Personal Loot Trading Restrictions

Community WoW Community Council
#1

This expansion has seen some loosening with the slots that count towards each other for trading purposes, however with the end of raid bosses having inflated item levels it’s creating awkward scenarios where you don’t want to equip items immediately in case you loot something at the end of the raid so you can trade the initial item to other players.

This reared its ugly head this tier especially with Domination Sockets being such a large power gain.

For example, this type of scenario happened to me a few times this tier. I looted a Leather Chest on Eye of the Jailer, used it (as you rightly should as it’s a huge power gain), and then looted the Sylvanas Chest. Whilst the Sylvanas Chest was an upgrade in some scenarios, I did not want to keep it but the game forced me to. The gain of power from No Dom–> Dom compared to 7 item levels is minor. I really wanted to trade that item as it would have allowed my other raiders to complete their set bonus, but the system as is does not facilitate that.

These scenarios will appear again in the next raid with tier sets having the same diminishing value of power compared to item level gains. The main chunk of power comes from the bonus, not the item level. However, there should be a difficulty based ilvl buffer between those, so it’s not as drastic as Domination Sockets were, where you would have two items of the same difficulty level but with different item levels.

These scenarios make me have a very negative experience with looting an item.

Sometimes you even had to game the system by trading the item to someone else and having them log out with it to prolong the trade timer to circumvent the time between bosses adding pressure.

Would love to see some item level leeway added for trading to facilitate these scenarios and M+ where you have an item from 1/2 key levels down but the stats make it not an upgrade for you, but an upgrade for someone else.

The social experience of an MMO is killed off at these moments where you are not able to be friendly and give your loot to someone else as the game deems it an upgrade (but in reality, it is not, or is very very minor).

56 Likes
#2

Do you think an option would be to eliminate trading restrictions entirely?

No one can “force” you to trade loot. It’s in your possession, they can’t physically take it out of your bags.
Yes, guilds have loot rules and yada yada yada, I get that.

Would this solve some of the Master Loot questions as well though? If we still had personal loot but it was fully tradeable?

7 Likes
#3

Ultimately the issue with Master Looter is that there are submissive players who do not want to leave guilds with absolute dumbos in charge who impose very weird loot rules favouring cliques, themselves etc.

Full Disclosure: Imo, where these guilds exist, people should absolutely 100% jump ship. If a teams goal and methods do not align with yours. LEAVE.

For that reason, I think some restrictions need to remain in place to have some level of protection for players that would be impacted by that.

A cleaner solution incorporating Master Loot with it too would be:

  • Increase loot ratio from 20% per person when Personal Loot is used.
  • Keep it at 20% for Master Loot.
  • Master Loot is only an option for Guild Groups (where 80%+ are from the same Guild).

Pretty much what we had in Legion. The tradeoff for deterministic control over loot should be the total amount of loot.

11 Likes
#4

I’m going to put on my tin foil hat for a second. So yes, PL with no restrictions is for guilds in terms of loot control the same thing as master loot. Because in CE guilds, the ones that wish to run Loot council will and it makes prepping for the tier simpler/allow less loot waste, and the ones that want it to go to whoever, still can.

The big issue with PL comes with loot waste. It’s no surprise to me that come end of legion going into BFA, Blizzard wanted to slow down the gearing process and early progression gear. The amount of loot waste with PL is significantly higher than what ML had, even PL with no restrictions would have more loot waste than the other system. So a question would be, how does the gearing process feel early on? And to me that answer is and will stay awful, but it’s the direction Blizzards been going since end of Legion.

6 Likes
#5

Absolutely. Every spec in the game can get necks/rings so we’re throwing them out while still looking for loot from the same bosses.

5 Likes
#6

You don’t even need to think that much about this one. Look at Weapons. This tier we didn’t have tokens and we’re on 2 Painsmith weapons total and 0 Sylvanas daggers, and we’re on Week 23 of Mythic :expressionless: .

The Painsmith example was even with nearly everyone in the raid going into specific Loot Specs to obtain it.

10 Likes
#7

From my understanding the loot trade restrictions were primarily implemented in order to reduce the number of splits. It felt like this system was implemented for a very small part of the community that it ultimately didn’t impact as significantly as it was hoped for. Splits still happen, loot still gets traded, if anything it might have slowed it down a bit.

Meanwhile the core player base has been saddled with this issue of not being able to trade personal loot because of an ilvl. It’s not a very “smart” system because it doesn’t take into consideration things like stat optimization - if I get a ring with stats that are not ideal for me, and the ilvl difference is marginal at best, I’m not going to wear it because there isn’t any value. I still can’t trade it though, and that means the loot was wasted.

9 Likes
#8

Pretty sure the official stance was ‘trials deserve loot too’. Designing around a very small number of guilds is a pretty silly move if it were to be true.

The world first crowd will always find whatever is optimal and go for that. Even if it’s as insane as what happened in BoD where everyone had every crafting profession at some point to have a piece of crafted gear in each slot equipped at least once in order to trade.

Let the high end do whatever? It’s really no big deal.

8 Likes
#9

Not to mention that guilds who want to use rcloot council will still distribute tradeable loot anyway as it is.

7 Likes
#10

Yes, it was the stance. I’m agreed too that Blizzard has maybe implanted that to reduce split from some guilds.

In my guild, we have Rcloot council. When we loot something, if we dont need it, our RL tells us to give it to a choser player. Or sometime we just /roll
Maybe just implant in game something like Rc loot council (without Masterloot).

It’s because we dont have primary stat on ring like intel, strengh,… So you can decide to equip a very low ilevel ring.
For exemple, on my main priest, I stil have a 226 equiped ring (because of stats). And i’m 253 ilevel.

#11

The amount of splits have increased significantly since this change. A good chunk of it happens off stream. However, the removal of Master Looter isn’t purely to blame for this. This is because of forced personal loot allowing you to make optimised group compositions for specific items, so in order to game it, you use raid groups that are tailor-made to loot those items with a couple of mains in each to gear funnel.

So you went from what 3-5 splits to 5-10+.

That’s Master Looter… So you want to just rename it? Guilds have circumvented the removal of Master Looter by doing what you have described above to retain some form of loot control.

I highly doubt this, outside of healers who value leech significantly. Generally speaking more total secondaries (ilvl) will outweigh 2 better secondaries (low ilvl but “better” stats).

Looking at this particular example for your Holy Priest, this ring did not have leech on it. So I’m not sure why you have passed on potential upgrades?

Even after running through sims, nearly every ring available to you (M14+/Heroic Raid/Mythic Raid) would have been an upgrade.

6 Likes