This week has been a sort of "alt week" for me. I have not yet touched Jarsus or Oterro (who now qualifies as a kind of Vice Main,) but I've spent a bunch of time running the mage, warlock, warrior and even the Horde rogue through LFR.
Today, the combination of Elder Charms gotten from the Treasures of the Thunder King scenario and the increased drop rates means that if you do a bonus roll on every boss (or at least every boss off of whom you want something that didn't drop immediately,) you can walk away with a ridiculous amount of gear. Sure, sometimes you won't get the piece you were most interested in (I dreamed of two Spiritsevers from Lei Shi on Darsino, but I got none) but your item level can rise meteorically. All four of those characters walked away with 2-piece tier set bonuses, and two of them got a third. Darsino, the Rogue, is now even qualified for ToT (though that's from his inventory, including the Fist Weapon off Shek'zeer, which was odd because I've been running him as Assassination, and would not think that weapon ought to drop for me in that case.)
Catching up is not instantaneous, but if I were to focus on any one of these characters for a little bit, I'm sure I'd have them going into ToT next week (well, Darsino could do it now.)
Now, to be fair, I played a lot this week, but I think that the increased LFR drop rates are pretty much the catch-up mechanic we all needed.
Typically, each expansion has three tiers of raiding, though in some cases there have been either a whole other tier, or a half-tier, like AQ40 or Sunwell Plateau (actually, for the life of me I can't understand why AQ wasn't just called tier 3 and the original Naxxramas wasn't tier 4, but anyway...) So far, we only know that they've bumped the droprate here up by a hefty amount.
What I would propose is that the droprate adjustment become progressive.
I have no idea what the actual numbers are, but from my experience, I can give a very rough estimate that you've got about a 20% chance to get a piece of gear in current raid content. While on average this would mean you should be getting a piece every five bosses you down, you have to remember that probabilities can screw you. Also, remember that the people most likely to complain about it are the people who are getting screwed. For every person denouncing Ghostcrawler because they haven't gotten the bow they want yet, there's someone else who lucked out and got it on the first kill.
I would guess, then, that the current state of tier 14 on LFR gives a 40-50% chance at loot (before using a Charm.) That's not bad at all, but late in the expansion, when everyone's raiding Orgrimmar, it'll be frustrating to be the guy trying to run Heart of Fear and just not getting that one piece they need out of MSV on his two runs a week.
So what I would suggest is a progressive build-up. At launch, we had the low chance, maybe 10%. Then, in 5.1, I would have brought the chance up a little bit, maybe to 25%. In 5.1, it was still current content, but you've probably been running it for a while and the bad luck is pretty annoying. 5.2 hits, and we have a new raid tier, and we put it basically where it is now - with a little luck, you can mostly fill out your kit in a single string of runs.
So where does it go from there?
5.3 comes, and we can bring it up another 15% for both tiers, so tier 14 is now at a 55% drop rate and ToT is up to 25%. Now, getting geared up through tier 14 shouldn't be very hard at all, allowing you to catch up and get into ToT before everyone stops running it.
When 5.4 hits, we can bring tier 14 up to 70%, where in all likelihood you'll only need to run through the raids once to get what you need out of them, and then you can move on to ToT. Here, you'll probably need to spend a little more time, but it will give you time to prove you're ready to head into Orgrimmar.
One of the objections that Blizzard had to the late-expansion heroics of Wrath and Cataclysm was that it allowed you to skip content. However, by requiring you complete each raid segment in order before you can queue for the next one in LFR, you force people to at least see the fights.
There is a danger, which is that if everyone gets everything they want out of a raid on the first go, they might not want to come back for it. That's a valid concern, and actually one of the main reasons to tolerate non-guaranteed loot in the first place. I think that we can rest relatively assured that people will keep running old content, though, either on alts or for the big chunks of VP (it might not hurt, actually, to make a raid segment give more VP - like 140 or something.)
I don't think the choice to avoid new heroics was because Blizzard doesn't like catch-up mechanics, but I think that they want you to catch up by doing what your main was doing, only quicker. These increased drop rates seem like the best way to accomplish that, if you ask me.
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