What's DKP?

Ok this occured to me when I was writing the last post and so I thought I would write a small piece about it.

Loot Rules change between players and instances and guilds depending on your play style and the difficulty of the content.

Open Rolls are usually used in 5-man and 10-man instances. This just means that you are given the opportunity to press a button for either NEED or GREED for an item. Most players at the top levels know to press Need only when the item in question can immediately be equipped and benefit the player more than the item they currently have equipped in that slot. Greed is simply for, oh thats a nice item I might use if ....., or I want the gold for selling it if now one else needs it.

Now, when we come to the harder 25-man raids the items that drop are quite valuable to many people in the raid group and to help out with fairness and making sure that everyone gets loots that will benefit the whole group, we have a way of keeping track of who's been investing the time in the guild and should get priority. This is called DKP - or Dragon Kill Points. You can research how this came about elsewhere there is plenty written on the subject.

In my guild we use a zero sum way of tracking based on our timer. So basically, we've assigned values for the items based on their level and where they come from. Each week we count up the amounts spent on the loot that dropped, divide it by the number of hours raiding and the number of raiders then apply that number to everyone who raided a given night. The reason we break it into the whole timer is that some nights are 'farm' content (lots of loot dropping) and others are 'learning' (maybe nothing drops). We like to reward both equally for the time they're investing.

Bidding on an item simply means you whisper the Master Looter that you are interested in an item. He/She looks at the table to see who of the people interested, has the most DKP and assigns that person the item. Obviously it's more complex than that but that's the basics. So when the timer is calculated, the cost of an item is subtracted from the person who got it and distributed to the entire raiding group.