Personal loot vs. other loot options

[Marco]

Both of my raids have experimented with using group loot in normal Nighthold, at least for bosses which drop tier, in hopes of getting more people their set bonuses.  In group loot you get set tokens, which can be distributed to roughly one third of the classes for each token type, while on personal loot you can only trade set pieces with people of the same class.  You also can't trade away a set piece you don't already have, even if you're using a legendary in that slot.  Group loot might also be better for under-represented armor types in the raid (e.g. if you only have one plate wearer), although that benefit is probably marginal at best.

But I've seen a perception that group loot drops so much less loot than personal loot that the benefits aren't worth it.  I don't know whether that perception is fair or not.  My understanding is that personal loot does create more loot items than the other loot modes, but I don't know by how much.  Does anyone know if players have figured out how big the personal loot advantage (in raw item count) is?

[jsoh]

I ran some numbers like this a couple of years ago, based on a) some hand-wavy estimation of what the personal loot percentage chance was (may have been from a blue) and b) my horrible understanding of the mathematics of expected value, and the answers that popped out was that in terms of EV(pieces of loot), personal loot won out, and it wasn't that close. ISTR (and please dont trust my memory on this) that the personal loot drop chance was something in the 20-30% range.

That did - obviously - depend on a number that was fairly hard to peg accurately, so as always, YMMV + ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

The one thing that I really wish that Blizz would do (and I've tweeted at them before, with no response) would have personal loot award tier tokens, rather than actual tier pieces, which would (IMO) help address the issue of better distribution of tier gear within a raid.