During Cataclysm, I leveled up a second mage, this time on Alliance - a Draenei named Goraas. LFR was new then, and we were all hitting up Dragon Soul to the degree that we were willing to put up with LFR (while I think the difficulty was tuned fairly well, the loot system led to a lot of awful behavior.) While running Goraas through, I somehow managed to, on his first run of both wings, get the four-piece tier set, with helmet, shoulders, robe, and pants.
Now, I should point out here that I think Mage Tier 13, "Timelord Regalia," is probably my favorite armor set in World of Warcraft.
LFR gear, both in Dragon Soul and all the Mists raids, has a different color scheme. Much as normal and heroic gear are differentiated, LFR gear has its own color scheme (which seems to often involve green.)
The problem, of course, is that while Normal, Heroic, and under the new Warlords raid paradigm of normal, heroic, and mythic, you can always just change the difficulty of the raid to pick up old pieces, in the case of LFR, once you out level a raid, you can never go back and run that on LFR.
I would love to be able to fill out my Mage's tier 13 set with the icy white, grey, and blues of the LFR version of tier 13, but there is no way for me to get into that version of the instance anymore.
Months ago, I suggested allowing players to run raid at LFR difficulty without the LFR group-finder, essentially just using LFR as a template for "Easy" mode, treating the LFR matchmaking system the same way that one treats the Dungeon Finder.
The solution may actually lie in the new raiding scheme. Unless they decide that they now want to do four color schemes for each item, they will probably stick to having two of the difficulties share a style. Right now, Flex Mode and Normal Mode gear looks identical (my DK now has a cool purple sword, which I think looks way better - and more Draenei-appropriate - than the green LFR one.) The solution therefore might be to just switch it so that LFR and Flex (which, to make things not at all more confusing, will be called Normal in Warlords) share a scheme.
However, to work retroactively, some other changes should perhaps be implemented. There is no flex mode for tiers 13-15, and so Dragon Soul LFR gear is unattainable, and by 2015, so will all the LFR gear from Mists (well, theoretically you could lock your XP at 90, but good luck waiting in that queue.)
For tier pieces, it could be as simple as allowing you to trade in a tier token for a lower-iLevel version of the corresponding piece. But of course, that leaves out non-set pieces.
Indeed, it might require that we see an overhaul to the transmog system. The upcoming Diablo 3 transmog system will work off a checklist of gear you have had, rather than gear that you currently have. Therefore, it would be pretty easy to allow you to just make a higher-quality version of a piece count for all inferior versions. Let's say you run Heroic Dragon Soul, and you get the purple version of Gurthalak. With a checklist-based system, having the heroic version could just count as having all three versions. Having the normal version could count as both that one (red) and the LFR one (blue.)
Adopting a checklist-based transmog system would probably make the entire feature a lot more elegant (not to mention the fact that it would probably mean they could get rid of Void Storage.)
From its first introduction, I have been a great fan of transmogrification. It gives us another way to express the characters that we are playing. There's essentially no downside to it, so I think it's one of those features that Blizzard should eagerly expand to be as user-friendly as possible.
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