10 v. 25 Man Drop Rates

So this was part of a blue post:

"The intent is for the difficulty to be comparable. While not directly relevant to difficulty or tuning, it may also be worth noting that 25-player bosses drop 6 items in both Normal and Heroic difficulty now, instead of just in Heroic, and that the 25-player versions will drop 3 set tokens, instead of the 2 seen in Dragon Soul".

Blizzard went to all the trouble of making 10 man raiding viable and now 25 man is getting a buff to loot drops and unless they say otherwise it appears 10 man will still be 2 drops (1 tier, 1 item). I don't really complain about loot, but this seem patently unfair to those of us in 10 man raiding guilds.

I know all about RNG being RNG, but there is a problem when one has 22 Heroic Morchock kills and has seen the Plate healing boots drop exactly 0 times; or the shields off Blackthorn or the axe off Zon'ozz drop once (34 combined kills) and that was heroic.

I know we all have stories about the damn piece that won't drop ... ever... but it does get discouraging. It seems that some of that discouragement is being aliveated in 25 man, but 10 man is being left to the old 2 pieces dropping (1 tier, 1 item). So does this mean Blizz wants to push 25 man raiding ahead of 10 man?

well on most servers 10 mans are a lot more prevelent than 25 mans so this may be a move to help even it out.

I can tell you the other side of the story 2 tokens dropping in 25man DS was too low, took ages to get everyone tier. With a little off balance roster, lot of vanquisher/protector classes, and a bit of bad luck people were still sporting LFR tier while we'd done DS for ages. Don't even mention tier for offspec that was just impossible.... while in firelands it felt much better.

We didn't got the castershield of blackhorn until after 12-15 weeks or so (with 5 people after the shield) and lack of those random trinkets but that's just bad luck. I can imagine bad luck in 10man being worse but the amount of tier dropping in 25mans doesn't have much to do with that.

I can assure you that if blizzard would leave it at 2 tier drops for 25mans the 25man raids would die out faster then they do already. The 1:3 ratio seems a good balance since 25mans usually have a larger roster at least better then 1:2 ratio that was DS that was just stupid /rant

In 10-mans we got screwed over with so much sharded loot the very first week of clearing things that it wasn't even funny. 25-man should consider themselves lucky to at least be using the loot they get, even if it's not exactly what you were hoping to have drop.

here's something else to consider WRT loot balance:

The way 10 mans got screwed over wasn't so much the ratio of loot to players, that was the same (when it was 2:5). So yes, at 6 25 mans still get a buff, but the REAL way 10 mans got screwed over was b/c when there's only 7 or 8 bosses, the bosses have to have massive loot tables in order to cover all item slots for all classes. With 16 bosses, the loot tables will(should) be significantly smaller, so the odds of seeing an item you need drop will increase in the 10 man world.

That's not to say that 25 mans won't have a slight loot advantage, more-so I'm just saying that at least in T14, 10 mans probably won't have AS hard of a time as they did in Firelands and DS, WRT loot drops.

Aggathon I hope you're right about smaller loot tables but with 2 raids being a higher tier then the first raid I expect the loottables to be not that much smaller (10 bosses in the last 2 raids compared to 8 in DS).

"Mists of Pandaria will also include two other raid zones, which we plan to make available a few weeks after Mogu’shan Vaults: the Heart of the Fear and Terrace of Endless Spring. Both of these instances are a higher tier than the Mogu’shan Vaults and are designed to be tackled using gear obtained in the Vaults, which is why we plan to make them accessible a few weeks after the Vaults unlock."

Edit: If the info here is correct http://www.wowpedia.org/Mogu'shan_Vaults the loottables are about the same maybe even 1-2 lootdrops larger.

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Originally Posted by Aggathon

but the REAL way 10 mans got screwed over was b/c when there's only 7 or 8 bosses, the bosses have to have massive loot tables in order to cover all item slots for all classes. With 16 bosses, the loot tables will(should) be significantly smaller, so the odds of seeing an item you need drop will increase in the 10 man world.

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That's a good point Agg; I'd just caveat it with "as long as the boss loot tables have some over lapping items." I bring this up because of wands in Tier 11 - it was just stupid that one wand with Spirit dropped off a boss and the dps wand was a random trash drop and those were your only chances, despite lots of bosses in T11 compared to the rest of Cata.

We've discussed the loot tables before, hopefully they improve the variety of loot in MoP; at least in ICC you had some choices, for example there were tank rings, then the tank ring with armor; so that while you may not have gotten the BiS ring, at least you got a level appropriate tank ring and weren't totally closed out because the RNG gods hated you. Was the same way for neck pieces, etc. choices and variety.

