How Groups Split Loot Without GDKP
With gold-pot runs ruled out, nothing converts a drop into a price and a price into a payout. What is left is whatever the group agreed before the first pull: an open roll, a reserve list, or a guild officer with a spreadsheet. Here is how each one works, and where each one costs somebody something.
Who decides when nobody is bidding
A gold-pot run did the deciding for you. An item dropped, people bid, the highest bid took it and everybody else walked out with a share of the coins, so a pug full of strangers had a reason to behave for 2 hours. Remove the pot and the reason has to come from somewhere else. The rule itself, and what it did to the demand for coins, is set out in the GDKP ban and gold demand, which explains the prohibition rather than what groups do instead.
In practice 3 arrangements have filled the gap in every version where gold trading for loot was off the table. Open rolls, where the system asks need or greed and the dice settle it. Soft reserve, where each player names one item in advance and only the people who named it roll when it drops. And guild distribution, where an officer or a council hands items out against attendance and need, with no roll at all.
None of them is free. Open rolls are fastest and give a geared player the same claim as a first-timer. Soft reserve keeps pugs filling, but it concentrates the value of a run into a short list of items. Guild distribution produces the fairest long-run outcome and the most arguments, because somebody has to defend the decision afterwards.
Need, greed and the rules said out loud
The default client roll offers need, greed and pass, and where an enchanter is present the greed roll can be taken as a disenchant instead. That much is mechanical. Everything around it is convention, and the convention is what pugs argue about: whether an off-spec set counts as need, whether a player who already won something rolls again, whether a tank with a better weapon in the bag may still press need on the drop.
The cheap fix is to say the rules out loud before the first pull and to say them in 1 message, not in 5 corrections after the fact. Main spec need, off-spec greed, 1 need win per run, enchanting materials go to the enchanter or get rolled at the end: a group that hears that line before it moves has nothing left to discover at the wrong moment. A group that does not hear it will discover it over a weapon.
Ninja-looting is a social cost rather than a mechanical one, and on a fresh realm the social cost is unusually high. Early on, the same names keep turning up in the same dungeon queues, and the person who pressed need on a drop they could not use is the person nobody invites in the following weeks. That is the entire enforcement mechanism, and it works better in the first months than it ever does later.
Soft reserve and what it does to a run
Soft reserve is the pug answer to the missing pot. Before the group forms, each player names 1 item from the instance. If that item drops, only the players who reserved it roll; if nobody reserved it, it goes to a normal need roll. The effect is that a stranger joins a run for a specific reason, states the reason in advance, and cannot be talked out of it once the item is on the floor.
The list has to live somewhere. Historically that has meant a spreadsheet or a web form filled in before the invite, with the leader pasting the relevant line into chat when the boss dies, and a logging addon used afterwards to show who rolled what. Which tools exist on day one is a separate question, and the state of the client-side ecosystem sits with addons the economy relies on.
The trade-off is worth stating plainly. Soft reserve makes the 2 or 3 items on everyone's list the point of the run, and the rest of the loot table becomes filler that gets greeded for vendor value. Groups that reserve heavily fill fast and clear slowly, because the people who came for 1 item lose interest once it drops or once somebody else reserves it harder.
Materials, professions and the part nobody agrees on
Gear is the loud half of the argument and materials are the quiet one. Hides are the exception that proves it: with the shared rule in place every skinner in the party takes their own, which is why shared skinning and leather prices behave differently from the rest of the loot table. Ore and herbs do not share. They go to whoever clicks, which is why 2 gatherers on the same route end up negotiating a lane split rather than a loot rule, a problem laid out in farming together against farming alone.
Crafting output is the other sore point. Shards from disenchanted drops are worth real money, and a group that lets 1 enchanter keep every shard has quietly paid that player a second share of the run; the market those shards feed is covered in who buys enchanting materials. The same applies to a boss-dropped recipe or a rare reagent that only 1 profession can use: a player who takes it as a crafting input and then sells the result through crafting work ordered by other players has monetised a group drop, which is fine if it was agreed and poor form if it was not.
What we do not know. Blizzard has published the prohibition on gold-pot runs. It has not published a recommended split, a loot policy for pugs, or any statement on whether master loot, personal loot or a group-loot variant is the default in Forever, and we have not seen a reserve list tool confirmed for the client. Everything in the 3 sections above is convention carried over from previous versions, not a documented Forever rule, and we will rewrite it rather than guess if the loot settings turn out different.
Questions
Can a group still pay gold for an item if nobody calls it a GDKP?
The prohibition is on the arrangement rather than on the word, so renaming a gold pot does not change what it is. The practical reading for most groups has been simpler: keep gold out of the loot decision entirely, settle drops with rolls, reserves or guild distribution, and leave gold trading to the auction house where it belongs.
Is soft reserve better than need before greed for a pug?
It depends on what the run is for. Soft reserve fills a group faster because everyone can see in advance what they are playing for, and it prevents the argument where 2 players both claim the same weapon as main spec. Plain need before greed is quicker to explain and spreads loot more evenly, which suits a guild alt run far better than a pug assembled around 1 item.
Who should get the shards when a drop is disenchanted?
Agree it before the first boss, because afterwards it is already a dispute. The common conventions are a free roll on the shard at the end of the run, or the enchanter keeping it as payment for providing the service. Both are defensible. What causes trouble is leaving it unstated and letting the only enchanter in the group decide on the spot.
Do these rules change anything about how much a dungeon run pays?
They change who collects it rather than how much appears. A clear rule set stated in advance mainly saves time, and time is the real input: a group that argues for 10 minutes over a shard has spent more than the shard was worth. The raw value of what drops is a separate question from how a group decides to split it.
Sources
- Blizzard's World of Warcraft news hub, where Classic policy posts including the GDKP ruling are published — World of Warcraft news.
- Wowhead's Classic section, which tracks loot rule conventions and the tools pug leaders use for reserve lists — Wowhead Classic.
What changed on this page
- 11 Oct 2026First version: need, greed, soft reserve and material splits after the GDKP ban, with the unconfirmed loot settings marked as unknown.