo kill quests are more efficient grouped tho.

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I believe there is a big problem with loot right now, yes. As a multiboxer, I notice this more than solo players, I’m sure. What happens is a mob will have loot sparkles, I’ll click to autoloot and it will instantly flicker close faster than normal. The loot sparkles stay visible on my other chars but attempting to loot said body gives an error that someone else is already looting that body. I’m pretty sure that those glitched bodies are artificially depressing the drop rate of stuff.

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Quests where you need a drop off a named mob are shared.

Non named mobs aren’t. But the benefit of grouping is that you can kill more mobs.

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Also, and I know this is a given for most, but if you see a money bag on a party leaders portrait that is loot master.

Just be careful friends. I noticed it right away in a group and warned general chat about this, but there are a lot of folks who wouldn’t think about someone doing something shady like this, and others who don’t know what it is :slight_smile:

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I’m dual boxing myself and yes, this happens quite frequently just as you described. The loot window quickly closes and then it still sparkles on the other character and can’t be looted.

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I feel like drop rates are even worse than I remember, solo or group. Well except for the gorilla fur in STV, but I’m not there yet.

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But those mobs would need to exist in order for this to make sense, right? So many people waiting for mobs to spawn that the benefit of killing things faster goes to zero since there’s nothing to tag once it’s dead. That’s why I lost this as one of the possibilities since maybe it’s that it needs to retuned to account for different variables like number of people in a chunk/map. It’s one of those things where changing something that appears unrelated has significant unintended consequences in another area given so much of this game is interconnected.