Thursday, October 25, 2012

LFR: A Necessary Evil, but an Evil Nonetheless

In theory, I love the idea of LFR.

Before 3.3, which introduced Icecrown Citadel, the Frozen Halls 5-man dungeons, and the Dungeon Finder, putting together a dungeon group meant spamming trade with requests like "LFM VH, need two dps and a healer." You would do this for about an hour (though admittedly, playing a tank made things easier.) Finally, you'd get a group, and you could go run the dungeon. If someone was an asshole and you decided to kick them, you'd have to send someone back to Dalaran (or Shattrath, or Ironforge or wherever) to get a replacement. Having a guild obviously made this easier, but any guild I've been in has people who don't necessarily want to just drop what they're doing to run a dungeon.

The point is: For 5-man dungeons, people ran PuGs all the time. Sure, some of them were brutal (heroics in BC were generally considered harder than Karazhan, the starter raid,) and by no means were there not people who were total jerks, but really the environment did not change much with the introduction of LFG.

Nowadays, running 5-man dungeons is relatively stress-free. Sure, during the era of the Zuls you'd have some people who just couldn't figure out that you had to always stand next to Jin'do's chains - even if you were trying to dps the spirits chasing the healer, but overall, you could often come across a very friendly, sociable group of people that makes the run (even with occasional wipes) a pleasant experience.

I have yet to experience a pleasant LFR run.

Now, ok, once people really knew Dragon Soul, you could get Madness down pretty quickly and get the cool weapons. The thing is, the best you can ever hope for in LFR is a quiet group that is competent.

What you can usually expect are people complaining about low dps (even though we're downing the bosses just fine) or people starting the fight before everyone is there, or people who go AFK after every wipe, or people who just flat-out refuse to resurrect, yet want the people who are running back to be kicked for not being ready for the next attempt.

In short: LFR is a terrible way to experience the content.

Now, I am all for ease and accessibility. I've always been more of a "perfectionist" gamer than a "challenge" gamer. I'll play games on the low difficulty settings, but attempt to pull things off immaculately. In Skyrim, my Argonian assassin only ever got a bounty after killing the cousin of the emperor in the Dark Brotherhood quest chain (I don't know if it's even possible to get out of Solitude undetected.) And that's with both the full Dark Brotherhood chain and the full Thieves Guild chain. I like beating time records on bosses we have on farm. I like smooth runs.

So I have absolutely nothing against LFR as an easy way to raid. That's commendable.

My problem with it is that the anonymity of being in a group of 25 people, rather than a group of 5, allows for some really horrific behavior. I was just in a Vault of Mysteries LFR and we got wiped because someone activated the Will of the Emperor before everyone was there. But with 25 people, it's not easy to tell who did it. So we tried again, and the exact same thing happened. This, of course, after I was forced to stay up to 2:30 in the morning just to get in on a tank.

Honestly, I don't have a solution, other than the general advice of "don't be a dick." LFR was really the only way I got to experience Dragon Soul, as my guild's raiding core has somewhat dispersed since Wrath of the Lich King. I can only hope that we can try to rebuild this time around.

Now here's what concerns me: Blizzard has said that they want to emphasize LFR as the way that alts or latecomers catch up. They feel that the un-randomized grind of currencies makes things a bit too mechanical, and that it allows people to get far more powerful gear than what drops in the less challenging content they are running.

What I take away from that is that they want us running LFR a lot. Respectfully, Blizzard, I'd really prefer not to. Yes, it's true that you could get Firelands-quality gear out of the Hour of Twilight heroics, and that you could get Trial of the Crusader-quality gear out of the Frozen Halls. So yes, you can skip that content. But is that such a terrible thing? During Wrath, we fell into a lull after completing Naxxramas (sadly, Ulduar was the raid we missed out on the most.) We did some Trial of the Crusader, even beating it once or twice, but where the guild began to thrive again was in ICC. We would not have been able to get working on ICC had it not been for the 232 gear in the Frozen Halls.

I've never had as much fun raiding as the ICC days, when we had two full raids running each week: one the "progression raid," which was regularly pushing on the final bosses of the various wings upstairs, and the "Alt raid" that clearing a good half of the instance regularly (the first four plus Rotface/Festergut.) All of this was possible because of the Frozen Halls.

Now, I know the argument is that LFR will be able to provide that booster gear. The problem is that PuGs get exponentially worse the more people are in them. 5 people? You might get a rotten apple, but usually you'll be fine. 25 people? Oh dear lord.

Finally, as another direction to look at this from: Some of us like running 5-man dungeons. While raids are the pinnacle of PvE content, 5-mans have always been the meat and potatoes. Please let there be a progression of 5-man content through Mists!

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