Gear Trading Time Limit Upped to Four Hours in Dragonflight Patch 10.1

A “quality of life” change is coming to Dragonflight Patch 10.1, which will see Gear Trading has its time limit upped to four hours.

The most recent 10.1 PTR has included a change that will see Gear Trading being made a little easier. Previously locked to two hours, you'll now have four hours to trade items. However, it will now tick down while you're offline. So, it's a win for most, but it might add a few new “issues” in some cases.

Dragonflight 10.1 Gear Trading

Average player vs top end guilds

The change will have significant impacts on not just the quality of life of most players, but it will impact the upcoming Race to World First.

Firstly, this is a good change for 95% of the player base. Many guilds raid for around 3 hours a night; this means guilds can deal with loot later in the raid and keep the progression going at a steady pace. So, for this major part of the WoW raiding community, the change has been seen positively by anyone who cares to voice an opinion. It's those top-end raiders. However, that might be getting the short end of the stick.

It's been known for a long time that most of the top guilds do a lot, and we mean a lot, of split runs in order to get the best possible gear onto their main characters. This is even more crucial in Dragonflight when we have Tier Sets and all three organized raid tiers open simultaneously. The TLDR of this is simply that players will be chosen based on what tier or items they get in split runs, which might mean someone is on their 5th alt.

This change, however, removes one of the ways top guilds would “abuse” the system. Here, to save time and split runs, RWF guilds might park lots of items on an alt and hand out loot at the culmination of the raid to make sure they get the most optimal loot on the right people. Now, while the timer has increased to four hours, it will now tick down the second the loot is given out, meaning these guilds will have way less time to decide what the correct distribution method is for each item that drops. While this change has only just happened, the immediate fallout from those in the RWF guilds has been less than happy with the change.

pic.twitter.com/CqLJHs1IlB

— Liquid Thdlock (@Thdlock) April 19, 2023

Liquid player Thdlock was quick to question the change on Twitter, later replying to someone asking. “Will this mean more split runs”, with a simple “yes”. We know Blizzard doesn't like RWF guilds doing split runs, but this seems counterintuitive to that idea. Then again, Blizzard also claims that things don't happen due to the RWF, so I guess this backs that up.