For ordinary French-speaking players, it is unlikely that you have ever heard of “SR” or “HR”, and that is quite normal. However, on the English-speaking kingdoms of WoW Classic and Burning Crusade Classic a very particular mechanism exists and allows anonymous people to organize themselves simply in order to go on a raid and not bicker for the loot of the bosses.
And precisely, it is precisely this system which allows us to know that the most coveted object is almost unpredictable! Forget legendary weapons and other very rare items, you’re not there!
“SR”, “HR”, what is this thing again?
If you play on an English-speaking kingdom of Burning Crusade Classic, and to a lesser extent on certain French-speaking kingdoms in particular Sulfuron, it is likely that you have already seen many announcements of this type:
For a player landing after years of absence from the game, or coming straight from a French-speaking server or from Shadowlands, it’s incomprehensible coded language. However, this announcement is rather clear if we know what the terms “SR” and “HR” mean. Concretely, these are acronyms meaning “Soft Reservation” and “Hard Reservation” and serve, to put it simply, to allow each player in the raid to “reserve” certain objects in order to announce from the start of the raid. that they covet in priority one or two very precise objects.
This mechanism is in fact used to avoid what are commonly called “caddies”, these poorly equipped players who arrive in a raid and leave with half the loot. In this way, everyone can say that he covets this or that object. If several players reserve the same item, then the banal “/rand” is performed by each of them if the given item drops. Simple !
But this system is nevertheless much more ingenious since it allows, thanks to the site Softres.it, to benefit from bonuses if a player has already participated in a raid using this mechanism. So if you’ve ever done Gruul’s Lair once in hopes of getting theEye of Gruul but you didn’t get it, then next time you will get not one “/rand” but two in a row if you want to have an advantage over your competitors trying for the first time to get this highly sought after item!
The ultimate mechanism of this system is the principle of “Hard Reservation”. It allows certain players to negotiate with other players for absolute priority on a given item. If you place an “HR” if theEye of Gruul for example, no one else can do the same: if the object falls, it is definitely for you!
The aforementioned announcement therefore means, in good French, that the player is looking for a main tank and that as a gift (to attract him) this one benefits from an additional Soft Reservation. All other players get two Soft Reservations, and any items that drop that haven’t been reserved will simply be distributed to /rand first for everyone’s main specialization (MS => Main Specialization), then secondary specialization if nobody really wants it (OS => Off Specialization). Simple !
And the most coveted item is…
Alright, introductions are done. Let’s talk loot now.
The fabulous site Softres.it lists since the beginning of WoW Classic (first of the name) all the objects that have been reserved (in SR only). Through the tab Statsit allows us to discover with fun which are the most reserved objects since 2019. A feature that is necessarily very interesting!
Thus, since the launch of Classic, the object that has won the gold medal for reservations is theHakkari Primal Idol of Zul’Gurub with a total of 390,006 reservations, very far ahead of the second which obtains “only” 282,599. This is quite easily explained by the fact that it was in fact an object allowing to obtain very powerful head enchantments for each of the classes in the game, including theprophetic aura for priests. These enchantments were also sometimes the best available including during a large part of BC Classic, making this small Rare item the most sought after of all!
As for the Top 10, the data is again very interesting:
If all the items in this Top 10 are from Tier 4 and Zul’Gurub, it’s probably not without reason. It is in fact, at the time of writing, the most accessible content for new level 70 players. It is therefore very common to see so-called “pick up” groups set up for Karazhan, the Lair of Gruul or Magtheridon and exploiting this system.
Conversely, subsequent raids tend to be far less permissive and require some organization to complete. This is probably the main reason why the Ashes of Al’ar de l’Oeil are not even in the Top 50 bookings (barely 30,000).
On the side of Zul’Aman which remains very widely accessible, it is its recent deployment which will have cost the place of the objects that this small raid offers in the Top 10. It is indeed only available since March 22, 2022, it is the most likely hypothesis that tends to let us think that his objects seem so uncoveted. However, it is interesting to note that theAmani War Bear registers only 1,113 reservations at the moment, against more than 6,100 for the Head reduced to spells for example !
Overall, the availability of Zul’Gurub (and its mounts) and the great accessibility of Tier 4 raids will have overcome the desires of players. However, the SR is only rarely practiced in pre-BC Classic raids, so it is likely that a vast majority of the reservations of the Zulian Tiger took place even though players could obtain equipment that was effective for the time.
Like what, the sumptuous tiger of the jungles of WoW will even have dreamed of the most avid of powerful loots, well beyond certain very rare and coveted objects such as the Assault Girdle or the Hakkari Warblade !
mmo
Nearly a year after its official rollout, Burning Crusade Classic is coming to an end. However, the players are far from having deserted the first extension of the game: the affluence even reached impressive records on certain kingdoms!