concerned about 5.2 LFR population

[zenga]

You and I have different meanings of the word "forced".

While your comment was no aimed at me, heroic raiders were forced to run Dragon Soul LFR since you could no longer obtain set items through valor points. Set bonuses being such an important part of your dps and the new trinkets being so good made it a necessity to run it if you wanted to optimise your char. I was in full best in slot heroic gear from firelands, and the lower ilvl gear from DS lfr was actually a serious dps gain.

The only reason they changed the way setimes were acquired was to make sure the more experienced raiders would join LFR to improve the chances of the tourists (i.e those who have zero clue about boss mechanics, don't put any effort into learning them either and who have no idea how to proper play their toon). On top of that loot distribution was completely random, so that the chances of getting what you wanted was much bigger provided you ran it with friends or you had good begging skills/something to trade.

So yes, heroic raiders in the past were forced to run LFR.

Luckily this changed with MoP. I find it perfect nowadays. There is no need to run LFR to cap out on valor if you don't want to, there is no need to acquire gear if you just stick to dailies for alts and the personal loot system made it such that it's no longer absolutely needed to run it.

I do no longer feel forced to do LFR since I have options. Whether hc raiders still do it depends on the person. Half of my guild still runs it every week on alts or to cap VP on mains, the other half like me absolutely hates to clear the same instance more than once and stick to some heroic dungeons or dailies to cap out. And options are a good thing.

[Immitis]

as long as legendary stuff drops in lfr they will do it, as long as tier bonuses are good they will do it, as long as they need valor for 5.3 upgrading they will do it

[Mctriple]

LFR will be fine. Queue for BGs or do dailies between queues if you're dps/tank. Or find a healer friend (this is an MMO after all) and don't worry about it. Plenty of geared/experienced ppl will run it for VP to teach newbs.

[Osmeric]

On the other hand, a lot of guilds that started trying to raid normal mode in this tier have given up. So maybe normal participation will be lower in T15, not LFR participation.

Also: have they actually said T15 LFR will reward lower ilvl gear than T14 normal? If not, I expect normal mode raiders in T14 will still be doing T15 LFR.

[Halifax]

I do LFR to practice fight mechanics (I pretend it's on normal and try to avoid all avoidable damage, and do the fights properly) and to test new specs/rotations/gear setups in a situation more realistic than the target dummy. I expect I'll do the same thing in 5.2 even if I don't need the loot.

Also, despite having an item level of 492 I'm still using a 476 weapon because loot RNG hates me, so I'm still LFRing for a sha-touched weapon.

[Spotnick]

LFR is already suffering, queues are terrible these days. The lack of healers queuing up is a huge contribution to this.

It will be fixed once they allow us to pick the gear we want to roll on. Right now I run them as dps because I want off-spec loot, while I'm a healer..

As for people concerned.. they will nerf the hell out of normal modes tier 14 instances once 5.2 will hit, so any pug should be able to get 496 gear in no time. That is exactly what happened when Firelands was released, they nerfed tier 11 to the ground, except heroic modes.. I really hope they keep it that way for heroic modes as well.

[Count Zero]

My guild doesn't need to run lfr (as a whole -- some of us still need to fill in gear spots, grab tier bonuses, etc), but we like to in order to practice for live. I realize the mechanics are often different, but it's much, much better than just reading and watching videos. if nothing else, we can get down positional requirements, work on timing, coordination, etc, especially when we have a full 25 guildies in there, so we can do normal mode strats even if we don't have to.

[Rickarus]

There are a LOT of reasons for raiders to do LFR. Set bonuses, hard to find pieces like weapon/trinket/etc., gearing up alts (especially higher tier raiders whose guilds prefer people to have multiple raid-ready characters at all times), easy VP, (possibly) legendary quests, the list goes on.

That being said, the issue with queue times may not be a "not enough people" issue. In fact, I'm fairly sure its the opposite, and the large number of people doing lfr cause the queues to be so long. Early in its life this expansion, not as many people had the ilvl to enter LFR, and it was nearly instant in most cases. Once that number got higher, though, so too did the queues get longer. Obviously the change that stopped players from seeing whether any bosses were down when queue popped didn't help the queue length either, but I still feel the most likely culprit is the growing number of players joining it.

---------- Post added 2013-01-08 at 03:48 PM ----------

It will be fixed once they allow us to pick the gear we want to roll on. Right now I run them as dps because I want off-spec loot, while I'm a healer..

As for people concerned.. they will nerf the hell out of normal modes tier 14 instances once 5.2 will hit, so any pug should be able to get 496 gear in no time. That is exactly what happened when Firelands was released, they nerfed tier 11 to the ground, except heroic modes.. I really hope they keep it that way for heroic modes as well.

