Quality of Life from the 5.3 Notes

Two nice things coming in 5.3 should make life a little less painful.

The first is fairly simple, and something that we sort of should have gotten from the get-go. For LFR and Quests, we can now pick the spec we want to receive loot for. That means that if, say, you've got a really kick-ass dps set, but you want to gear up your healing capabilities, you can now select that role as your loot spec and then continue running as dps, contributing your nice facemelting numbers instead of trying to heal in that collection of questing greens and dungeon blues that probably aren't really appropriate for Throne of Thunder.

This should, I think, make switching roles mid-expansion a lot easier, and also make gearing up an off-spec a simpler matter. Granted, what I've taken to doing is just running as Retribution through those raid segments where I already have all the Protection gear I need (and of course tier tokens are spec-agnostic) and I've had decent luck so far (still haven't gotten a single Ret weapon drop though. I'm using the Klaxxi sword that they said was really there primarily for transmog purposes. Ironically I have it transmogged to Ironsoul, a 2h mace from Ulduar.)

This is very much a quality of life change. The other change is more dramatic: Bonus rolls will get progressively more likely to award loot the more often you lose the roll (remember when gold was something we actually wanted?) We don't know how quickly this will stack up, but it strikes me that getting geared through LFR slightly quicker is not exactly a terrible thing. Plus, there's always that one piece you desperately want, so people may, in fact, be less likely to use their bonus rolls on other bosses for fear of consuming the bad-luck-streak prevention thing.

Before people try to go around complaining that this somehow makes things easier... well, yes, it does make things easier. But LFR is supposed to be easy! Normal modes are challenging enough and then there are heroics on top of that. If you're unsatisfied with the game's difficulty, then join a guild that does heroic raids. I'm certain that there's a sufficient challenge you simply have not explored. And if the noobs and the scrubs get geared up a little faster, just deal with it. You can still vastly out-dps a bad player by simply being good at your class and knowing an encounter (and if you're really a good player, you'll also know that on certain fights, the people who are highest on dps are the ones who are doing it wrong. *cough* Horridon, *cough.*)

I still want to know more about what kind of new zones or areas we'll be seeing. So far the main event of the patch seems to be these scenarios, and unless these are some amazing scenarios (I certainly hope they are) I feel like there needs to be some central focus.

There's not much yet, but what I like what I see.