My guesses:
Hearthstone expansion
Heroes of the Storm open beta
SCII expansion
Ladders for D3 (Though these may come out before Blizzcon)
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My guesses:
Hearthstone expansion
Heroes of the Storm open beta
SCII expansion
Ladders for D3 (Though these may come out before Blizzcon)
Y'all can come party with me!!
RPGCrazied
Member
I'm with you. If they say its just to see content, then I'd rather go to youtube an watch it, then slog through a raid with mostly complete morons most of the time.
If anything I think LFR raiders don't get enough incentive to go.
Yeah, it may be enough reason for me to finally toss in the towel. This whole build up is starting to feel a lot like Cata part 2 to me. Great for heroic/serious raiders, bad for everyone else. The current reward structure is absolutely fine outside of some small tweaks. I'll be very interested in this blog .
Wibblewozzer
Member
As someone who mainly just does LFR with a little experience in Flex and Normal I'm completely fine with good looking gear saved for the higher levels. I think it's a good reward for people that are willing to put in the effort to raid and do all that stuff. There's enough transmog out there that I can easily replace that plain mail gear so it's not like I'm forced to use it.
So yeah, I'm cool with it. And perhaps I'll feel a greater push to raid more.
So yeah, I'm cool with it. And perhaps I'll feel a greater push to raid more.
StormyTheRabbit
Member
Doubt the Hearthstone Expac, they announced one like 2 weeks ago at PAX East I think. Launches in Summer. Doubt they'll announce another so soon.
Gentleman Jack
Member
The primary effect of making LFR gear less appealing is that LFR will become less appealing to everyone.
And here I thought they were trying to raise the general quality of players who raided, not go from '5/25 people trying to kill a boss' to '3/25 people trying to kill a boss.' LFRs are going back to the days when queues will stretch to 2 hours and the first wing of anything is a four hour minimum commitment. I get that they want LFR to be less 'mandatory' but they're not doing enough to combat its biggest problem, that it's a cesspool of horrible players wasting each others time.
And here I thought they were trying to raise the general quality of players who raided, not go from '5/25 people trying to kill a boss' to '3/25 people trying to kill a boss.' LFRs are going back to the days when queues will stretch to 2 hours and the first wing of anything is a four hour minimum commitment. I get that they want LFR to be less 'mandatory' but they're not doing enough to combat its biggest problem, that it's a cesspool of horrible players wasting each others time.
How is this issue combatable? LFR's rewards will never be attractive, because Flex, Normal, and Heroic will always have higher item levels. LFRs in MoP only had carries because of the legendary quest being for all classes and obtainable through LFR, but I doubt that Blizzard is going to give everyone a legendary again, if just because the top-end raids have to be balanced with it in mind.
How does LFR raise the quality of the general raider if the mechanics are neutered to basically be irrelevant and everything turns into a zerg? I think they're trying to push anyone who wants to be casual or noncommital with their schedules but wants to raid to Flex.
Who or what does LFR serve, exactly?
Gentleman Jack
Member
At present it serves the purpose of Lore, quest advancement and 'cash equivalents' like VP. It just also happens to be a place to fill out set bonuses and get some gear that at least looks like raiding gear. It's done that since Dragon Soul.
The potential removal of these last two rewards is just a serious bummer for anybody who runs LFR for the first three reasons. I've got no problem with Flex raiding, and I don't expect Blizzard to fix some of the more toxic behavior of the 'non casual' raiding community (LF25M Flex Wing 1 minimum 25 ilvls higher than mine or kick), but this erosion of what paltry reasons already exist to LFR serves no purpose either. All it does is stroke the egos of the small percentage of players who commit more than anybody else to grinding out normals.
- people who don't have a set schedule.
- people who don't want to deal with filtering through thousands of ridiculous gear/achievement requirements to find a PUG.
- people who want to raid in off hours.
- people who want to see the content that the devs admit eats up the vast majority of content creation time.
- people who want to gear up their alts.
- casual/bad players, who do play & pay for the game and deserve content too
It's a rather ridiculous requirement to say LFR doesn't serve anyone. If it didn't, then you'd never be able to find a raid when you queued. But you still can, even for the original 5.0 raids. Beyond that, I'd rather hit a button and queue and go play the game rather than playing the lottery to get a Flex DPS spot or sit in trade for hours wasting my time.
