Shoot raid loot still be based on random drops?

Anyone doing the Love is in the Air event this year knows that much less of your ability to successfully complete the meta is based on chance than it was last year. This year, you can get all of the items you need by handing in Love Tokens, which are rewarded by the new dailies and given when you give the holiday vendors a Lovely Charm Bracelet, which are made from Lovely Charms, which can be farmed off of any enemy in the game that gives you experience. In short, getting all of the achievements for Love is in the Air is simply a matter of investing enough time in the holiday, to the extent that, with some dedicated play, I got all of the achievements for the meta in two days.

Why do I bring this up? Because the larger trend in World of Warcraft seems to be a general moving away from RNG. In general, chance is playing less of a roll in everything we do. Tier gear is now bought with emblems, not tokens that randomly drop off of certain bosses, which was still less random than the tier pieces themselves dropping off of raid bosses. We now focus more on gear that can be obtained from emblems and less on gear that drops from bosses than we ever have (though we still think about the latter, obviously). The chance for quest items in Northrend to drop increases with each kill, meaning you don't get those situations where you kill dozens of enemies for that last ear you need for your quest. However, drops from raid bosses are still a very random element of the game, much to the irritation of people who want a specific drop. Is it better that loot remain this way, or are random drops a relic of a more primitive time in WoW's history?

I have said in the past that gear serves two purposes: giving you access to new content and representing your achievements. An RNG-based loot system isn't the best way to accomplish these purposes, but it isn't a horrible way. Basing a person's ability to see content on how lucky they can get with gear drops may not be the best way to go about regulating the rate at which people see the content, but in the long run, streaks of good and back luck when it comes to loot drops tend to even themselves out. Sure, raiders may feel frustrated when a certain piece continually refuses to drop, but raid drops will rarely screw over a person so consistently that he won't be able to gear up for the next raid. As for representing one's achievements, though skill is required to successfully complete raids, getting gear from those raids is more of a matter of luck and dedication than skill. In that sense, gear can be a display of one's dedication to the game, and though one may get lucky with one or two drops in his first raid, many raid runs are usually required to fully deck out one's character, so good gear does a pretty good job of representing one's achievements. That said, the loot system as it is is less than perfect. The amount of gear that gets disenchanted into Abyss Crystals can attest to that, and the random nature of random loot drops necessitates guild loot systems so that everything can be fair.

Still, I think the way loot works is fine as it is, because any feasible alternatives (meaning alternatives that don't change the loot system into some completely new system) would resemble the way loot drops now, but wouldn't be as interesting. Emblems are an example of one such alternative; a different loot system could involve bosses dropping only emblems and all of our gear coming from emblems. However, in the long run, farming emblems for all of your gear would have the same effect on your character as simply running multiple raids for loot drops: both result in your character getting better gear, and though the latter is a bit less consistent, it is more exciting. I think the system we have now, where bosses drop both random items so people can get instant upgrades, and emblems so they can work towards other upgrades, has the best of both worlds: emblems allow people with bad loot luck to still gear up, while random loot drops still allow people to feel the excitement of getting a new piece of gear and the immediate satisfaction that comes with it. Barring a total overhaul of the system by which raid loot is acquired, I think it is fine the way it is.