The story is there, but you’re fighting BigWigs/DBM alerting you and people rushing through and getting impatient if you dare to watch a cutscene. Or running back from a wipe because people stacked circles/didn’t soak despite the 10th time being told to. You miss a lot.
I do LFR. I’ll still do LFR. But I’d like to experience the story without all the distractions.
100% agree with this.
I also agree
Well hopefully they add even more story then since this allows them more freedom.
End LFR timegating. If people want to experience the story that way vs forming a group for normal, let them. At the very least put this story mode boss at launch.
(We currently plan to release this experience alongside the final wing of Looking For Raid difficulty,)
If it isn’t released fully when the raid comes out then this mode is pointless.
Stop time gating LFR in general, Its so dumb that Mythic is cleared before all wings of LFR are even out.
Should just get rid of LFR entirely, raiding is meant to be a social experience you do with your friends, not with a bunch of computer-assigned strangers.
LFR wing delays was implemented at the same time the Determination buff was added. Get rid of Determination and there might be a case for easing up on the LFR delays.
But not before.
dream on lol
It’s not a matter of the patch-based storylines, it’s the “weekly gated” storylines that tend to accompany a raid patch. Most of the time, those usually open over the course of 3-4 weeks, with the final quests covering events that happen after the raid.
A famous example was playing Venthyr at the start of Shadowlands, the Covenant campaign covered helping the newly-freed Kael’thas with his absolution a full week or two before the wing where you actually rescued him was available in LFR, and I believe it reached the point where you learn about Denathrius being trapped in Remornia before the final wing opened.
LFR is extremely useful and the ONLY reason why raids are still developed because it gets enough people to do them to justify the development investment for them.
It’s not up to you to dictate how people must play the game so long as raids remain the story peak of each patch.
By the time the final wing of LFR is available, the story will have been long posted about on every website and youtube channel. Letting everyone experience the story on day 1 allows for it to be consumed unspoiled for everybody, it IS the best option for everybody. Also, why not extend it to the entire raid? Allows people to practice mechanics before lfr wings, and experience the story in its entirety, presenting the finale and nothing else feels wrong for what this is trying to achieve.
Very much hoping for that!
I think this is a fantastic choice, but I really don’t like that raid story is timelocked for non-raiders. Especially when significant stuff occurs in the rade (like Belameth). Often the story beats of a raid are still experienced first online BECAUSE of the lack of an easy way to experience them. Story mode will help a TON when the raid becomes somewhat legacy with a new season, but doesn’t fix the main problem with how people experience raid stories.
I can’t remember if we helped Anduin recover from his trauma under the Jailer’s thumb but we had I think a couple weeks of post-Jailer defeat lore dumps before many players faced him.
That’s a rubbish fairy tale and always has been. What Blizzard actually said (back in MoP) was that the increased ## of people doing Dragon Soul through LFR justified doing a massively large 16-boss raid tier at the start of MoP.
That’s it.
I don’t see any 16-boss raid tiers these days, do you? (Thank goodness for that.)
Raiding was fine before LFR and will be fine afterwards.
That’s because raiding population is still plummeting as people have the ability to gear outside of content that requires you to deal with 9-29 other people. So yeah, raids are going to continue to shrink because it’s not as popular a content when it was the only way to gear.
Could you have it release alongside day 1 raid?
Ehh. Meanwhile Heroic dungeons have become heavily pushed again as a core progress point as of S4, so I’d say they actually are pushing the queue as a feature you’re expected to be using more frequently now.
The problem with LFR is that even a modicum of difficulty becomes a big problem if (as is common) you have a limited segment of the group that’s actually trying, and also if the boss has core mechanics that can’t easily be defanged to the point of addressing that without basically not being a fight at all (say, N’Zoth, or a lot of the Shadowlands raid bosses).
Add to that how restrictive WoW is on battle rezzing (compare its closest analogue, Alliance Raids from FFXIV, which are usually similar to or even a little more complex than LFR mechanics wise, but rez is also orders of magnitude more accessible since except for a DPS debuff - which is usually not important, as DPS checks in Alliance Raids are normally more “are enough people alive and at least targeting the boss and pushing some buttons?” checks than real challenges - and cast time/mana cost, there’s basically no limit to battle rezzing there) and you can see a problem looming.
The result is that the common MMO latecomer/slow paced player scenario (and these days, “slow paced” can culturally almost even go as far as “didn’t make a point to bum rush everything by lunch on patch day” in many a situation) extends all the way down to LFR in WoW raiding.
And that scenario rightly turns people off to the game. Why continue putting in effort if it feels like it won’t matter? No matter how gud you git, actually getting anywhere means hoping you find n-1 other players that can also cut the mustard, in a culture where those players tend to be in an increasing rush to close the wagons around them in order to avoid failures caused by unskilled teammates, and are only too happy to just tell folks sorry you missed the bus try again next season …
Which means Blizzard has to try something different. This is something different (and which usually is successful when tried by other publishers).
And come to think of it, is it really that much different from say how Torghast worked? Even if you got in late to the party and missed out on the rush of group runs, you still had the option of soloing it, so you weren’t either locked out of your legendary or forced to try and get a carry (like happens with so much other content). Or you could easily ask your guild for help without needing a full squad’s worth to be available (the amount of other people’s time needed to catch up one new player, or even one new character, has been a chronic thorn in WoW’s side. Remember that BRD escort quest? xD).
Please for the love of the Light, Loa, void, shadow, arcane fel and whatever else don’t make people wait until the end of the LFR release. Story mode is as you said meant to be experienced to finish the story.
Why should we (who don’t want to raid or have no interest in it) have to be punished waiting 6-8 weeks purely to get the final chapter. Let us have it on release with normal and heroic so we’re not being gate kept behind ‘content’ that we’re not interested in.
As a roleplayer I want to have the story and experience it and not be forced to wait 6 weeks for the final chapter of a book because it’s being gate kept by normal, heroic, mythic and lfr on a 2 week release schedule
We’re all missing this part. It’s not the entire raid, just the last boss. It releasing when the final LFR boss wing releases makes sense then.