Nostalrius Begins - Quality wow vanilla realm (1.12)

Hey guys, just following up with a post here as I was instructed to do by GMs ingame after they replied to my ticket.

So <Voltaic> ran Ony's Lair and MC yesterday and encountered a frustrating bug we'd never seen before. Onyxia died and dropped *only* gold - no blues, no bag, no purples. She was skinnable and we skinned her - so it wasn't just a case of us being unable to see the loot on her body. She dropped nothing at all.

This was Ony raid ID 5647.

A bit upset, the guild soldiered on to Molten Core, where the first ~12 trash mobs also dropped nothing at all. No gray stones, no lava cores, no boes, nothing. We were more than a little suspicious, so we re-made the raid since we hadn't been saved to the instance yet, and we re-entered the zone and re-cleared the trash mobs. This time the bodies were sparkly and they dropped loot as normal - the usual amount of grays, cores,, greens and so on. We thought it was just a weird hiccup and we kept clearing. Lucifron, Magmadar, Gehennas all dropped loot no problem. Then we got to Garr... and the same bug happened. Garr died and dropped nothing, only gold.

We paused the raid (seeing as remaking would cost us significant time) and are going to resume today. According to the GMs who responded to my in-game ticket, this is just a bug that happens sometimes and there is nothing they can do. But they also encouraged me to make a post here, so here I am.

Molten Core raid ID where Garr dropped no loot is 5735.

Now, as to what we know about how this bug might have happened...

We were on master looter during all of Onyxia and most of MC. We occasionally switch to free-for-all when a mob is killed too far from the ML to loot it, but I'd guess upwards of 95% of the time we were on master looter.

We switched raid leaders a couple times during the raid, back and forth between Vesper, Vanity, and Valentine (yeah we like V names...). This was largely due to being a bit shorthanded for yesterday's raids and needing our GM to swap back and forth between her warlock and paladin depending on whether we needed heals or dps/banishes.

This gets me to where I *think* the problem was. For Onyxia we had started the raid with Vanity as raid leader & master looter. We had zoned in and started prepping when we realized we were a bit light on healing and paladin buff coverage, so we had our GM switch from Vanity to Vesper, and we gave both raid lead and master looter to Valentine, who in turn passed it on to Vesper when she logged in. Then as I mentioned above, Ony bugged and dropped no loot.

Fast forward a bit to MC. After the initial reset, we had been clearing just fine and dandy until we got to Garr and realized we could use the extra banish more than the extra heals. So we had Vesper pass raid lead and master looter to Valentine, who in turn passed it on to Vanity when she logged on her warlock. Then Garr bugged, same as Onyxia.

Right now we *think* the problem is swapping ML/RL to new characters, then having the original ML/RL log off. Obviously we're going to avoid this sort of thing on today's (and future) raids. But if there's anything you guys can do here we'd greatly appreciate it, both in terms of restoring the loot we lost from Onyxia and Garr, and in addressing this strange bug so we can swap ML/RL in peace!

Thanks for your time guys - once again I have to re-iterate what a fantastic job you're doing with the server and how much our guild is enjoying our time here. Even if you can't restore the items lost, it's a small price to pay in the long term if our info can help improve the server's code. And please, let us know if there's any additional information we can provide to help out, anything at all.

We've continued to have problems with loot. Last week again ML was not working, with no ML changes, logging out, etc. We tried putting it on FFA and still nothing. We eventually had to use a different group leader than our usual two, and we're scared to change anything in case it messed up again.

Any ideas what could be causing all these issues?

We still need to reform our raid ~4 times every single week to get loot working. Does anyone have any ideas what could be causing this? We are out of ideas.

if your master looter is offline during time of kill or not in the instance, it bugs the loot out and you get 0.
its happened on pvp realm as well for many kills.
start looking at ensuring master loot is set on someone with stable connection/not flip flopping. some guilds with enough trustworthy members use group loot to prevent this issue.

We've determined has nothing to do with master looter changing or the person who made the raid being offline. Every single time we raid, we zone in, kill a few mobs, see no sparkles, zone out, reform. We do this 3-4 times before we get loot to work so that the raid can actually see the loot dropped.

No clue what is causing it.