loot, does it bug you?Follow

The paladin should back off if there's a shaman looking for the piece.

The shaman can't even use the plate gear that drops, and if the paladin took the mail piece and now finds the plate gear obsolete, that's loot wasted.

It's not a fair trade, BIS gear or not. Downgrading armor class should be an offspec roll, at best.

I was in a group with a fury warrior that said that these gloves were considered in the top-3 for his BIS. They are the only 264 gloves that drop in ICC which have ArPen and even though the Int is wasted, the remaining itemization makes them worth it. I don't know if he was right or not, but it sounded good.
>.>

I still think the plate wearer should defer to the mail wearer, though. No real reason, just seems logical to me. Just the same as a healer would defer to a dps on a piece with hit on it. It might be an upgrade but it was designed with the dps in mind.

My guild has an armour class priority rule unless an item is BiS for your class, basically because otherwise the item is just serving as a filler until the correct AC item drops. For example, we had a raid where mail bracers dropped and went to a paladin, later plate bracers dropped and he took those instead. Now imagine we had a shaman there for the first drop, but not the second drop. If we let the pala roll on mail (and he won) we've now got one player with new bracers. If we give priority to the shaman we'd have two players with new bracers.

For the pala it might seem a bit crap, there's a chance no plate bracers would drop, but then again there's a chance that a) the mail ones will drop again and noone needs them or b) the plate ones will drop. If the shaman loses out on the roll they only have the first option to hope for.

Pugs I would expect to function in the same way, the paladin still has one possible drop, the shaman has one possible drop. If the paladin is lucky then no mail user will need that item and he can take it. If there was a particular item I wanted that wasn't my AC then I would ask the raid before killing anything whether I would be allowed to roll or not. If I raid on my moonkin I don't expect to be allowed to roll on cloth items over a cloth user, I don't see why paladin vs shaman would be different.

I've had a priest and a mage as my main character, so I'm used to higher competition for drops. We seem to get a silly amount of mail/plate drops and tend to not have many takers for mail gear or plate healing loot, so pretty much anyone in our guild wanting that loot is guaranteed to be geared to the teeth in a couple of runs. It doesn't make me want to add more competition for those classes who don't have anyone else sharing their AC though, that's just the way loot works. Also, with cataclysm AC is meant to be becoming more important, so if you down-grade then you may find yourself with something a lot less useful come the expansion.