LFR to Have Unique Set Bonuses

In a move to separate traditional raiding from LFR, and certainly to encourage people to try out the former, Blizzard announced a while ago that Warlords' LFR setting would use different gear than the other difficulties - separated not just by color scheme and item level, but giving us totally different models and pieces. Additionally, to make sure that traditional raiders didn't feel they needed to run LFR to get important pieces of gear, they also simplified gear in LFR - making sure trinkets had either flat stats or very simple procs, and none of the kind of transformative pieces like Unerring Vision of Lei Shen or Rune of Reorigination. Likewise, LFR will not drop tier-set pieces, meaning that if you want the awesome set bonuses (and they are pretty cool,) you'll have to do the "real" raiding.

Still, gear sets are fun, and they don't want to make LFR feel totally unlike real raiding. Thus, there will be effectively "LFR tier" sets. These are not class-specific. Instead, there will simply be a set for each armor class and the roles those armor classes can perform. Presumably, like the normal Warlords tier sets, these sets will also change bonuses depending on your spec, so that you only have to collect a single set of them on your character.

I really wonder how raiding will work out in Warlords. Mists largely carried over the problem that had begun in Cataclysm. By merging the raid sizes with regard to difficulty, they effectively got rid of the 10-player normal mode that had made raiding so popular in Wrath of the Lich King. Flex mode helped, but a lot of guilds were broken in the intervening years. My personal hope is that, with "flex" as the new normal difficulty, we'll see guild raiding become more prominent again. For anyone who wasn't playing during Wrath, it was quite amazing - a huge portion of the game's players did actually run raids, long before LFR was a thing.

I definitely think LFR should remain, but I think it's all right if it becomes the super-easy version of the raid. LFR had a strange line to straddle during Mists. For most players, it was the only way that we would really be able to access Mists' raids (and without new dungeons, raids were really the sole path in PvE.) As a result, I think that they erred on the side of retaining a great deal of the raids' complexity (that said, some fights, like Elegon, became far simpler,) which is unfortunately torturous in a group with 24 strangers.

My hope for LFR is that it will be primarily a confidence-booster - a raid difficulty that lets you see the place and encourages you to try it out on a higher difficulty. If you can't manage to get a guild or a PUG to run the raids, at least you'll be able to see the fights, but I think it would be ideal for LFR to serve as a stepping stone into raiding, and not the primary challenge of the expansion itself.

Still, for those who stick to LFR, these sets will give them some incentive to collect gear there, and I think that's a good thing.