We've now been blasting our way through Dragon Soul on LFR for two months. Overall, I think the raid finder is a fantastic addition to the game. I am in a very casual guild (we just got Shannox down on Normal mode last night,) but while I've been able to experience a decent amount of content on my Alliance characters, there's rarely more than two people online on the Horde side. So the fact that I've been able to take my shaman (and my rogue, and soon my mage) through to the end of Cataclysm, taking Deathwing down once and for all, is amazing.
Also wonderful is the introduction of the special LFR Need+ system. My guild's loot rules, and the ones that I generally apply in any instance I'm running, are fairly simple. You get priority on items for the role you've come in to play. Regardless of what you consider your "main" spec, if you come in as dps, you get priority to roll on dps. The one exception is that, if we have a shortage of healers, we'll sometimes ask someone to switch specs to fill the slot. In this case, we give them a choice - to roll as the spec they wanted to come in on, or to roll for the one we've told them to come as. Of course, we then open up off-spec rolls after the people with priority have passed.
Essentially, our system works almost exactly like the Need+ system.
Overall, Need+ works very well. When a plate shoulder piece with haste and crit drops, it's clear that the Ret Paladin should get it before the Protection Warrior. There are some problems, however. Essentially, all these problems boil down to not having a clear idea what spec a player is.
I have been both the victim and the unwitting perpetrator of this problem. On my main, Jarsus, I killed Deathwing in LFR. Gurthalak, Voice of the Deeps, the 2-handed sword (a great Ret piece) dropped, and Souldrinker, the 1-handed sword (with a proc that does a nice amount of damage as well as healing you, making it a nice tank proc) dropped as well (technically, these were different runs, but this doesn't matter.)
The big problem is that these two items are both flagged as Tank and Dps. Gurthalak is a tank weapon because of Blood Death Knights (I'm not sure if the tentacle it summons does anything for tanks, but it's the only weapon for Blood since they got rid of any of the pre-Madness of Deathwing weapons in LFR) and Souldrinker, despite its tasty healing proc, is clearly also meant to be used by Single-Minded-Fury Fury Warriors and Dual-wielding Frost Death Knights (two half-specs that add up to a whole, I guess.) So despite the Need+ system, I lost the Souldrinker to an Arms warrior and I won Gurthalak despite being a tank.
Blizzard claims that, at least at this point, the game doesn't have a clear way of knowing what spec you are. I'm not sure I believe that, given abilities like Guardian of Ancient Kings, but if that's their way of saying "sorry, we're busy working on the next expansion. We'll have it fixed by then" then I will begrudgingly accept it. But the clear way to improve Need+ is that, rather than simply giving each item a list of classes and a list of roles, there needs to be a specific list of specs for each item that drops.
If this change can be implemented, I'd like to see the improved Need+ in basically any PUG setting. Let's stop having Ret paladins roll on intellect shields just because Paladins can use shields and there is a spec - Elemental - that uses those shields for dps.
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