TLDR: Remove LFR, Tune Normal to be able to be completed by a random PUG with lower gear, and give it the option to be que’d for. This get rid of worthless gear from current LFR, and allows players to do a full raid that isn’t broken into “wings”. Helps players find guilds as well by pulling from a pool of players on same server first.
Begin Full Post:
Lets face it, LFR is something I don’t think most people like or enjoy, and there’s already too many raid difficulties in the game right now. LFR gives rewards that are essentially worthless to anyone. By the time you can do the current raid, you out gear it to the point of why bother anyway?
Normal is basically a throwaway tier as any guild that raids usually breezes through it the first week of each tier’s release then never looks back. I would propose a merger of the two in a sense.
How it would work is getting ride of raid wings in LFR, but LFR mechanic for queing still exists, but only on normal difficulty. It is just the full raid, fully released the first week at what normal basically is, with difficulty tuned so that a random pickup group can handle it, geared appropriately, for a new raid tier. It would allow guilds to still do the raid tier together, or if they are short just throw themselves in LFR que to be automatically filled to 25 players with players queing being drawn from the guild’s realm first before going to a larger pool.
The reason I suggest it being the same realm is so that guilds can run coordinated low difficulty raids as a means of hopefully randomly recruiting people who may be looking for a guild, and it gives the guild a change to see how someone performs in a raid without them being detrimental to a progression run. It also creates a mentoring type environment, and a sense of community on the realm again.
In addition to raid finder wings being gone, the que system I think should be changed. When que’ing for normal (if not in a pre-made group) you can SELECT which boss you want to start at, provided you’ve completed that boss already at least once in the raid tiers lifetime. This way its not a big deal if people are dropping raid after getting the boss done that they wanted and don’t stick around until the end. Its also good for people who don’t want to get thrown into an in progress raid, then have to re-que for missed bosses.
It would also allow for the raid to actually flow like a normal raid instead of it getting that chopped up feeling of having to que for a different wing then wait another 30 minutes to do the next portion. This is perfect for people who want to raid, but don’t have the time to do it in the organized guild setting. It would allow them to start and stop where they want, without having to feel like they missed out, all while getting to see the full story.
It also gets rid of 4 difficulties that need to be tuned, and can work on the same kind of scaling tech as normal, heroic, and mythic enjoy, or if popping your normal into LFR it just boosts it to 25 to fill it.
All in all I think its an idea that would work better for a lot of people and would scale back on completely worthless gear and the lack of incentive to bother with LFR that most people feel.