I guess what really gets me in DS is that there are gear gaps, no heroic cloaks, limited heroic neck (why does the spirit using caster/healer get a heroic neck but the tank doesn't), caster off hand being a trash drop that's BoP, but the Spirit off hand is a boss drop etc. No upgrade to heroic version tokens like in FL. I could go on and on, but it just seems things were poorly thought out.

I don't mind gear gaps, what I mind is a lack of choice.

The problem isn't so much the number of drops, it's the number of useable drops. Chances are, the 25 man will see at least something useable by someone. Simply a matter of numbers. That's one of the nicer things about tokens as they've been done before.... they hit a wider spread. Placement of these has been an issue in the past.

This is again, a fine example of something that Blizz keeps "listening" to us about, and still giving us something back that we don't really want.

At least they are going in a better direction with this whole, "lucky panda bonus" thing that they are incorporating. Hell, I wouldn't even be opposed to a "boss shop"...... you killed a boss? Great! You now have access to their loot table under the valor vendor. Prices and costs.... I'd probably make it a significant amount of valor points... or better yet, points earned only from killing that boss. You killed Zonozz 20 times? Great... you get 20 Zonozz points.

But this reliance (over-reliance) on RNG.... it blows.

Edit: my "zonozz points" example is rough. But really.... the use of valor points alone isn't a good fix. I don't like the idea that, I could kill Deathwing once... and then just run dungeons and collect all of his gear at my pleasure running dungeons. It'll be abused and exploited. Maybe, killing him multiple times increases the cap on points that can be spent on "his" gear...... or simply.... certain items require "unlocks". 1 kill for rings.... 3 for armor.... 5 for weapons.... something like that.

In any case.... again.... this RNG or nothing thing?..... it blows.

In SWTOR they had software that made it so only items useable by the raid would drop off the boss, it was actually one of the things the game had going for it. Yes, adding something like this would probably be time consuming, but the point is it's doable. Like, come on Blizzard, i thought you guys were pro at stealing other peoples ideas.

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Originally Posted by Gregasaurous

In SWTOR they had software that made it so only items useable by the raid would drop off the boss, it was actually one of the things the game had going for it. Yes, adding something like this would probably be time consuming, but the point is it's doable. Like, come on Blizzard, i thought you guys were pro at stealing other peoples ideas.

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Unfortunately a system such as that has to be built into the architecture as a whole. The servers can support it, but the game isn't capable of doing something like that without requiring a drastic change in coding since the whole system has to support current and old raid content due to the nature of item drops.

Blizzard does need to get rid of duplicate item drops though, that was one thing I hated most about Cataclysm, they did it in ICC as well. It's worse for 10 man groups more then it is for 25's though.

I don't really care about how many items drop, just stop this bullshit about "your best in slot items have a 0.5% drop chance from each boss and there is no alternative for that slot".

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Originally Posted by Fetzie

I don't really care about how many items drop, just stop this bullshit about "your best in slot items have a 0.5% drop chance from each boss and there is no alternative for that slot".

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This... I don't mind shared loot drops, but if anything they should be a much higher chance and ideally they would be bonus loot rather than replacing a normal drop. 1% chance per a person in the raid that the boss drops something from the shared loot table as a bonus item perhaps. Or throw in an optional boss that only drops shared loot items.

I don't think that the game should ONLY drop useable loot, but should slightly increase the drop rate of useable gear and the shared boss loot would be extra loot so a 10 man would get 1 tier, 1 non-shared boss loot and possibly 1 shared boss loot giving a chance for 3 items to drop. Granted one doesn't need full b.i.s. gear , but for me it doesn't feel like the tier is complete when I'm still missing 2 pieces.

http://www.mmo-champion.com/threads/...of-10m-vs.-25m

Very nice thread where they built a loot simulator. 10 man gets screwed pretty hard. Between this new 25 man loot increase, removing shared lockout and what probability does to loot distribution in 10s....Blizz seems to be pushing HARD to get 25s back to where they were.

Wait, did they actually remove the lockout between 10s and 25s?

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Originally Posted by Aggathon

Wait, did they actually remove the lockout between 10s and 25s?

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This is news to me too... doesn't sound like something they would do.

I know they had talked about maybe doing something like sometime eventually maybe possibly could be but hadn't decided how they'd go about it or how they'd modify looting (or if they would). But I didn't think they actually DID it without changing loot permissions/structures.

Well, that part may be a false alarm. [guilty look] I've been on the D3 forums for the last 4-6 weeks and haven't kept up on MoP changes [/guilty look]

Edit: But that was the rumor that was being stated as a probable type of change last I was around the WoW forums.

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Originally Posted by sifuedition

Blizz seems to be pushing HARD to get 25s back to where they were.

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They must be working so hard doing soo many things to promote 25s again..... or wait they only did 1 thing improving the tier drops from 2 to 3 since dropping 2 was stupidly low for 25s. I really don't think it has anything to do with 10/25 balance more that only 2 tierdrops was frustratingly slow and not fun.