Sax Russel
Banned
LFR will still be there, and can do all that lore/super casual stuff. They don't "need" the better gear/"tier to fill out slots" anyway. Most people with even a modicum of skill will move to Flex, if they haven't already. You can easily do Flex now without a set schedule and without having to wade through any obscene requirement bullshit, especially with an addon like oqueue. And with Blizz saying they're revamping/improving/snazzy-ing up their LFG system, Flex will become even more accessible, and obviously what they're pushing people to get into rather than slog through mechanics that have been reduced to almost nothing or even removed with a bunch of <redacted> players. =) I LFR hero'ed my way through all of MoP, but I converted to Flex near the end with barely any disruption and am looking forward to never touching LFR again come WoD.
Gentleman Jack
Member
Flex is an imperfect replacement, even with oqueue you are just as likely to get an 'in progress' raid as a fresh one, and the wait for a slot if you're on a waitlist is just as long. I've never bought the narrative that someone who uses LFR to farm for gear upgrades can just slide into a Flex raid like it's nothing, especially if you run on Pacific time instead of Central/Eastern. Right now if I queue for LFR no matter how bad the group is, it will eventually grind out a win. Flex runs fall apart in a heartbeat.
The way I phrased the question may have unintentionally implied that LFR doesn't serve anyone. It clearly is being run, but I still think it's a legitimate question: who/what does it serve? And what does the planned change do to impact that group?
Most of the items listed are currently covered by Flex raids. If Flex were as simple as hitting a built-in button to queue, would that make it more palatable? I'm mainly curious if the barrier is one of UI/convenience, or if it's the difficulty in Flex compared to LFR, or if it's player behavior.
Of course PUGs will require more item level than is generally needed. That has always been true, since forever. LFR is basically an intermediate step between Heroic Dungeons and Flex. I would expect people to do LFR to get gear to do PUG Flex if they are not already in a guild that does their own Flex+ raids.
This is basically what currently happens, and I am not sure that there is a huge planned difference, except in cosmetics. For anyone who only does LFR exclusively, is it the insult that the gear is not even cosmetically equivalent to other raids?
I don't care personally since LFR is just something I do on my alts occasionally l, but I just find the change sort of funny. Seems like lame ego stroking for high end raiders who continually bitch about LFR all over the official forums.
HarryDemeanor
Member
Kicked out of another Flex 4 after a 19% wipe on Blackfuse. It's not my fault your fellow guildies can't do the belt.
Looks like it's an uphill battle just to get my first Garrosh Flex kill.
Looks like it's an uphill battle just to get my first Garrosh Flex kill.
HarryDemeanor
Member
I always ask but I get nothing back. I mean if it's a DPS issue (even though there were quite a few from the same guild who did less than I did) then whatever, I'm always looking to improve. Yet when I get nothing back how else am I supposed to know what the hell happened?
unknownstranger
Member
Ragequit on my guild tonight because the other mage kept giving me shit for my dps. I know my dps is crap for my ilvl, but the stats on my gear suck. He's demanding me to go fire but I only have 5 pieces of gear with crit (6 with a sidegrade tonight and not including legendary cape) and don't have my 4 piece because I always passed on tier to other people since I had 561 pieces already. My gear isn't that great for Frost (what I am now) either because I also have just 5 pieces with haste. My gear is mostly hit/mastery.
They've been talking like it's some sort of success for them, so... who knows. I really hope not, anyway.
I liked that it was an expansion wide effort, but a lot of it just didn't seem FUN. You were basically subject to RNG for all but a few of the stages.
I don't even have that big of a problem with the quest itself or whatever.
I hate that, like, if you're doing it now. You have to flex or LFR some pieces even if you're doing normals or heroics because you missed a fight. And all that does is encourage some of the people in LFR who autoshot to keep doing autoshot because someone trying to finish their cloak is going to carry you.
It should just be 'First 8 bosses you kill in SoO be it flex or normal or heroic or LFR give you a shot at runestones.' Instead of 'First 8 bosses.' So if I don't kill Nazgrim but kill Paragons, Paragons should give me my 8th shot of the week. I don't know, it's just a poor concept they used to try to stick people into raids longer than they needed to be.
Like I'm at the point that all I need is Heroic stuff and like TWO normal bosses, but I do all the normal bosses for the first 8 for my runestones instead of letting someone who needs a boss come in my place instead.
I hate that, like, if you're doing it now. You have to flex or LFR some pieces even if you're doing normals or heroics because you missed a fight. And all that does is encourage some of the people in LFR who autoshot to keep doing autoshot because someone trying to finish their cloak is going to carry you.
It should just be 'First 8 bosses you kill in SoO be it flex or normal or heroic or LFR give you a shot at runestones.' Instead of 'First 8 bosses.' So if I don't kill Nazgrim but kill Paragons, Paragons should give me my 8th shot of the week. I don't know, it's just a poor concept they used to try to stick people into raids longer than they needed to be.
