The way that loot is distributed and received has changed tremendously over the course of WoW’s history, and particularly in raids, it can sometimes be a point of contention.
In the past, things like Master Loot have allowed guilds to allocate items in a very specific way, but that system was taken away in favor of a “Personal Loot” system that sometimes led to a sub-optimal distribution of loot for highly organized competitive guilds. But yesterday, WoW game director Ion Hazzikostas told reporters that the team is intending to reintroduce a form of group loot specifically for raid instances in Dragonflight.
For the absolute top guilds in the world, the personal loot system, which has existed since before the massive rise in popularity of the raiding Race to World First, meant that players in guilds needed to gear up numerous characters outside of their main.
These alternate characters would be used in what are called “split raids,” with very complicated and specific raid compositions intended to maximize the way that gear is funneled to every player’s main character.
While those split raids would still exist with some form of group loot, gamers in top guilds have regularly looked back fondly at how much more simple it was when loot could be easily traded and distributed to the main characters that needed it through Master Loot.
Hazzikostas made it very clear that Master Loot specifically isn’t coming back. But the flexibility that group loot offers will likely serve the same purpose for the top raiding guilds like Team Liquid and Echo.
“Moving away from personal to a shared pool of loot, where you kill a raid boss, you work together with 15 or 20 or 30 people to do it, there’s 5 items on the corpse and you can roll for those items… that’s a world we think we want to be in again,” Hazzikostas said.
The team hasn’t hashed out all of the details for group loot yet, but the intention is that it will be a raid-specific feature. Players will still have personal loot in dungeons.
“We haven’t really heard people clamoring for the return of group loot in dungeons, and getting a bow from a chest at the end of a dungeon when a group has no hunter,” Hazzikostas said. “Raids are uniquely a cooperative experience, they lend themselves to a cooperative loot allocation mechanism.”
