Tobold's Blog
Wednesday, March 18, 2009
 
Naxxramas loot table

Using WoWWiki and WoWHead, I compiled a table of all epics that drop in Naxxramas-10. And it appears that there are no "common" and "rare" drops, every item on the loot table of a particular boss has an equal chance of dropping. Clear Naxxramas-10 five times, and statistically speaking you have one of everything. In reality of course Murphy's Law applies, and you get several times the epic nobody wants, and the most wanted thing doesn't drop at all. :) But the loot table gives us an idea for what raid composition Naxxramas is designed, or which classes have the best chances to gear up there.

I didn't go into details of classes and talent trees, for that you'll have to look at WoW-Loot. I just sorted the loot into cloth, leather, mail, plate, and other, with other including all sorts of weapons, off-hand items, jewelry, and trinkets. I subdivided plate and other into categories of caster, melee dps, and tank. And I subdivided leather and mail into caster or melee. I didn't count tokens.

The result was that there are 16 cloth items, 16 leather items, 15 mail items, 24 plate items, and 53 other. The cloth is obviously all for casters. The leather and mail is split half and half for casters and melee/ranged dps. The plate has 9 caster, 8 dps, and 7 tank pieces. And in the other category there are 26 caster, 21 melee/ranged dps, and 6 tank pieces.

The count confirmed my suspicion that there is 50% more plate dropping in Naxxramas than other armor. Which is curious, because there are three plate-wearing classes and three cloth-wearing classes, so there should be equal amounts of cloth and plate. The easiest class to equip in Naxxramas-10 would be a holy paladin, who has 9 pieces of plate nobody else can roll on, plus the largest selection of other items. The hardest classes to equip would be a protection warrior or paladin, a long-standing tradition of Blizzard. Cloth wearers have the biggest competition for armor pieces, but benefit from the largest selection of other items. For mail and leather wearers there are a lot of items that are useable only for few classes and builds, which makes loot distribution there depend strongly on what classes and builds are actually in the raid.

Only about 10% of the epics in Naxxramas-10 are specifically for tanks, a bit more if you count items useable for feral druid tanks. Over half of the epics are for casters, that is healers and spell dps. So for loot purposes a "perfect" raid would only have one tank, 3 healers, 2 spell dps, and 4 melee dps. Teach your death knight to off-tank in dps plate gear, and you're golden. :)
Comments:
Some of the plate has block rating or value which is NFG for DK tank...

If you operate with loot rules where mail/leather casters cant roll on cloth until after the clothies, Moonkin and Elemental Shaman get the shaft... All of the caster leather/mail is itemized for better for heals than dps (there is no hit on any of it for example)... An elemental shaman is further disadvantaged when rolling on cloth and leather because of the common itemization of spirit on this gear... As a prot paladin, I have a full 213 set of healing plate that only took a week or two to gather...

A topic that has come up in our guild (straigh DKP system)while discussing loot is "best in slot only" looters... We have a handful (4or5) of casters holding out on spending DKP until they get The turning tide off of Kel'thuzad (Dropped 2 times in 12 kills for our guild)... While most of our guild is 75%+ in 25man gear, these players have looted only a few items each and top the DKP charts... While I do think they are correct believing that The Turning Tide would make a huge DPS difference I do disagree with this kind of thinking... Most of our guild agrees with my opinion that it serves progression the most if people loot the gear that drops and build the best set of gear they can (a sort of Game Theory for loot)...
 
*The count confirmed my suspicion that there is 50% more plate dropping in Naxxramas than other armor*

Makes you wonder how the developers design the loot tables. Do they roll a dice? ;)
 
You are discounting specs. There are 3 plate specs which require very different stats: healing, dps, and tanking. Meanwhile, all the cloth specs share most stats. So you need the extra plate in order to guarantee the correct type of gear to the plate wearers.

Essentially, your cloth wearers will make full use of the cloth that drops, while plate can be a little more sketchy. I've been on Naxx runs where plenty of dps plate dropped but not a single piece of healing plate.
 
ts the amount of 1h daggers that always flummoxes me. Useful for 1 spec of 1 class?
 
@ Rohan actually there are about 6 Plate specs.

Holy Paladin
Ret Paladin
Prot Paladin
Prot Warrior
Arms Warrior
Fury Warrior
DPS Deathknight
Prot Deathknight

Now out of those, Protwarrior,Paladin and Deathknight all use basicaly the same items, the exception being shields. Ret Paladins, Arms Warriors, DPS deathknights and Fury warriors all share very similar gear (The Primary Difference being the level to which +hit is emphasized based on if your arms or fury, and exactly what type of dps DK you are)

That means that 3 Specs can share prot gear, and 4 Specs can share DPS gear.
Holy paladins on the other hand are the single class/spec combination that requires plate with +spelldamage. As such holy paladin plate is of the least use to the largest number of people in a raid.
 