Like I'm at the point that all I need is Heroic stuff and like TWO normal bosses, but I do all the normal bosses for the first 8 for my runestones instead of letting someone who needs a boss come in my place instead.
I listed who it might serve...players in any of those situations. Flex would be palatable if I didn't have to deal with the unreasonable ilvl demands (i.e. all the runs who require a higher ilvl than the zone actually drops) or the threat of a group falling apart with no system in place to keep it together after a wipe. LFR removes both of those hurdles. People won't be able to use the max ilvl from LFR for Flex just like they can't do that today, it's a backwards system that, as you said, the community always falls back on.
And as someone that does run LFR, the cosmetic angle is the biggest deal - even more than the tier bonuses. Blizz spends the VAST majority of their art dev time on tier gear, so removing that from LFR is a huge deal. I'm now paying them to develop armor that I won't be able to use for years on most of my alts. The mail gear might look nice in a basic sense, but it doesn't sniff the quality we just saw with the warrior armor.
Edit: what Harry experienced a few posts above is what I worry will be the norm in this new paradigm with no real alternative to get the gear for either cosmetic/gear bonus reasons.
Are you for sure going again? I haven't decided yet, but I def want to!
Yeah I dunno about the whole legendary quest thing. On one hand it's cool to be rewarded for playing all the tiers, but on the other hand everyone gets it so it doesn't really feel special. It was a mistake doing it for three characters lol, def contributed to my feelings of burnout.
Eh, They admitted that the BGs and valor quests were pretty bullshit. The rest really wasn't bad. You can have a cloak now in like less than 2 months, including test of valor in its nerfed form.
Not sure why you need to do flex, you can get everything on lfr (obviously flex is probably simpler of course).
It's not like you don't get rewards along the way, I thought the questline, less the two REALLY stupid parts mentioned, was interesting enough. It's also vastly easier now of course, I remember spending like 3 or 4 months getting runestones before they changed it. But I mean, I've got cloaks on like 5 characters and it never felt particularly tough or time consuming on most of them. It'd be 'aww that was a bad week for drops' or 'oh wow I got 8 this week" and in the end they only finished it a week or two different depending on rng.
Not sure why you need to do flex, you can get everything on lfr (obviously flex is probably simpler of course).
It's not like you don't get rewards along the way, I thought the questline, less the two REALLY stupid parts mentioned, was interesting enough. It's also vastly easier now of course, I remember spending like 3 or 4 months getting runestones before they changed it. But I mean, I've got cloaks on like 5 characters and it never felt particularly tough or time consuming on most of them. It'd be 'aww that was a bad week for drops' or 'oh wow I got 8 this week" and in the end they only finished it a week or two different depending on rng.
Does anyone else feel that the Legendary cloak being so "common" also made it seem like those who didn't have it yet were missing out on a very important piece of "required" gear for raiding?
Apologies for liberal use of quotation marks.
Oh absolutely. The worst part about the legendary cloak is that the community made it mandatory for heroic raiding. And I can't even blame them, it's so overpowered compared to any other cloak.
LAUGHTREY
Modesty becomes a woman
I agree.
I wasn't really around for Atiesh, but the "collectable/craftable" legendaries aren't really that great I think.
Sulfuras was difficult because you still had to get the eye, Thunderfury was the collectables but also rare bindings. Shadowmourne was only really one craftable per raid group at a time albeit the same tediousness in that none of the item drops were rare. Dragonwrath was similar although it was more efficient to craft 2-3 at a time per raid group since there was 2 sets of drops, so that felt a little more watered down.
My favorite legendaries are Warglaives and Thoridal, and by slight extension Sulfuras and Bindings. They're just super rare drops, not extra-long raid quests. I like seeing one huge rare drop, as opposed to 50 tedious ones that have like a 50% chance of dropping anyway.
I dunno, just look at this list. Compare MoP to all the other expansions. It just seems silly doesn't it?
It does seem that the fights are tuned for tanks and the majority of DPS to have them.
I wouldn't mind to see the expansion-long quests return, I just really hope they gut or severely nerf the RNG portions.
Gentleman Jack
Member
Warglaives sucked because of how good they were in Sunwell. You could kill Illidan 20 times and never get a full set for your melee while some other guild could get 3 pairs in the same time frame and pull ahead in progression because of the damage bonus to demons.
Fangs/Shadowmourne are the best models for Legendaries because you still got usable gear out of various stages of the quest, and it was a goal you worked towards as a guild. I got no beef with the cloak implementation besides the stupid PvP part of the questline, but I can see how those with alts in bleeding edge guilds would feel the pinch of needing to farm multiples.
