Normal mode raids: please don’t settle on this loot system...

[Reinha]

Would you rather have the game randomly roll one of the 7 armor classes, randomly roll the gear slot too and then (assuming you can actually use the drop) make you roll against teammates who use the same gear type (who will roll "Need" even if it's not an upgrade)? That's the dungeon / 24-man loot method and it's way more random than what we have now.

[Shurrikhan]

Would you rather have the game randomly roll one of the 7 armor classes, randomly roll the gear slot too and then (assuming you can actually use the drop) make you roll against teammates who use the same gear type (who will roll "Need" even if it's not an upgrade)? That's the dungeon / 24-man loot method and it's way more random than what we have now.

One poor system being worse than another poor system does not mean the first isn't worse than it needs to be.

Personal loot, for instance, is yet another commonly used loot distribution in MMOs and faces downsides only in situations where a static is consistent across a tier and vying for early progression.

[Reinha]

One poor system being worse than another poor system does not mean the first isn't worse than it needs to be.

Personal loot, for instance, is yet another commonly used loot distribution in MMOs and faces downsides only in situations where a static is consistent across a tier and vying for early progression.

I have played with personal loot and it is the same level of garbage as random gear drops. It's still a gamble to get an item at all and then also to get it for the right slot. In some forms of personal loot whichever drops you don't want to use can't even be passed on to someone else so that they have a better time looting. If you can't get loot for a job you aren't currently playing then personal loot forces you to play lower geared jobs in order to get gear for them. This is not the case with tokens and tomes.

The system we have for normal 8 man raids isn't poor at all. You can get one or more pieces you can use every week, for any job and any slot regardless of what job you run the raid with. You have a 50% chance to get any token per kill and the average amount of runs it takes to get all tokens per week is two per boss, 8 total. This amount of RNG is totally bearable. You can do with even fewer runs if you collect your tokens in a different order than other people. It is a very small amount of work and takes only 4 weeks to complete (per job) when combined with tome gear.

I honestly don't see what issue people could have aside from not getting to select a piece from the loot list after only one weekly kill for all four bosses. I doubt any game has such a generous loot system for their main PvE content.

[Shurrikhan]

I have played with personal loot and it is the same level of garbage as random gear drops. It's still a gamble to get an item at all and then also to get it for the right slot. In some forms of personal loot whichever drops you don't want to use can't even be passed on to someone else so that they have a better time looting. If you can't get loot for a job you aren't currently playing then personal loot forces you to play lower geared jobs in order to get gear for them. This is not the case with tokens and tomes.

The system we have for normal 8 man raids isn't poor at all. You can get one or more pieces you can use every week, for any job and any slot regardless of what job you run the raid with. You have a 50% chance to get any token per kill and the average amount of runs it takes to get all tokens per week is two per boss, 8 total. This amount of RNG is totally bearable. You can do with even fewer runs if you collect your tokens in a different order than other people. It is a very small amount of work and takes only 4 weeks to complete (per job) when combined with tome gear.

I honestly don't see what issue people could have aside from not getting to select a piece from the loot list after only one weekly kill for all four bosses. I doubt any game has such a generous loot system for their main PvE content.

I'd argue the token system isn't poor, except in that it takes up item slots, but the loot competition following removal of weekly lockouts certainly brings particular disadvantages to the fore. A system that works if and when a player must decide which single token to take will not necessarily (or remotely likely) work well when any player able to take all.

In the same way, normalized or supplemented RNG in personal loot systems allows for very similar rates of acquisition to token- or currency-based gear progression, but still allows for a sense of boss caches. Without any normalization, however, the same issue occurs. It ends up less a matter of the "right" system, as a system done "right". (Personally, I like a mix, slightly favoring currency for a sense of deliberate or player-chosen progression, adapting for certain random drops.) But I do think it's safe to say that the current system is not ideal, and ends up problematic after cap removal.