LFR made its debut in Cataclysm's final 4.3 patch, which brought us the three (quite good) Hour of Twilight dungeons (End Time - soon to be Timewalkable - Well of Eternity, and Hour of Twilight,) and the (pretty disappointing due to the lack of new art or locations and small number of bosses) Dragon Soul raid. Dragon Soul was the first LFR-capable raid - a bold experiment in taking the greater complexity of raid mechanics to a casual audience.
Previous to this, raiding was something that you either had to have a dedicated guild to do, or you had to brave often excruciating PUG groups for. There were eras in which you could get a fair way through a raid with a PUG - in late Wrath, I participated in a few PUGs in ICC that got about halfway through the instance, which was far from bad. But overall, raiding was something that only a portion of the players were even expected to do.
In Wrath and especially Cataclysm, they experimented with adding a significant number of dungeons over the course of the expansion. Wrath added one in 3.2 (Trial of the Champion) and three in 3.3 (The Frozen Halls - Forge of Souls, Pit of Saron, and Halls of Reflection,) and Cataclysm added two in 4.1 (5-player revamps of the Zul'Gurub and Zul'Aman raids) and the aforementioned Hour of Twilight dungeons in 4.3.
The worry that Blizzard expressed with these dungeons was that their rewards often eclipsed the previous raid tier. Trial of the Champion had Ulduar-10 level gear in it, and the Frozen Halls had Trial of the Crusader-10 level gear. The Zul'agains came out before Firelands, and were given kind of half-a-tier lower gear than the tier 11 raids, but the Hour of Twilight Dungeons had gear that was just as good as anything you could get in Normal Firelands.
The problem, as Blizzard saw it, was that this allowed players to skip forward. Far, far more people wound up doing Dragon Soul LFR (which had significantly better gear than Firelands) than had fought the minions of Ragnaros. The worst scenario was the case of Ulduar, which many consider the best raid Blizzard has ever made, which was obsoleted by the mere four-month-later Trial of the Champion (and Trial of the Crusader.)
Yet there was a kind of logical sense to this progression. Raiders would always be a tier ahead of players who only did dungeons, but dungeoneers could still feel that they were making significant progress.
Even though Dragon Soul was underwhelming as a raid, I actually think that the system was working pretty well in 4.3. Players could progress through effectively three tiers of heroic dungeons and then, if they wanted to jump to raiding, they could go up to LFR to get a taste.
After Cataclysm, Blizzard has not released any post-launch dungeons for Mists or Warlords, with the expectation that players will simply run LFR instead of dungeons after a brief stint running heroics to gear up after hitting the level cap. LFR certainly solves the "skipping content problem," because anyone who wants to experience the raids can do so pretty easily, even after they are no longer current.
If LFR had been in place for all of Cataclysm, it seems to me that anyone with any interest in raiding would have defeated Ragnaros several times before the Hour of Twilight dungeons came out to make Firelands gear obsolete.
I think the question that this raises is what the purpose of LFR is.
Is LFR meant to be the main way that those who do not have raiding guilds and are PUG-averse progress, as it has been for the past two expansions? Or is it a means to allow the majority of players to see the cool raid content that the designers have made at a far more leisurely difficulty level?
In Mists, it was primarily the first, and in Warlords, they've tried to balance the two.
But there is a question of rewards. The thing about WoW, and perhaps all MMOs, is that players will naturally gravitate to things with a significant, efficient reward. I certainly don't do many Mythic Dungeons because I know that I can get just-as-good or better gear running LFR and doing Tanaan dailies, which are easier.
If LFR had no gear rewards, I doubt many people would do it. But if you aim to, like in Wrath and Cataclysm, release new dungeons or new dungeon difficulties over the course of an expansion, where do the two balance out in the pecking order?
4.3 kind of had it easy, because with no tiers to follow, they could simply have the new heroics, then LFR, and then the regular raid difficulties. But a whole expansion could lead to crazy gear inflation like we saw at the end of Wrath (my Rogue had a 54% critical strike chance, if I remember correctly.) Also, if we're expecting to see more challenging dungeon content that represents the real meat of progression for non-raiders, perhaps LFR needs to have lower-level gear, which kind of upsets the tradition of raiding's supremacy in WoW. But wouldn't mythic dungeons have been a bigger success if the gear there was better than what you could get in Hellfire Citadel LFR?
I guess what has to happen is Blizzard needs to decide if they're ok with at least the lowest form of raiding being less "prestigious" than running dungeons. In the abstract, that seems clearly ok, but then you have to contend with the fact that this would make the lore feel pretty weird. Dungeons tend to have lower-level characters - often people we've never even seen before in-game, or perhaps in like one quest chain. Raids, at least for their final bosses, are almost always significant lore figures. With the system I'm proposing, had it been around in 4.3, beating Archbishop Benedictus would have been a bigger challenge and more rewarding than killing Deathwing himself - at least on the LFR setting.
Now maybe that's not such a big problem. Lore and gameplay have always been kind of divided (there's no way that Garrosh was more powerful than the Lich King or Death Wing - or freaking C'thun and Yogg-Saron - despite the fact that he was higher level.) But given the immediacy of these things coming in the same patch, I could imagine Blizzard feeling very uncomfortable with the idea.
Maybe enough to axe LFR.
As an old-school WoW player (I always felt like the new guy because I started at the end of vanilla, but I really can't realistically claim that anymore) I'm perfectly happy with having dungeons be the main way that "casual" players progress. But it does raise the biggest problem that Blizzard more or less created LFR to fix - that they go to a ton of effort to make these raids really cool and original, and yet only a fraction of the players actually see them.
If LFR got axed, I think they'd need to drop the difficulty level of Normal significantly - pretty much to just north of LFR's current difficulty. Those who want more of a challenge can do heroic, while the super-hardcore will still have a Mythic just as hard as it is now. If LFR goes, they need to make Normal the kind of difficulty in which the average player will be able to clear the raid on week two or three. This would also, I think, give Heroic difficulty a clearer identity as the kind of "real raiding" difficulty.
From Blizzard's talk, I wouldn't rule out this latter solution. Getting rid of LFR would be a huge upset for the game, and it's hard to tell whether it would be ultimately good in the long run It's been around long enough that there are plenty of players who think of it as the normal state of the game, and at this point, players expect to be able to see, fight, and defeat the final boss of each raid, and not simply have to look up the ending cinematics online.
That opens up a whole other can of worms - the merits and dangers of exclusive gameplay - but I think that the future of dungeons, raids, and LFR, will be at the heart of the evolution of WoW in Legion.
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