Fangs/Shadowmourne are the best models for Legendaries because you still got usable gear out of various stages of the quest, and it was a goal you worked towards as a guild. I got no beef with the cloak implementation besides the stupid PvP part of the questline, but I can see how those with alts in bleeding edge guilds would feel the pinch of needing to farm multiples.
Still on the fence. Going to try for a ticket. If I get it - great.
I hate this cloak quest because even though I've already put in a bunch of work I know i'm still miles off. I doubt I'll even get it in time to begin to raid properly before the new expansion comes out so I'll miss out on better gear/titles and stuff x_x
I guess it doesn't help that I'm somewhat new to DPS again but it's still annoying that to get into flex you need flex level gear and most likely the cloak. It means people like me starting late are in a really bad position, moreso than ever before.
I guess it doesn't help that I'm somewhat new to DPS again but it's still annoying that to get into flex you need flex level gear and most likely the cloak. It means people like me starting late are in a really bad position, moreso than ever before.
RPGCrazied
Member
So I finally get my 20 secrets, get the trillium bars, do the first part of the scenario, but this 2nd part is really difficult. In the forge room where you have to defeat all the sha without letting one of those protector guys die. Can you get help with this, or is it solo only?
Cool. Not a bad idea
Didn't get a trinket upgrade from Dark Shaman, but I got a decent consolation prize
I got the trinket with a coin !
LAUGHTREY
Modesty becomes a woman
I'm excited to come back to raiding for WoD. It's starting to look like you'll be able to do some casual raiding and not have to have a strict set number of people to raid every night.
It's also much more fun that LFR isn't just handing out free candy anymore. Getting the armor and weapons without having to raid 3-4 days a week will be fun.
There is a place between Heroic and LFR where you can play casually but also not be insulted by the simplicity of the raid mechanics. I'm hoping everything being flex means that not showing up won't be such a big issue for guilds anymore. Missing out on tanks will still suck but at least now you won't get power tripped on for missing raid night anymore. Hopefully.
Of course, afaik 14 is the magic number for flex difficulty right now, and if they don't fix that scaling breakpoint problem then that feature will be all but ruined.
It's also much more fun that LFR isn't just handing out free candy anymore. Getting the armor and weapons without having to raid 3-4 days a week will be fun.
There is a place between Heroic and LFR where you can play casually but also not be insulted by the simplicity of the raid mechanics. I'm hoping everything being flex means that not showing up won't be such a big issue for guilds anymore. Missing out on tanks will still suck but at least now you won't get power tripped on for missing raid night anymore. Hopefully.
Of course, afaik 14 is the magic number for flex difficulty right now, and if they don't fix that scaling breakpoint problem then that feature will be all but ruined.
It's less of a magic number now. Used to be certain mechanics would affect an extra target at 15. Now whether or not you get an extra thing is proportional to your raid. Garrosh's MC's, for example, will always affect 2 people, but at 14 there's an 80% likelihood of affecting a 3rd (instead of 0%, as it was at Flex launch).
HarryDemeanor
Member
And we have confirmation that Garrisons are now only in the starter zones (Frostfire Ridge and Shadowmoon Valley) after they tied it into questing.
https://twitter.com/mumper/status/458701369939996673
Farm 2.0. *sigh*
I was really looking forward to placing my garrison in any Draenor zone I wanted (depending on faction.)
https://twitter.com/mumper/status/458701369939996673
Cory Stockton said:
Farm 2.0. *sigh*
I was really looking forward to placing my garrison in any Draenor zone I wanted (depending on faction.)
I believe it's a solo scenario. Keep trying, it's long but once you get the mechanics you should try it, it took me 3-4 tries on my rogue and rogues are generally terrible for soloing so it's doable.
alot of people were gone this week so we got to 3 heal garrosh
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QWFt8gjTdjo
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QWFt8gjTdjo
I was expecting it tbh. Sucks a lot.
Also:
Fuck this shit. They're going back on earlier xpacs with Atonement and I hate it. I had little reason or benefit to use it then.
"During the Garrosh Hellscream encounter, Word of Glory no longer generates threat during stages 2 and 3 to address an issue that was making the encounter more difficult than intended for raid groups with Protection Paladin tanks."
Well, that's interesting. On the one hand, no more having to click off Righteous Fury in phase 2 - yay. On the other, though, no more "Okay, he's low, just let the adds come to me and focus on Garrosh" at the end of the fight.
Well, that's interesting. On the one hand, no more having to click off Righteous Fury in phase 2 - yay. On the other, though, no more "Okay, he's low, just let the adds come to me and focus on Garrosh" at the end of the fight.
Shadowmoon Valley is a starter zone? I don't know why but that feels dissapointing after TBC and Shadowmoon being the ultimate area for cool dudes ;-;
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