That's kinda how I ended up with 4 resto druids. heh.

The major drawback to such a system would be you would have people selling run-throughs of raid instance. Not that it can't be done now, but you are effectively limited to selling one run a week. Now I don't necessarily have a problem with really wealthy players having access to more gear (there's precedence for it in the past e.g. BoE valor items, Quel'Delar etc, and they'd still be at the mercy of RNG), but I could totally see how this would incentivize more gold-buying.

@eel5pe:

Easy answer: make loot come in individual loot bags, like WoW already does for seasonal bosses (and TOR does for easy mode raids, and GW2 will do for all kinds of loot, including "raid" loot).

With individual loot bags, the current ways to artificially increase a player's chance to get loot (by adding players to the group that will pass on the loot) won't work, so purchasing a raid run will be as effective as just doing it normally, since the players you are paying won't be able to pass their loot to you.

@DarkWalker

Sorry bud, but that's a terrible idea.

Bosses drop 2-3 pieces in 10-man. Let's just go with 2 for the moment. When those 2 pieces of loot drop, they are assigned to someone who needs them. This means that, for the most part, any given 10-man has a fairly high chance of seeing a drop that someone in the raid can use.

If they switch to this "individual bag" method, RNG will become much, much worse. Every individual boss has anywhere from 10 to 15 pieces of loot. Sure, you'd be getting 10 pieces of loot per boss, 1 from each bag, but the odds of any individual person getting something they actually need is much, much smaller. I can just see healers ending up with that shield the tank wants, but unable to trade it, while the tank got that fancy healer staff. Meanwhile, the melee DPS got that same agility trinket he got last week, while the hunter can only weep and curse the RNG gods as the melee vendors it.

And don't start in on the "make the bags only drop loot that people need". Sure, it's a neat idea and would make a lot of people happy, but it would also cause raid groups to quickly exhaust the gear from any given raid. Where it takes 8-12 weeks to get up now, most raids would be done in 3-4, if that. Blizzard wants to keep subscriptions, not see them canceled 1 month after a patch because groups have cleaned the raids out already.