The Re-Legitimization of LFR

One thing that I'm actually very excited about in Legion is a change, or rather a reversion of a Warlords change, to the gear obtained in LFR.

If you'll recall, from Dragon Soul through Siege of Orgrimmar, the gear in LFR raiding was the same as that in other difficulties, but with a lower item level and a different color scheme (just as normal, heroic, and mythic difficulties have different color schemes - though mythic also gets "enhanced" model designs.)

In Warlords, Blizzard decided that in order to get people to run higher difficulties through the raid finder and also prevent "serious" raiders from running LFR to complete set bonuses or pick up trinkets with powerful procs, they'd simplify the gear out of LFR and also give said gear much less interesting models.

In fact, I'd say that the LFR models in Warlords of Draenor were really barely fit to be used for green quest rewards (the exception being the HFC cloth set, which actually looked pretty cool on a Warlock.)

Here's the thing, though - LFR isn't perfect, but it's a difficulty that is actually designed for PUGs. Doing pick-up groups on higher difficulties is, in my experience, exponentially more of a pain in the ass than LFR. In LFR, yes, you'll sometimes get some really bad players. But they can't really bring a raid down on their own. And you don't have an all-powerful group leader whose whims you have to follow.

I like raiding with my guild because it's filled with friendly people, even if we don't get much progress at all done in raiding anymore (we got a few bosses in Highmaul and one or two in Blackrock Foundry.) But when it comes to really growing my character's power, I stick with LFR, generally.

Now in Legion, with World Quests and new dungeons getting added to go with Mythic+, it might be less of a pain to seek alternate gearing strategies. But I'm also very happy that LFR gear is not going to look like total crap - I'll be able to gear up my Demon Hunter in gear that actually looks demon-hunter-y (ok, bad example, as he's got some really class-appropriate transmog looks from his class starting experience.) I'm confident that I'll be able to pick up the Paladin tier set that looks like Lightbringer and Judgment had a baby.

The question then will be whether difficulty goes back up as well. One might not remember it, but in Mists of Pandaria LFR was actually pretty challenging - getting Garrosh or Lei Shen down required more coordination than Blackhand or Archimonde, as Mists' LFR was less forgiving.

Personally, I think that the presence of hard difficulties like Heroic and Mythic means that there's nothing wrong with making LFR easy. But we'll see how it turns out this time.

Anyway, as someone with a lot of alts (see the name of the blog,) and who doesn't even get to do all that much regular raiding on his main, I'm really glad that they're no longer going to be punishing people who can only realistically do LFR.