LFR Thoughts

I'm not sure how I feel about the new LFR tool.

On one hand it's very handy. I don't really get fights until I've seen them. So what I used to do was look up strats and then have them make no sense until after the first few wipes. And then I'd have to look them all up again now that I have a bit of a mental model of what is going on. But with LFR I can go into there and then look at a strat, and it's not usually too bad to add a new mechanic or two. It's also nice to actually see all the fights and cut scenes. I've taken so many screenshots of the dialogue it's hard to sort through for posting.

On the other hand, I truly think it's the final death knell for 25man raiding guilds. Having seen how things went between Wrath and Cata I think that the only reason Wrath had so many 25s is because that is where the better gear was. And now that the gear is equalized very few people are willing to do 25s rather than 10s. 10s require a finer tuned balance of classes, but its a lot easier to find 10 non-idiots than it is to find 25 non-idiots. It also seems that many of the newer fights in FL and DS have a tendency for a mistake by anyone in the raid to wipe the whole thing. With 25 people it's a lot harder to get a mistake free pull that leads to a boss kill.

I do like that the LFR is such a handy way of gearing up any missing items and your offspec. It's been a few weeks and I'm still hoping that I can win a hat token to replace Mornara's Daybreaker Helm. Yes, she is still wearing a helm from Bastion, but nothing else has dropped! Hopefully she'll win the token from LFR or we'll kill Blackhorn soon. But aside from that she's gotten a whole lot of pieces for her dps set.

One bad thing about LFR is that it's such a low bar people can basically face roll through it. When I bring Mornara in there with her initially crappy dps gear and a PVP unholy build I expect to be hovering above the tanks on the dps meters. I don't expect to be 6th or 7th on damage every fight. And it's really quite sad when people spew abuse at the dps or heals after a wipe where mechanics were misunderstood. I have not yet seen a wipe in LFR that was caused by lack of dps or healing. I have however seen many wipes caused by confusion about how the fight needs to be done.

I think that in general LFR is going to get more people into raiding LFR but it won't increase the number of people doing normal raids. It will, however, kill the last few 25man guilds out there. I am not going to be the least bit surprised if in Mists of Pandaria the only options for raiding are 25man LFR and 10man normal and heroic.