Normally, due to the abundance of loot coming from M+, nothing other than special gear tends to have value from raids, so under PL those who wanted to use their off-spec swapped their loot spec often.
I personally swapped to the one that had a chance at dropping an off-spec piece I needed, be it for Brewmaster, Mistweaver or Windwalker, but that is because I am a main spec Brewmaster who also can and do use all of my specs.
Adding Group Loot back to pugs was only an issue for two reasons:
Because pugs got spoiled with personal loot, that created this psychological image that loot drops for THEM, and not for the entire raid. It also disincentivized social interaction, as all you had to do was to tag along to the raid and you either got loot or not.
After its removal they added a loot mode that just highlights how anti-social and uncompromising people are in pugs.
The only advantage personal loot had you had a guarantee to get one piece of loot from the raid, eventhough that could give you a duplicate which was about similar as to what people experience these days: 0 loot if RNG wills it like so.
Say there are 4 items from a boss in dps spec and 5 in healer spec and you want an item that can drop for either.
In PL you would kill it as dps loot spec so that if you were awarded an item, you had a 1/4 chance of getting it instead of a 1/5.
In GL it doesn’t matter if you kill it in Dps or Healer loot spec because the items drop from the boss, they’re not generated in your inventory. The only difference is if you kill it as healer you can ALSO roll on healer loot when that drops. There’s no downside to killing the boss as healer loot spec. None.
The only case where it’s the same is if the boss drops 5 items in dps, one being dps only, and 5 items in healer, one being healer only and you explicitly want the DPS only item.
You could but it was in the majority of cases going against your own best interests.
Now the math has changed there’s no downside to setting yourself up to roll on items for another spec unless the boss specifically dropped something you needed to be in another spec to roll on.
No, you are misunderstanding me.
My point is, personal loot basically made you participate at the loot roll.
Period.
The game with PL decided first who was gonna get loot, then what was going to be looted. And you could not “need/greed/ds/pass” loot.
Now the game first decides the loot. Then allow the player to roll for said loot. But the freedom to get a shot at a certain item stays the same, even if it is not the spec you are playing.
The system is obviously different, my point is that, the idea behind that is the same. And is not to limit the ability of players to get rolls for different specs.