Project Lore

There's a few well-known lucky rollers in my guild, and let's just say I'm not one of them. Sure, I get my fair share of loot, but oftentimes it's by default (that is, no one else wants said loot). When it comes to my guild's 10-man groups, we don't use an intricate loot system -- we're all pretty fair people. Roll if you want something. If it's a bigger upgrade for someone else in the group, take that into consideration. And if you've already won several pieces of loot in a night, consider sitting out a roll. It's not a system that works for PUGs or guilds that don't share a sense of camaraderie, but it's great for my guild.

When it comes to 25-man loot, we usually use Suicide Kings (more on that in a later post). But this past weekend we were just having fun running some random stuff. I asked who wanted to run Onyxia since we hadn't done much dragon-slaying in awhile, and off we went. We wiped once when we tried it out with a 20-man group, then we filled the rest of those slots with friends of friends, and decided to just go with straight-up rolls for gear.

We got her down right away, and none of us were expecting the drop of all drops -- Reins of the Onyxian Drake. It was the first time that any of us had seen it drop. And thank goodness the raid leader had set it to master looter, because it's definitely one of those items that someone might deem worthy of a ninja.

The rare, super-fast mount was up for rolls first, and immediately I typed my /roll. I thought I saw a roll of a 9 next to my toon's name, and immediately gave up hope as the screen filled with double-digit rolls from most others. Then someone typed out that I was in the lead unless anyone else rolled higher -- I did a double take. I scrolled back up the chat window and there it was in print -- I hadn't rolled a 9; I had rolled a 91. Still, usually high rolls for a group with that many people are up around 96 or 98. I was dumbfounded. My luck had finally come through in a big way.

Right away, bids from non-guildies in the raid started coming in. They reached 6k gold before I rebutted with a "Hell no," learned that baby, and promptly took my spot above the Dalaran well perched atop what I would argue to be one of the best-looking (and girliest with hues of pink and purple) mounts currently in game.

Now I'm expecting my rolls to get really bad for a while, to make up for my lucky dice on that one roll. Sure, that's not how statistics works. But it's how it seems to go sometimes. There are a few high-rollers. There are a few constant low-rollers, and then there's the majority who, like me, tend to roll somewhere in the middle. And when you see a deviation from that model, everyone takes notice. I'll just cross my fingers that this means my luck has changed... maybe it's time to partake in a few more mount runs.

What kind of luck to you usually have when it comes to rolling for loot? Are you one of those lucky few that seems to win everything in site, or does it take you a while to get loot because of an unlucky streak?