Zebra Guild

Hi striped ones,

Zebra is tweaking the loot rules to allow faster gear up for the main specs of the raiding members. The change is for the declaration phase of the looting. In addition to our original "bonus" and "nobonus" whispers, we will now use a new word: "offspec". This will indicate that you can use the item, but not for your main spec. If you win an item using "offspec", you will not lose any karma. In fact, you will not be able to bonus on an off-spec item anymore. For tier items where you will need to pay a minimum amount of karma (25), you will not lose this when you declare "offspec" and win the item.

The priority for the loot candidate selection is as follows:
1. People who declares bonus: as long as they are within 50 karma of the top karma, they can roll. (No change). If there are no other people who declares bonus or nobonus, they will not lose any karma for looting the item. Specifically, if the only two declarations are bonus and offspec, the winner will not lose karma. (Extended rule)
2. People who declare nobonus: if there are no bonus declarations, or if the highest karma for the bonus declaration is less than 50, they can roll. (No change)
3. People who declare offspec: they can roll only if all other declarations are also offspec. (New rule)

When selecting how to declare on what loot, the simplest rule of thumb is whether you will wear the item in your main spec or in your off spec. For example, a mage whose specs are fire and arcane, but comes to raid as fire should not declare bonus or nobonus for an item that he is planning to wear in his Arcane build.

Another example is the PvP item drops from the Vault of Archavon. Nobody can declare bonus or nobonus on these items, as all of our main specs are PvE builds, and the PvP items are usually no good for raiding.

We are planning to let you declare using a honor system: we will trust everyone to do the right thing, but we will also check for compliance occasionally. When there is a mistake, in most cases we will simply correct the mistake by transferring the loot to someone more deserving. If we cannot do this because of in-game limitations (time passed, enchants made, etc), we will treat the loot asif it were bonused, and deduct karma from the winner.

In addition to the above rules, there are still a number of classes that have three specs. For these specs, you should declare offspec only if the item is for your actual off-spec that you can switch to immediately using the dual talent build feature. Some of our members actively use the offspec in either 25 or 10 men raids. While we do not officially support 10-men raiding in Zebra, we also do not want to hamper the 10-men progress by giving an item that they can use to someone else who'll keep it in the bank, marinating for when they will respec in the future. The declaration for these items will be as we have done in the past: wait until the master looter announces that the item will go for disenchant, and then declare "offspec" and roll immediately.

For the main specs: we still expect you to declare bonus on items you really want, and nobonus on items you could make use of. Given our stance on the 10-men raiding and offspecs, we would like you to declare nothing or offspec if you know that the item is inferior to the one you are already wearing. If it is an upgrade to the alternative you are keeping in your backpack, treat it as offspec.These new rules should act as an incentive to bonus more often, because your chances of not losing karma on a bonused item is now considerably higher than our old implementation.

If you want clarifications on any aspect of these new rules, please contact one of our officers.

Happy raiding,
Dys