This goes for all queues content, normal dungeons, heroic dungeons, battlegrounds, LFR, even arena skirmishes should not allow players to join unless all 4/6 players have accepted.
It’s beyond dumb when an instance is over, say 4 players are killing the last boss on a heroic dungeon, to allow a 5th player to ‘join’ and have to wait until combat is over before actually going in, only to find it’s over and they waited in queue for nothing.
For PVP content there needs to be a break point where the game decides it’s over and no one else is getting in, like if you are doing AB and the score is 400 - 1400, why would you let anyone else join when it’s basically over? For dungeons and LFR, if the last boss is being attacked don’t let anyone join unless the group wipes.
It’s especially bad in arena how you can join a 1v2 game, only certain classes against other specific classes can win those, but I find it even worse when I get into a 2v1 game, what’s the point? I join skirmishes to practice, that’s not helping.
If the instance is all but over, why would you replace them? Why would you force someone to accept a queue invite, get in and get nothing from it, then have to requeue again?
It also means they might kill the boss and therefore the 5th person waiting to get in cannot, because they are in combat, and if they do win than that person is now joining a dungeon that has all bosses dead and done nothing but waste time.
I can right now solo heroic dungeon content, if someone is missing I don’t care I will fight on. It’s a big problem for tuning, but a needed problem because the iLVL needed to get in to these queues is laughable and players with myhic iLVL’s are going in an roflstomping the instances.
During BFA I would even stomp these dungeons as an Unholy DK ‘tank’ and not have an issue, I was hitting hard enough to keep aggro and had enough survivability to not need a healer.
But those are fringe cases, most of the time a tank at a high enough iLVL can do it all and will, but again they need the bonus damage from these PVE queues because the iLVL is low and needs to be to allow more people to gain access.
Yeh but what’s worse (or better), taking longer to get into a dungeon that can guarantee at least one boss kill, or for PVP some action more than just joining and walking out the front to a lose (or a win)? Or having shorter queues but gambling on whether the queue is a dead queue that will give you nothing?
Half the time you can gauge if the queue is dead by how fast it pops, but even than there is nothing you can do, you are still needing to go to the back of the queue and having to wait again.
I agree OP.
Just tonight I got into LFR and they started the fight while I was still at the zone in, they started the last boss and locked me out of the fight and I got no chance at loot AND I’m locked out of that boss for the week.
If you pause in-combat on the very last boss, it’s going to have a negligible effect on the rate groups fill. The very situation is extremely niche.
Dungeon and LFR queues are already effectively paused in-combat. That’s why if you’re in LFR and happen to pull the boss with someone missing, people won’t just randomly be joining in during the boss fight, it’s when the boss fight ends that the queue resumes and 3+ more people are added to the party, or whatever.
Of course, the issue the OP is discussion won’t significantly change with any of this. In a typical example, someone joins the group and is given an invite, and THEN the group happens to pull while that process is happening. The game doesn’t really have a good way to prevent that. What’s probably required for that kind of situation is to waive the 15 min dungeon queue cooldown so that person can immediately re-queue again.
If you don’t have a chance to loot the boss (and nothing is in the mail), you aren’t locked out of the boss for the week.
I think it should give a warning that you’re about to join a dungeon in progress. Then it is the players choice to join or not. Because on time walking weeks I love when I get in on the final boss lol.
Somebody leaves. The group requeues. They wait, then start killing trash. They get to the next boss, still no replacement. They decide to try to kill the boss. Either they do or they don’t.
Negative, I know that is how it is supposed to work, but it isn’t.
No fight, no loot, no mail.
And the boss is greyed out and red x
It even says it’s already looted.
Except you get nothing for not participating. The only time you get something free is when you join a BG and your team wins within seconds of getting in, any PVE content that has the last boss engaged by the time you join means you walk into an empty instance and walk out to requeue.
Backfilling should let you leave and requeue without consequence.
Nobody likes to queue to kill a boss, then you join a group that already dropped it. Now you’re stuck with them and have to kill them with an ancient dalaran portal out of spite.
Moral of the story: play mage and you can kill LFR players.
The mail part won’t be guaranteed of course. You’d only be having items mailed to you that are relevant, e.g. loot you’ve won, quest items, etc. If you were a Warrior, and the boss dropped all Cloth and int items, you’re obviously not getting anything in the mail.
With Fated raids in Shadowlands, which were after the pre-patch using the same loot system, I know I personally ended up being locked out of the room for bosses in LFR (usually on some alt I didn’t care about at 5am because I was bored and figured it was a way to re-learn that alt’s class and finish an LFR transmog set). Any situation I entered combat was a situation I was eligible for loot, and any situation where I was not in the zone at all was one where no loot-lock would be applied.
If you’ve found a (niche, rare, and hard to reproduce) set of circumstances where that doesn’t apply or work correctly, you should probably open a Bug report. It’s entirely plausible that no tester would have come across or replicated the exact sequence of events that you happened to.
I can confirm for a fact that Group loot does continue to mail a person loot from the boss, since I’ve done it personally.
I wasn’t able to confirm from a dev during the Beta process what the game does if a person happened to get kicked during the boss (and would therefore not be in the zone when the boss died). Realistically, the options are the game runs the timer with no roll on their part, and then eventually Passes on their behalf, or the game automatically Needs on their behalf. The former sounds pretty bad since it’d work as a way to remove your competition if you can pull it off.
Not LFR. Even if one boss left could be considered “about to end” that’s still an entire raid boss left.
There have been times where for whatever reason I killed only the first boss in an LFR wing, or only the first two, or whatever. I have queued and gotten lucky to get into a group that already started where I don’t have to repeat the boss. Great success.
Other times I haven’t gotten lucky. I will either (1) just re-kill the bosses. This is the worst thing ever because they’re all one-shots and with 0 loot is is the most boring thing on earth. Or, (2) I will actually just quit the group and requeue until I get into a group that’s on the boss I am on.