Welcome to raiding-- at any level. You’re supposed to wipe if you don’t do mechanics. Kick people who repeatedly refuse to do them and find those who will. Eventually we may purge the LFR laziness out of people.
Nothing needs nerfed.
Azshara on LFR is a cake walk compared to G’huun. Who is still a pain in the butt to kill because “orb running means i do no damage”
If blizzard didn’t change G’huun, I doubt they will change Azshara, who doesn’t need a nerf to be honest.
Part of me wants blizzard to continue to design fights where even on LFR people have to do mechanics otherwise it is a wipe. No more fights where 90% of the raid goes afk to watch netflix and get free loot afterwards.
How is it pressure? Does its existence pressure players to do it? What a bizarre thing to say. The content is there and can be done. Players will still decide to do it or to not do it. Making it easier will result in more people doing it, because quick and easy is quick and easy, but it also fundamentally alters the content.
Yea its not even worth queueing for risk vs reward just not worth it.
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I meant your words, not the way the content is in the game. If someone does LFR for the story and doesn’t want to do other difficulties I think the ability to do that is great, and it shouldn’t be up to people who do normal/heroic raiding to decide if it’s easy enough because we aren’t the players who use that content.
I really do understand what you’re saying, I don’t think LFR as it is is very challenging at all (though for sake of competent teammates, normal pugs are easier) but I also don’t know why people care if easy, unrewarding content exists in the game alongside them for people who, for any reason, don’t want the challenge. You’re free to scoff at people using lfr gear if you don’t like that playstyle
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Because it splits the playerbase unnecessarily and ultimately hinders everyone except the mythic raid crowd, who will always be an exclusive group. I’m not sure I would call it pressure, but a lack of an easier option will increase player incentive to at least do a normal mode raid. From there, it’s a jumping off point into feeling confident to try heroic. LFR damages the endgame community just as much as LFG, and just as much as sharding. There’s a stark game paly experience difference between running group content every week with PuG after PuG vs running group content every week with guild mates and friends. Features like LFG discourages the effort of social interaction, even if a minimal effort, and that damages the in game community.
On topic:
LFR Azshara difficulty level is fine, I think. It’s only the second week and once people figure out the fights and the average ilevel of players get better, it’ll get easier. Overall, I think LFR palace was very well tuned, for me at least, as I find it mildly to moderately challenging but not soulcrushingly hard. Like LFR Garrosh or LFR Archimonde was soulcrushingly hard especially on the first month. LFR Azshara, not so much.
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You don’t really know the history of this game. Blizzard did everything they could to entice players into raids and failed to sustain it. The first tier would have moderate numbers of players but then the player numbers would dwindle as the later raid tiers were released. 1% was the number Blizzard actually floated out there once before while justifying LFR.
Only misstep in their mind is that they released LFR before trying out flex mode and easy mode raids.
There IS a market for pre-made raids, sure, but I think it’s accepted that the LFR market is order of magnitudes bigger. And if LFR is taken away, most, if not all, of those players will NOT be joining any raids, even the easy modes. Also the existence of LFR MAY entice non-raiders to try out at least the normal raid, if not heroic or mythic. (Not me since I had my fill of raids in Wrath and is happy to never do that ever again.)
So tl;dr LFR does NOT hinder the raiding player base in any meaningful way and may in fact aid in keeping the raiding player base sustainable.
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source? Naxxramas doesn’t count.
Oh you mean the raid tiers where you HAD to do the previous one to get into the later ones? Imagine starting 18 months into classic. You gotta do MC first and no guilds are going to be doing MC at that point. BC was honestly worse in the sense the attunement process went almost all the way through the expansion.
The 1% was used for Naxx which required the completion of what? 5 different raids prior? At 2 items a boss that takes MONTHS to catch up to.
There is very minimal dropoff of AotC between tiers unless the tier is exceptionally off. I can almost bet the main reason AotC went down from Uldir to BoD is solely due to H Mekka.
A lot of the fights this xpac on LFR have been tuned nicely. The only one that hasn’t is G’huun, but that is mainly due to players refusing to run orbs (which you NEED to do to kill him) and refusing to refresh their debuff in phase 2 by standing in blood feast. Which does do a lot of damage when you get to 6+ stacks even on LFR.
That was something I liked about MoP LFR until sometime during patch 5.4. You had to do the previous wing to do the next one.
So you had to do MSV wing 1 to get to MSV wing 2.
You had to do MSV wing 2 to get into HoF wing 1 etc etc
So if you started late, it felt like you were “progressing” a raid unlike today where you could defeat G’huun before defeating M.O.T.H.E.R if you hit 120 now. Or you could do all of BoD before doing all of Uldir. Or doing all of EP before doing CoS.
Sunwell?
Only about 1% of the playerbase saw KJ during patch 2.4, let alone defeat him.
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Yet again expansions where you literally couldn’t do Sunwell/Naxx without doing like 5 raids beforehand should not be brought up in a conversation where there is a hard reset every 22 weeks.
I think you’re right - the 1% number was floated for Naxx. And for Vanilla to Wrath, once a new raid was released, any previous raids were largely abandoned. At least in Wrath, you had a catch up mechanism as you could buy low ilevel raid gears for valor then upgrade them through raiding.
What I meant about WoW’s raiding history is this:
- Vanilla had 40 man main raids. But then they saw how popular 20 man raids were compared to the 40 man raids, so for BC, the main raids were tuned down to 25 man raids.
- BC had Kara which proved to be IMMENSELY popular and still run even into later tiers. As someone else mentioned, Sunwell clear rates were abysmal while Kara participation rates remained strong.
- Since turning down raid group numbers was so controversial for BC, in Wrath, they left 25 man mode but added a 10 man mode on top of it. I believe the two modes were on a separate lockout, to boot. Naxx was really popular and more people cleared ICC than ever before compared to vanilla Naxx and Sunwell but according to unofficial numbers (first available due to the introduction of achievements in the WoW Armory) the numbers were still trending downward.
- By cata, 10 mans weren’t cutting it anymore. So for the final raid tier of that expansion, Demon Soul, they added LFR mode, which made Blizzard sit up and say “whoa”, Keanu style.
- In MoP, LFR was included for all raids, which continues until now, and by all information available, was wildly successful with high participation rates. I’ve seen achievement polls at mmo champion that posted like 70% of players with LFR clears compared to sub - 10% normal clears during MoP and WoD and like 1% mythic clears (although the early bosses were higher. Still single digits, but higher). Also, the LFR butthurt started in full force in MoP, which continues until now.
So even now I think it’s safe to say that LFR participation rate is much higher than raid participation rate. My guess is that more than 50% of players have LFR clears while 10-20% would have normal or higher clears.
10 and 25 man shared a loot lockout iirc. At least I think so since I remember not being able to go for both Naxx mogs on my druid.
Yeah that was nice. But the problem was that for DPS players, it might take an hour or longer to get into an older LFR. It still beats endless trade spamming in the pre-LFR days, but it’s still a major roadblock as the expansion progresses.
I’m thinking a good compromise would be that a previous clear would be necessary for the current raid, but not from the previous raids. So like if Eternal Palace is released, then all previous wings would be unlocked and you just have to start Palace from Wing 1.
Yeah you might be right. I did run Wrath Naxx back in the day but not extensively.
I don’t remember tbh. I am fairly certain you were locked out of ALL difficulties until Siege of Orgrimmar.
As more people learn the fight it will get easier. Besides, going to LFR for gear is a bit of a waste.