LFR and Loot

Here's the huge caveat: this is a sample size of four characters, and it may have just been a fluke.

LFR's first wing of Highmaul opened up on Tuesday, and it's clear that some big changes were made to the way LFR works. First off - I have no idea how they managed this or if it was sheer stupid luck, but I didn't have more than a 5-minute queue time as a tank or DPS (with one exception, after re-queueing my rogue, who got in on the last boss, and had to wait about an hour to get another run to see the first two.)

The other thing that struck me is that the loot flowed freely. I did get one item via a bonus roll (on the hapless rogue,) but all four characters I took in there got at least two pieces of gear (the mage got three.)

So is the drop-rate in LFR far higher than it has been in the past? Again, this is anecdotal - it's possible I was absurdly lucky. But the other possibility is that they have made LFR drop gear far more easily than it had in the past.

Given the extreme ease of the fights - making Mists' LFR difficulty look like Heroic - this reinforces the impression I get that Blizzard really, really wants players to move past LFR quickly and start running normal mode.

The odd consequence here is that it sort of obsoletes heroic dungeons. Heroics are what we've had available since the launch of the expansion (which was just under a month ago,) and while they haven't been absurdly hard, there have been things you've had to pay attention to lest you go splat.

LFR requires somewhat higher-level gear. You'll need an average item level of 615 to run it, meaning you'll really have to exhaust the normal level 100 dungeons (or get some crafted/Apexis/vignette gear) if you want to do it without running heroics.

But once you hit that threshold, I don't really see many people worrying too much about heroics. If you want to gear up for your guild's normal mode runs, the rapid speed of the LFR wing and the apparent higher loot drop-rate would seem to make it a superior method for gearing. The main downside is that it's a weekly lockout, rather than daily. Still, with everyone grabbing lots of LFR gear, runs through heroics to fill in the gaps should go incredibly smoothly (and to be fair, at this point they're mostly pretty smooth now that people know the fights.)

I really have no idea why queue times were so fast, and I'll be curious to see if that holds up later in the week (if I can get my newly-100 warlock geared up before I go home for the holidays.) But it seems like hitting that 615 threshold will be enough to propel you far higher into fantastic (for now) gear levels. (Should make solo stuff on squishier classes a lot easier. I'm interested to see how soloing on my mage will be with these epic pieces.)