Loot Management Week: Karazhan
September 24, 2007 by Matticus
Filed under Loot Distribution
Sorry guys, I had a really busy weekend. I had to finish up a few projects and participate in my hockey draft. I think my picks look pretty solid.
I’ve noticed an alarming trend lately in how some younger Guilds are imposing DKP for their Karazhan runs. Wait, what? Why? Why use DKP for loot distribution in a small ten man instance? Hopefully my plea can change the course of Guilds so that they don’t run into any Guild Drama later on in their path.
Don’t use DKP for Karazhan. As a Guild run, there will be at most two classes that are the same (warrior/warrior, priest/priest). It adds unnecessary work and possible consequences in the future. Loot should be decided via rolls or gear prioritization. I’m assuming that your guild is running with the same crew of people on a weekly basis. Even if you have two or three groups for Karazhan, then the loot being distributed should remain in those individual groups.
Like come on, seriously, its only a ten man raid. Did anyone run UBRS with DKP? I think not. There’s only a few pieces in Karazhan that can be used by multiple classes. Even then, a simple roll off will work for it. There’s a LOT of bosses in there that it’s almost virtually guaranteed that everyone will get an upgrade at some point. As you progress through the higher areas of karazhan, you’re going to end up with players with an insane amount of DKP through the roof. Once you start instances like Gruul’s and Mag, then you will have players with lopsided points (in the range of thousands). These are the instances where DKP really DOES matter.
The rest of the week, I’m going to discuss the various methods that Guilds can use to distribute their loot in the best possible way for players. Each loot system is different and should be tailored to the primary objective of the Guild.
I'm Matticus and I play a Dwarf Priest. My home is in Conquest, a raiding Guild that I have founded. Every week, I log 12 hours raiding on Ner'Zhul.
Wynthea is the Troll Priest with the best Mohawk on Firetree. Currently, I raid 4 nights a week in a hardcore guild. I started playing WoW in May 2005, and raiding end-game in May 2007. My guild is currently working through 25-man WotLK content. I've tried playing other classes, but Priests are my passion. I am extremely fond of Dwarves.... especially with Ketchup. 
My name is Sydera and I like to heal things--think Florence Nightingale with foliage. I play a night elf druid on Ner'Zhul, and I raid 12 hours a week. As a guild officer for Conquest, I coordinate healing and recruit new raiders. I started playing WoW in Fall 2005, and it was love at first click. Before I discovered the joys of Broccoli-stalk healing, I raided as a holy paladin, and I now have alts in all healing classes. I have to say, though, bark beats poofy dresses and heavy plate in my book.
I completely agree Matt, we should never use DKP for looting….
My guild does not use DKP for Karazhan. That said though, it’s not a completely bad idea. There’s a huge difference between the lower tower bosses and the higher tower ones. Some of the people that have been in the guild longer had to learn the new instances while the newer people get purplez handed to them at times. It’s not really fair to have a long time running, helping out player lose that one elusive item to a player that’s only been there a couple of weeks and barely has all blues. We talked about using some sort of priority system, but ultimately didn’t.
But on your point about Gruul’s and Mag’s… I completely agree. If one does decide to use DKP (or any other system like that), it should be for Karazhan only. It should not carry over to the 25-man instances.
We accrue DKP in Kara but don’t use it until Gruul. The idea is to encourage the better geared players to help the lower ones out so we don’t have people refusing to run Kara because they don’t need it any more. We did decide to only use DKP when 2 or more want the same item in Kara (Gruul will have min prices). We wanted to avoid the situation Leiandra mentioned where the noob who’s on his first Kara run get’s the drop the old timer has been waiting for a long time to drop. We wanted to reward the dedicated raiders with preference for loot (more DKP means more likely to win bids) If we get to the point where some have insane ammounts of DKP we’ll probably put a cap on it, but we’re not to that point yet.
I’m looking forward to more on loot management!
Great comments! But don’t worry, I’ll get to more on that in a bit… there’s more coming guys
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Our guild used to use dkp for kara, but the outcry of many of its guild members made it stop. It made us waste a lot of time whne progressing, thats for sure…
Then again, guild is still using zero sum, which I hate because almost everyone is in the negatives.
OK so I would normally agree 100% here… and until a few weeks ago I would still.
However in my guild which is a small, casual, friendly guild who is starting to raid Kara regularly we have some issues with no looting system.
Mainly we have 2 members of our guild who have near 100% attendance, are diligent about knowing bosses and being prepared. Yet, they seem to be cursed in the luck of the /roll as they both have been passed up multiple times, often by guildies who have gone very few times.
Is the only other solution to a simple DKP system to dictate that “ok this time if [awesome gear] drops it goes to bobbyjoe”?