I can't find the quote offhand, but I recall a blue post (or possibly a dev interview) stating that they will NOT be nerfing t14 content.

[Count Zero]

Well about f***ng time proper raiders are not forced to queue into the hellpit called "LFR"...

"proper raiders" ?? You do realize the best raiding guilds in the world run lfr, right ?

[Firebert]

Well about f***ng time proper raiders are not forced to queue into the hellpit called "LFR"...

Without LFR, you wouldn't even be raiding in MoP.

[Delath]

I can't find the quote offhand, but I recall a blue post (or possibly a dev interview) stating that they will NOT be nerfing t14 content.

This sounds about right, I think the reasoning was that people are not getting stuck on any particular boss yet and the three alternative raids offer a less linear progressions that helps preventing single brickwall bosses from becoming a major issue.

[Barnabas]

There won't be any issue with not enough people running it. It'll be short que on first day as usual and continue as the people with more gear disparity spend an evening gearing up through justice points.

[Last Starfighter]

Blizzard announced that people who regularly raid normal or heroic raids will not need to run the new LFR raids, because the gear it drops is not comparable to 5.0 normal and heroic raid gear.

this gives me the concern that a pretty huge chunk of players that currently run LFR, namely the raiders, will have no use for the new LFR, and thus will not run it. this could increase queue times for the rest of us.

thoughts?

Normal mode and Hard mode raiders are the minority of players in this game. Raiders period have always been the minority of the players in the game. Most simply do not want to raid at all. Not even LFR.

That said, normal and hard mode raiders should not feel like they have to run LFR on top of their normal raiding schedule because they feel like they need the gear. That was the whole reason for making 10/25's share lockouts. I would love to skip out on LFR without having to feel like I need certain pieces. So in this instance, blizzard is doing a good thing.

---------- Post added 2013-01-09 at 07:27 AM ----------

Without LFR, you wouldn't even be raiding in MoP.

Not true. We started raiding before LFR even started up. Heroic 5 man gear was the requirement for MSV.

---------- Post added 2013-01-09 at 07:31 AM ----------

LFR is already suffering, queues are terrible these days. The lack of healers queuing up is a huge contribution to this.

LFR is not suffering at all from terrible ques. I can hop in anytime I want as a dps without having to wait long. That said, LFR has been around a few months. When people get the gear they need, they slow down on running it. And when 5.2 hits, it'll be a mad dash to LFR again, and 3 months in, people will slow down. Just how it works. People don't kill a boss 30 times because it's a new and fun and exciting experience. They do it for a piece they're waiting for.

[Dranged]

I already have 45min+ queue times for Terrace on any given day of the week, including this morning at reset.

Maybe you should go to school or work instead huh? I'm not surprised if queue times are long in the MORNINGS. Who the hell plays wow at that time of day anyway?

[MrExcelion]

The main thing that's going to increase LFR queue times is the number of wings the player pooled is thinned into. There's already 5 single queues, and 4 more in 5.2. Just not enough healers to go around. I don't think there's really a solution for that since the 'random LFR wing' queue doesn't make since here since you can only get loot once a week from each boss.

[Cybran]

Blizzard claims that people who ran Heroic Tier 14 will not need to run LFR, but i expect the same situation that we had in Dragon soul. Namely that trinkets/tier pieces will push even heroic raiders in T15 LFR.

The only way for LFR to work is when good players carry the bad players.

[Darkfriend]

I don't want to do LFR to gear a toon in heroic 5.1 raid gear. I don't want to sit in more Qs, I don't want to carry more baddies. LFR should be for people too busy/casual/bad to raid.

[Buxton McGraff]

Imho I wish they'd lower LFR to 10m. Tank queues would be shorter (smaller tank to dps ratio) at least that's how I theorize it. Let me know if I'm wrong.
With less people doing LFR, it wouldn't be a bad idea to lower the amount of players required for a group.

[Darkfriend]

Imho I wish they'd lower LFR to 10m. Tank queues would be shorter (smaller tank to dps ratio) at least that's how I theorize it. Let me know if I'm wrong.
With less people doing LFR, it wouldn't be a bad idea to lower the amount of players required for a group.

No, Q's would be longer. You'd probably be required to have 3 healers, so instead of 6/25 being healers it'd be 9/30. 3 more healers for only 5 other spots. If tanks were lacking it'd be even worse, since it'd go from 2/25 to 6/30- over 2 times as many tanks for the same number of people running through LFR.

[Icaras]

I raid and I also have alts I like to gear. This just means I can focus my LFRing for alts and not have to do it on my main, outside of once just to have a look.

That said, if they implement changes that allow you to queue as one spec but receive gear for another, you'd probably see a fair few raider means join to finish off sets (Some even just for easier/quicker VP capping)