@Deuce- I seem to remember (can't check, at work) that one of the devs said that Naxx gear was not well-itemized by design, to create additional gearing viability. A piece that has +spirit instead of +hit can still be an upgrade for many new raiders, etc. This also explans the plate disparity...healers/dps casters can share gear and only take a small hit (since effectiveness scales primarily with +sp) whereas tank plate and dps plate (and caster plate, obv.) are very different.
Regardless, I think having a cloth piece that is BIS for, say, locks/mages/spriests/boomkins/ele shammies is better than having three separate BIS pieces, which really results in pleasing the dice gods. (My experience may be a bit colored, as I only raid in a 10-man group, which typically has no rogues/shammies/hunters/boomkins/ferals, so we end up sharding a lot of mail/leather. In related news, I've rerolled a Druid.) I like what Blizz has done for itemization, and I hope they'll find a clever way to solve the problem of caster plate/mail.
 
@Spinksville

I've seen hunters duel wield them as stat-sticks on occasion. Want to see something frightening? Look at how many different druid staves there are combined between Naxx 10 and 25man. Although again I've seen hunters using those as stat-sticks also. Naxx is just absolutely full of weapons, which is a little silly I think. 9 out of 10 times people are just going to want what is off kel'thuzad, Since he is a arms locker apparently. Even if you grab a weapon off an erlier boss its generally only until you replace it.
 
It gets more interesting when you take into account the relative popularity of the different specs. Since I posted about healing loot on your Open Sunday thread a couple of weeks ago, I've revised the numbers to take that into account. Once you've done that, all the healers work end up with roughly the same chance to upgrade (e.g. druids have the fewest drops, but they are rarer than priests, so it evens out), apart from holy paladins. They have that happy combination of lots of loot designed specifically for them (more than any other class) and rarity. If you want to gear up quickly as a raider it's by far the best route.

I'll be curious to see if this trend continues in Ulduar.
 
@CH

There is a difference between bad itemization and failed itemization... 2 trinkets come to mind here - Defenders Code (850 armor + dodge use) and Mark of Norgannon (69 Expertise + haste use)... Defenders Code doesnt cut it in a time where magic damage is prevelent (in the 2 hardest encounters at least) and double stamina trinkets is more the norm than the exception... Mark of Norgannon (i226) drops of 25 Malagos and isnt in the top 3 trinkets for any melee DPS spec... I could name quite a few more examples (Every plate DPS helm before Mal25 < Titansteel crafted) before we get to the whole mana regen discussion... The end result of this is alot of shards and wasted DKP (noobs)...

For my 2 alts, I have all but skipped 10 man raiding and gone right to 25 man pugs (after about 50 badges worth of heroics and some crafted gear)...
 
As for plate: you have healing gear, DK tanking gear and paladin/warrior tanking gear (with block but). Tanking gear for these specs of course overlap. DPS gear can be used by all DPS plate classes and healing gear by... paladins. Getting rid of the paladin healing gear would bring down the total count to 16: equal to leather/mail gear. With the downside that leather/mail caster gear is more itemized for healers then dps. Maybe add a few items with +hit?

Only a matter of time untill plate healing gear is removed from the game. Maybe some mechanic to let paladins use AP <> spellpower conversion such as my deathknight has? Haste & crit already work for spells.
 
My guild has so few clothies, even with passing the cloth up the chain to leather/mail/plate wearing classes, more than 50% of it is de'd. No one plays clothies any more.
 
> The hardest classes to equip would be a protection warrior
> or paladin, a long-standing tradition of Blizzard.

Surprise surprise!

This is because Blizzard knows that ultimately, your raid progression is controlled by the abilities of your tanks. If they can slow down the speed with which you gear up your tanks, you slow their progression and increase the time sink. :(

-Michael
Muckbeast - Game Design and Online Worlds
http://www.muckbeast.com
 
This comment has been removed by the author.
 
According to Armory Musings (stats as of 10th March 2009), the L80 class breakdown is as follows: Cloth 26%, Leather 18%, Mail 21%, Plate 35%. Of the plate wearers, 30% are DKs and only 14% are holy paladins.

So whilst there are a lot of plate wearers out there, cloth is still the second most common spec and healing priests (both holy and discipline combined) are the most common of all the healers.

Now these numbers don't tell the whole story, as they are for L80s as a whole and don't take into account whether people are raiding, PvPing or simply soloing dailies. They also don't tell you much about individual experiences, e.g. in my entire time playing WOW (since the UK launch), I've only ever once been in an instance with a holy paladin doing the healing, possibly because I mostly play Horde side. However, they are a rough guide to how common the classes are as a whole and are the best global stats I've seen so far.
 
Ooops - bad typing this morning! The above post was aimed at Vellon's comments about the rareness of cloth wearers.
 
I've cleared Naxx25 3 times now on my Holy Paladin.I've also done a few Sarth25 and Malygos25 (Maly only once). I'm the only Holy Paladin in my guild.

I have 25 man epics on my head, shoulders, bracers, gloves, legs, boots. In other words, the only thing I'm don't have are the items that have the most competition (rings, trinkets, necks, cloak) and a chest piece.

I love the fact that I'm gearing up.

I'm annoyed at the fact that I'm basically acting as a loot sponge.
 
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