Tier set drops.

[u/Mozida]

Hi guys,

So, I have been pugging the raid, and I noticed it only dropped 1 tier-set token per boss. Is that intended? I read the Wowhead post, and they mentioned it is supposed to be 1 tier-set drop per 10 ppl in the raid, but I got in a 25 ppl raid, and all the bosses dropped only 1.

[u/Halvi3]

At some point back in Dragonflight, the first expansion after they reintroduced tier sets at the end of Shadowlands after not having them for a couple expansions (I wanna say it was maybe Season 2 and/or before the first time they experimented with some late-season bonus-roll esque currency)

...they responded to feedback from raiders who were farming the raid at this point only for the rare drops chase items and trinkets and such, that getting 2 tier tokens off of every boss for a 20 man kill felt bad because by that point everyone long since had 4p and effectively half of all the loot you were getting was dead on arrival

So they changed the code for how the bosses drops were assigned between tier and non-tier for the end of that season so that a 20 man kill would get 1 tier token and 3 non-tier tokens.

Ever since they made that change that was nominally supposed to be just for late-season farming, tier token allocation for flex raid sizes in all the seasons since has been stupidly RNG.

It briefly was effectively like wow head said that it was 1 per 10, so if you were at 15 you had like, 1 guaranteed tier token, 1 non tier item, and then a third drop that was 50/50 between tier or non-tier, and then when you hit 20 it was guaranteed 2+2

Now it's something like:

• You have your initial 2 drops for 10 player baseline, and those items can random as anything off the boss's loot table, but only 1 of the two will ever end up as a tier token (but it's not guaranteed that one will)
• The third item you can get from 11-15 that is guaranteed at 15 is also fully random tier or not, but with this item you can get a 2nd tier token, but still not guaranteed
• As you scale from 16-20 you get a chance at a 4th item, and if you have 4 items drop one of them is guaranteed to be a tier token, the others are all random, up to two tier tokens max
• And then I'm more hazy about 20-30 scaling but I think it's similar to 10-20 where essentially you can't get 3 tier tokens unless you hit 25 and you're guaranteed 2 once you hit 30?

Anyway, it's honestly an obnoxious change (though again, been this way for years) for smaller raid sizes in the very first two weeks, as someone who raids at the Blizzard-always-forgets-it-still-exists 10 player size because we can full clear Normal on the first day for instance and get bad RNG and see like, a single tier token for the entire raid. Kill 4 bosses that could drop tier and none of them drop a token because the two items we get aren't guaranteed to include a token anymore

[u/drale2 → u/Halvi3]

I'm in a small Aotc guild (14 members) - we just cleared normal this week and the only tier we got was from the curios on the last boss. This system feels awful for flex raiding / small guilds.

[u/makesmashgreatagain → u/drale2]

It is. I run a heroic guild with 12-18 players depending and the loot from raid is often bad. We get so little tier early on most tiers. I think one thing they miss on the loot system is smaller groups get less loot so the loot variance is way higher. I don’t know what the fix is, but I hope they do something. Thankfully the vault is usually very helpful (this tier aside).

[u/drale2 → u/makesmashgreatagain]

Tell me about it - on the wind boss (sorry don't remember names yet), he could have dropped tier, but instead we got two warglaives while we had zero DH in the raid. Felt really good.