Tobold's Blog
Monday, August 07, 2006
 
Chance to get epics

Most people think that everybody else is getting more epics than they are, that is just human nature. But is your chance to get an epic in a raid independant of your class? No, it isn't, just the reasons for that are not what you might think.

In most guilds I've raided with there was a persistent rumor that in MC more druid and warlock stuff dropped than items for other classes. And the warriors always complain that for their class there is the least amount of drops. But if you look at the average raid, you notice that there are lots of warriors, and relatively few warlocks and druids. And according to the loot tables, loot for all classes drops about equally, and if anything the warrior set drops slightly more often than the druid or warlock set. What happens is that people automatically count the drop rate *per character*, and not per class.

I noticed the same with my raiding priest. Although our DKP system favors frequent raiders, and I raid less than some other players, I got quite a good yield of epics out the raids I attended. That is simply because there are usually twice as many warriors present than priests, and assuming equal drop rates of the might and the prophecy set, my chance as priest to get an epic is thus twice as high as a warrior's.

Actually warriors might be a specifically bad class to get epics, unless you happen to be the designated main tank of your guild. Many guilds have rules in place which let the main tank receive more than his fair share of epics, because the equipment of the main tank is so important for the raid group as a whole. But that obviously results in the other warriors in the raid getting even less epics. With warriors being one of the most frequent classes, and being most dependant on their gear for their performance, warrior is really the least favored class for epics.

In summary, not every class has an equal chance of receiving epics in a raid, but that is for simple statistical reasons, and not because the loot tables aren't balanced. By chosing a less frequently played class, you not only get into a guild or into a raid easier, you also end up getting epics more frequently.
Comments:
Things are not that bad. Of course, warlocks gets more class-specific item, but they get less multi-class items (such as trinkets, weapons, rings, necklace).
Any "even" loot-system will try to balance the per-character drop rate this way.
Blizzard could fix this by changing the drop rate of a class-item propotionnaly to the number of this class in the raid. (If they did it, I never noticed it)

The big problems comes when you must decide what class is an item designed for ... Especially for hybrid class, when people want to play in a very specifique way (thinks of feral druids, war-ladin, and windfury-shamans)
I often ear things like "this bow is for rogue, hunters can easily get a better one through quest" sometimes it prevents people from claiming a loot they want... and playing their character the way they want, sad ;(

Another problems is when people seek only "pvp-oriented" stuff.
That's the case for wariors, the main tank gets every tanking weapons, thus getting more loots, but he has no chance to get a good two handed weapon.

I cant think of a system that will satisfy everybody, but the difficulty to get the items you want makes it a lot more valuable.
 
I recently started raiding with my feral druid and I benefited greatly from druids being a less-played class. On my first run, I received 3 pieces of Cenarion, granted not very useful for a feral druid, but helpful nonetheless. Playing feral is challenging as you have to cobble together your gear from various epic drops (Wristguards of Stability, Boots of the Vanguard, Foror's Eyepatch come to mind) and don't benefit greatly from the raid set pieces.

Regarding what loot goes where and why, our guild uses http://www.wow-loot.com to help determine who should get priority on certain items. So far, it's helped greatly and is an agreed upon source. It gives a star value to the items to help guide them to the proper class/spec.
 
The main problem is that its very easy for players to forget what items dropped in a previous raid and only focus on the current run. A player could go through their guild's dkp website to track down raid drops but that's time spent not in game.

I'm hoping that one day a system is implemented in game for tracking DKP and item drops during raids.

relmstein.blogspot.com
 
I just dinged 58 last night with my Rogue which makes me elligible for 5 man instance runs.Woot! I am really looking forward to going on runs with the small guild I am part of because there is only one other rogue and he already has many of the items that I desire; so I have a feeling that the amount of epics I have is going to go from 0 to many fairly soon but only time will tell. I have to agree with Tobold; if you have 5 warriors and 1 rogue then of course the rogue is going to be epic'd out before the warriors. I think that many people go for the class that is "cool" only to find out later that everyone else picked the same cool class. I'm glad that I picked a class that isn't overly popular; at least not on the server I am on.
 
In our guild's experience, loot "streaks" are the #1 problem. I know that loot is "suppose" to drop evenly across the board, however; we have several streaks that technically should not occur (<1% chance based on an "even" drop rate).

Our MT got his wrath shoulders after 4 straight months of killing Chromag. Simply put, with 2 shoulder drops per kill, there should be a 25% chance any 1 class will see thier item drop. The odds of not getting the shoulders for ~16 straight weeks of farming is about 1%.

But Chromag is not the only exmaple. We get few mage bracers or belts. We get very few priest robes. We get no hunter gloves. ETC...

It is probable that 1 or 2 "streaks" could occur. But on just about EVERY BOSS?!?!?! No. Clearly this defies the law of averages.
 
Last Friday, two members of my guild tabulated our Tier 2 drops by class and ran the statistics. The verdict? Druids in our guild are getting screwed. Tier 2 druid drop rate is around 6%. Rogues were high with around 13%. Warlocks and Mages (I think) tied at around 11-12%. Everyone else was at 12-13%. Obviously this is an objective measure of loot drops over a decent period of time (since it covers many Ony & Rags kills and 2-3 Nef kills, plus tons of pre-Nef BWL kills). Very interesting results.
 
Well doesn't Naxx improve this in terms of dropping the desecrated items that multiple classes could use to make their tier 3?
 
Streaks can be insane. As Tobold stated, everyone thinks Warlock loot drops the most. In my guild the last 5 MC clears has yielded a total of 3 pieces of Felheart. 1 of them was BoE from trash mobs and 1 was the gloves which is only BoP piece all our Warlocks have already. 5 Rag kills also yielded no Warlock pants. We average 4 to 5 Warlocks per raid in our guild. Now for druids we average only 2 per raid. In those same 5 weeks we have had 10 Druid Cenarion drops and Rag dropped the druid pants 3 times.
 
To me that looks like every class got the same number of epics, around 100. Only the rogue and warrior numbers are statistically significantly different from 100.

Now in my experience the average MC raid has many more warriors than rogues. So I wonder if either there is some sort of automatic adjustment (note that your guild didn't find any shaman drops). Or whether Blizzard just manually did a slight adjustment to the loot tables to counter that know problem.
 
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