LFR thoughts: counterpoint

What I'm seeing is that LFR seems to be suited for a certain type of player, the raid PUG-player. The attitude and expertise of these people is very precise, they are very aggressive and bossy, intolerant of wipes, quick to blame, and those that know the fights are clearly pleased with themselves when they know. In fact, they are exactly the people who made raiding Vault of Archavon in WotLK a painful experience. This person is not someone who can deal with progression raiding; the only challenge they are interested in is outperforming the rest of the raid, and when PUG'd in, usually drop group after more than 1 wipe on a boss. With LFR, Blizzard has given them their own playground, exactly suited to them. It's a face roll for any geared character played by someone who knows how to raid. LFR even has a loot system which is not merit based, giving the raid PUG person a perfect target for their displeasure.

I do agree that 25man raids are suffering, but not from LFR, just from the combined lockouts. We can't just go into a 10man to see the fights, then try it on 25. And 10s are easier by far, even if the odds of useful loot decrease significantly. I'm sure Blizzard is seeing this and will deal with it appropriately in Mists of Pandaria. There are quite a few remedies they could apply without significant recoding.

While the various tiers of TOC and ICC was crazy bullshit, I think MoP raids should go back to how Ulduar was done, specifically Hodir and XT, with 10 and 25 on separate lockouts, and "heroic mode" triggered by demonstrating in the fight via a gear check mechanic that the raid could handle it. Well, "heroic mode" isn't the subject of this post. They do not have to distinguish between 10- and 25-man gear. There's really not going to be any harm in letting people go after a boss twice a week.

But if they really want to avoid some people feeling they have to run both, I'd rather see 10 and 25s be separate raids, like in BC; but that would not work well with guild structure as coded in the game and would be the source of "left out" drama. Maybe 10 and 20, instead of 25.