Master Loot & Guild Master Loot

#1 - July 20, 2016, 2:58 p.m.

UPDATE: This Thread is Full and Locked, Here is a continuation: http://us.battle.net/wow/en/forum/topic/20747695219

I saw in the prepatch yesterday that the option to choose Master Loot has been removed and replaced with "Guild Master Loot". I assume this change was to eliminate a lot of the ninja'ing that happened in pugs and such by making it so bugs cant choose Master Loot .... I am ok with this.

However, from what I can tell, Guild Master Loot requires you to have 100% guild members in your group, and that really bothers me. While the vast majority of our raid group is guild members, we have some people whom we consider to be a part of our guild, but cant afford to realm transfer (or simply dont want to transfer from their server). They raid with us every week and are considered a part of our core raid group, but they are not in our guild therefore we cant choose Master Loot.

There are a few reasons why i think this is a bad move, but i would say this is the biggest one ....

Blizzard has made a lot of changes that make it possible and encouraged to invite your Real ID friends from other servers to your raid groups .... But without Master Loot, it makes the raid leader have to decide between Should I invite my friend from another server and be forced to use Personal Loot or Group Loot? Or should I tell him he cant raid with us because we need to be able to assign loot in our guild run? I can almost guarantee you that there will be people that refuse to let friends into their raids simply because they dont want to be forced to use Personal Loot or Group Loot.

Personally for us, we have 4-5 people in our raid groups that are RealID friends and RL Friends of some of our guild members and they raid with us every week, so because of this change we are going to either have to tell them they cant raid with us or take away our ability to decide how we distribute loot as a guild .....

So my suggestion, instead of only allowing Master Loot for 100% Guild Groups, can you lower that a little so if its like 75% guild members then you can use Master Loot? Or let RealID friends count as Guild Members? That way we can just add our friends to RealID and be able to use Master Loot?

I think the Allowing RealID Friends to be counted as Guild Members would be the best solution because then Blizzard can keep the 100% Guild Members/RealID Friends requirement which will still put an end to ninja looting in pugs and stop those Split Runs that everyone hates.

Please consider this though! I would appreciate any feedback as well.

UPDATE: I was wrong about the 100%, apparently it is still the classic "Guild Group" Requirement of 80%.

Watcher

Game Designer

#8 - July 20, 2016, 5:04 p.m.

Using Master Loot in 7.0 requires that you have a "guild group," which is the same definition that is used for things like Guild Achievements or Guild Challenges: 80% or more of the group must belong to the guild. You can definitely bring a couple (or several, for larger raids) friends along from other servers and the like.

Is the appeal of Master Loot the convenience of only one person needing to check the corpse and then assign everything out? I'm a little perplexed that the reaction has been more "welp, guess we can't bring our friends anymore..." rather than "welp, guess we can't use Master Loot as much now...." I'd imagine there isn't much of a real concern about ninja-looting in a group of guildmembers and friends that raid together on a regular basis, or is there?

I know Personal Loot has been viewed with some skepticism by guild groups over the years. Originally it was due to the drop variance, where you could potentially get 0 or 1 items from a large-raid kill, which felt terrible. We fixed that in Warlords. But even then, being unable to trade loot around to gear up a friend, or pass an item to someone who needs it more, held back its appeal. In Legion, we've made more major improvements to Personal Loot, most importantly including the ability to trade any item that isn't a strict Item Level upgrade to other people who participated in the kill. So if you have (or have ever gotten, post-7.0, even if you no longer have it) an ilvl 720 trinket, any trinket drop you see that's 720 or lower can be traded to others in your raid group. And you still get the benefits of "smart" loot (e.g. never seeing a shield drop if you don't have a shield-user in your raid). Maybe it still isn't the right fit for your group, but I'd encourage people raiding Hellfire this week to give it a try - we've love to hear feedback on how it feels, and what could still be improved. Thanks!

Watcher

Game Designer

#192 - July 20, 2016, 10:37 p.m.

Just to clarify, there are more than two loot options here. No one's forcing raids to use Personal Loot, just because Master is off the table. (Though I am requesting that people give it a try and let us know what you think, since there have been significant improvements. Or don't. Your choice.)

As a player, in my own guild raids, we've used Need/Greed for as long as I can remember, sometimes just passing on contested stuff, figuring out who should get it, and then having them loot it. Uncontested stuff just gets Needed and ends up in the player's hands immediately. It always seemed simpler than manually assigning each piece. But maybe we're weird.

If you aren't a guild group, other Group-Loot-based methods remain available for your use in raids (both Need/Greed and FFA). Obviously that opens the door to ninja-looting, which is why I asked about that concern in my first post. But if you aren't worried that one of your friends/guildmates is going to steal something and vanish, then the only loss is the slight of inconvenience people needing to loot items off a corpse, or having someone trade items around to whoever's awarded them. I of course understand the desire to avoid any inconvenience, and we've tried to minimize the impact on static raiding groups, but we feel that curbing harmful uses (and abuses) of Master Loot in pickup groups is a benefit that offsets those costs.