So, I’m not sure if anyone else has noticed this but since Aberrus the LFR appearances of the tier are the hardest to acquire, and it’s really weird. I think Blizzard needs to come up with a way to more easily acquire these appearances pronto.
What Do I Mean?
You Can Gear Yourself of LFR Appearances. LFR has a protection system put into place where you can’t roll on gear if you have an item in that slot on a higher track. This basically means that if you even casually do content that’s harder then LFR, you’re probably not going to be able to roll on loot for the appearance. This makes sense; it would suck for people who actually need the gear to loose to people like me, who are basically Mythic geared, because I want a sword. But it also sucks because it means that off-set pieces and weapons from LFR are sort of the only items I can’t reasonably obtain. Why?
You kinda can’t que for LFR. Getting 25 people together for matchmaking something like this is hard, and to be honest I’m not even sure that you can que for LFR with a group that large. (Feel free to confirm or not in the comments.) Not only does this mean that me and 25 of my friends can’t go into LFR to farm appearances without stealing them for people who need it, but it also has the downside of:
Running LFR often doesn’t ensure you’ll get the appearance. When I farm a raid with my friends, I know that if an item drops over and over again I’ll probably get it eventually. A guild group I put together is going to have fewer and fewer people roll on the item over time after all. Even if I go into LFR on a lowbie alt to farm the appearances I want, I have no such insurance that I’ll eventually get the item I’ll want because everyone is constantly rolling on everything. It’s a two-fold luck of the draw every time with no, “Bad Luck Protection” in the form of a consistent guild group. And even if it was, there’s one more big issue.
Making Me Go Into LFR on an Alt for Mog Doesn’t Help the People Who Need the Help. The current system actively disincentivizes me from participating in LFR on my best characters because I don’t need the items for an item level upgrade and I can’t reasonably win things for their transmog appearances. So why would I go in there at all?
Ideas for Solutions
Here are a couple of solution ideas.
Make the Appearances Obtainable from Somewhere Else: Visions of N’Zoth did this best; you could get the entire LFR Tier Set appearances and Weapon Stock by doing outdoor content in the Vale of Eternal Blossoms and Uldum. This let people who wanted to do LFR free to do so, and those who just wanted the appearances a means to get them without stealing from LFR raiders or feeling like they couldn’t win at all.
Make Ensembles Drop in All Difficulties: Trial of Valor did this cool thing where you could do a weekly quest to earn the lowest-difficulty set of the transmog set from that mini raid; this was in part because the raid didn’t drop shoulders, but it was also pretty neat because you could work to farm the whole Normal set over the course of a few weeks and get the Heroic set as a dropd from Helya on most difficulties. If bosses could drop ensembles that gave specific LFR tints, that would solve most of the issues I’ve described with acquiring those appearances.
Make LFR Appearances Craftable: Currently every season in Dragonflight the crafted gear used the same appearance every season; the 10.0 Drakebreaker Set. There are a couple of exceptions; new recipes introduced in a given patch use the appearances of that patch’s outdoor world set, like the new Emerald Dream crafted plate help. You could change this so if you craft an item with that season’s Enchanted Whelping Crest or Spark, the resulting item always used the LFR appearance. That could add a boom to the crafting economy, since now crafters could make LFR tint items for people who don’t want to go into LFR without taking away the fun of LFR, since you’d still get the actual items and tier set bonuses from there.
Just some ideas; what are other people’s thoughts on this?
Solution already exist. Apologies for my shorthand, at a taxi stop.
For S1 only normal/heroic is easy. Get forbidden reach rares killed and get. (Wait till S4 and season 1 raid will be active again, could be a chance to get LFR set again)
S2 farm the coalescing essence. Fyrakk’s open world even boss (his assistant)/time warped also convert to S2 LFR tier.
S3 convert purple gear from the new map and since raid is current, can do that too.
But that only gives you the class appearances and not the lookalikes. You can get veteran rank gear from the Emerald Dream weeklies or farming +2 keys if you don’t want to run LFR.
But there is also the fact that some appearances are only available from the catalyst.
Like you mentioned, the LFR gear from Vault of the Incarnates is functionally inaccessible right now. It would be great if we could throw the Rank 1 Elemental Overflow gear into the catalyst to get it, but we can’t currently.
S2 and S3 gear can be acquired from the Catalyst, but that doesn’t help off-set pieces. Additionally, S2 gear lost the ability to be upgraded, which means it’s actually harder to get those appearances. For example, when Aberrus was current content I could get the Mythic appearances by running Heroic Aberrus and upgrading them to an item level where I got the next tier appearance. You can’t do that anymore, and the current S2 gear from Suffusion Camps / Dreamsurges even lost the ability to become the Normal tint of the Aberrus sets, which it previously could.
I actually address that directly in my post; it’s not great because you’re essentially trying to take gear from people who need it for the Mog, because unlike a guild group where eventually people won’t need the gear that drops EVERYONE is in LFR because they need something. It doesn’t really fix the problem with LFR gearing.
This is a great idea, ngl. I don’t know what the work would be like for Blizzard though.
Same, Rita. Same.
I wouldn’t hate this. It would be very similar to how the ensembles worked in Trial of Valor, only piece-by-piece. I also kind of like the idea that when you fully collect a set, you get an achievement that makes it class agnostic since so many of the sets already have specific pieces that do this.