If you finish a dungeon, kill a raid boss or even a world rare why don’t you always get a piece of loot?
Arguably all but the rares take a significant amount of time to do or are paced via a lock out. Why is there so much rng invovled with it?
In the past I get the justification but with mythic plus it seems a bit of a moot point.
That stick dangling the carrot is the reason.
Because then you’d gear out in like 10 dungeons and 3 raids while seasons last for like 5-7 months. Rng is simply a way to make the grind feel acceptable and add some spice a bit to gearing, if instead it was deterministic and they wanted gearing to take the same time it would be probably currency based and you’d probably hate it the same way people feel about farming crests/valor.
Wouldn’t this logic only hold true for at best 1% of the playerbase?
I’d say a lot of casual players do enjoy gearing and set gearing as their season goal. If anything more competitive players often see gearing more like a chore as they have other goals.
The great vault is deterministic and not rng. The vault is weighted to hold back on the great items that you want, but only seem to receive the week before they become obsolete. 
…that’s my theory based off of experiences.
You do, it just goes to someone else every time.
So you keep playing the game again and again and again , if the model didn;t work they would not have lasted 20 years
Don’t worry the best is when you switch talents mid season because of buffs/nerfs and end up using different stat and then realizing that you didn’t pick your best trinket week 2 because it used to be bad.
I miss the round robin loot choice in Vanilla, it was neat at first then a Paladin got a cloth belt. To be fair he could equip it and there wasn’t any actual armor bonuses at the time. I remember Holy Paladins used Priest Dungeon Set when it was BiS pre-raids.
I don’t think being guaranteed a single piece of loot for completing content would break the loot grind.
A piece of loot for every individual raid boss is probably too much though. Break it up by LFR wing.
The group is guaranteed loot, you just might not win it.
Some players continued to gear like that until Blizzard added the %5 bonus stats for the gear of your specialization .
Pretty much hit the nail on the head, I feel like their taking gear in the right direction this coming season, although having bullions be granted so late in the season seems like a moot point.
I do feel like we have both currently however, with gear being RNG, and a weekly capped currency that has to be gained, although its mostly passively gained through doing the content which is fine. Yet I do think that valor stones simply need to be gone, they definitely have a function with low end gear, veteran gear primarily. Yet when you look at upper gear the crests alone should be the only limiting factor as to how you can upgrade your gear. Given valor stones have always proven to be a hinderance that always forced you to do even more content given you need more of them than crests to even upgrade gear.
It’s the way it is because of psychology.
Variable ratio reinforcement schedules - actions are reinforced/rewarded after an unpredictable number of actions taken -generate strong and consistent engagement.
I think it’s a decent compromise considering as far as I know it will let you get a mythic track trinket without doing mythic raiding. If they had capped upgrade tracks to what you killed maybe they could do it sooner but I feel it’s ok this way. My own proposition to balance bullion was requiring CE as if you’re done with the content you should get the loot so this is a decent compromise for me as I think 18-20 weeks of raiding could also be seen that way while doing this way does have the advantage of including way more people and will probably add a decent amount of participation to raiding, could be seen the same way as people farming fyralath in DF.
Ain’t this kinda what the vault is about?
n crafting. You can make your own luck!
if you don’t do the content because the drop rates are so low - there becomes no content
define casual? I hate gearing and just don’t bother doing it. That’s the difference between casual and competitive. Casual can ignore gearing because they don’t need it competitive players are ‘forced’ to do it. Both groups think gearing is tedious.
Not everyone is of course the same, but I doubt participation would be higher in a lot of content if there were no gear rewards. Trying to define casual is pretty much a waste of time if that’s what you want to argue about, but I think “not the top 1%” in this case can also work good enough anyway.
Probably need some context but if we take M+ which has 40% droprate per player and delves which have 100% per bountiful I don’t think those are too low. Raiding could use some help as it’s standing at 20% buffing it to 30% would be great. But droprates are not the only problem like Grim batol loot table this tier which add also a lot to the rng.