LFR -> Flex -> Normal -> Heroic: Why?

[Pool of the Dead]

@all who say you don't have to run LFR and Flex:

Look at demonology warlocks in ToT. Lei Shen trinket with 100% crit really made them great, even if you only had the LFR version. So come this type of trinket again you will have to run LFR, Flex and Normal/Heroic to maximize your chance to get the trinket. If you're unlucky you'll have to farm for months ... this idea I hate the most. I don't mind the different difficulty levels, but there should be restrictions.

But they are all correct.

You do not HAVE to run anything you do not want to.

But people WANT to.

People that complain about having to do everything available are people with no self-control.

[Deleted]

People that complain about having to do everything available are people with no self-control.

Yeah well or those people want to maximize their performance in a raid environment. You know a raid, not LFR. It's like if you play a ballsport and taking extra practice hours to get better.

[Sealbinder]

Yeah well or those people want to maximize their performance in a raid environment. You know a raid, not LFR. It's like if you play a ballsport and taking extra practice hours to get better.

Except those who want to get better don't spend as much time complaining. I can understand the desire to get the best out of your performance, but if this is something you desire, don't complain about it. You only did it to yourself. Realize you are working to be the best you can be and be proud of that drive. Don't complain about it.

[Deleted]

Except those who want to get better don't spend as much time complaining. I can understand the desire to get the best out of your performance, but if this is something you desire, don't complain about it. You only did it to yourself. Realize you are working to be the best you can be and be proud of that drive. Don't complain about it.

I complain that for the drop I have to run those bosses 3 times, 2 of them in a difficulty setting like little league or t-ball. That's normally a waste of my time, but it's a way to improve my charakter because Blizzard decided it this way.

Make a lockout so that you only can run nhc/hc and one of LFR/Flex. Don't know why this would be a problem.

[ascari]

I like having 4 tiers. LFR is for those who don't have time to raid set hours, who's schedule is varied. Mine was for awhile, I couldn't find a raiding guild to fit my hours to save my life. I raided LFR, I was grateful it was there.
Flex is for those who have problems clearing normal, for those who have trouble with attendance or who have more than 10 in their guild to raid with, but less than 20. Also a nice helper with progression into normal if needed.
Normal is, well normal. It's been around for ages. Those who can find a raid group and fit the hours, they can do normal.
Heroic is for those who can dedicate the time, who work exceptionally hard for a lot more days than normal raiders.

I think they all belong. If you can raid normal, nobody is forcing you to raid flex or LFR, you can forget they exist and just run with alts through them or ignore them completely. That's the thing I don't understand. No one is forcing anyone to run LFR or Flex, it's for those who can't run Normal or Heroic, or for Alts. I still don't understand why everyone complains so much about it.

Those who can dedicate time to heroic and are good enough for it, they deserve to show off better gear.
Those who can dedicate time to normal and are able to progress deserve it too.
Those who can't find the time or the people should not be left in the dust. They deserve something too, otherwise why bother playing. Only so much you can do in the game outside raiding.

[Toxigen]

They deserve something too, otherwise why bother playing.

That is the defeatist, spoon-fed, instant-gratification-seeking bullshit that plagues the MMO market these days.

[Sealbinder]

I complain that for the drop I have to run those bosses 3 times, 2 of them in a difficulty setting like little league or t-ball. That's normally a waste of my time, but it's a way to improve my charakter because Blizzard decided it this way.

Make a lockout so that you only can run nhc/hc and one of LFR/Flex. Don't know why this would be a problem.

So your problem is that since Blizzard is giving you more chances to try and improve your character, you feel that you need to regardless of free will and the ability to make a decision to do otherwise? Those who truly want to be the best work at it. They work at it no matter how much time it takes. It is part of the process to be the best.

Since you brought up the sports analogy, do you think the top athletes asked for less possible opportunities to get better even if it is easy or focused on fundamentals as they developed? They got to the top by doing everything possible, no matter the time or the relative ease it might involve.

Honestly it sounds like you either want gear handed to you from the top tier so you don't have to grind for things anymore or that you lack enough will power to stop doing things you don't want. For the first I would say get over it, for the second I would seek help, since any addiction to a game that prevents you from stopping when you don't want to do something is possibly a problem that only a profession could assist you with. Either is not an attitude becoming of a "top performing" player.

[jimlow]

Seriously OP have you even looked at the ilevels of the gear in LFR! In case you haven't seen

ToT Valor and normal gear 522
LFR 528
Timeless isle 536
Flex 540
Normal 553
Heroic 566

Seriously your time would be better spent dicking around on the timeless isle rather then LFR the gaps are so god damn big. Your talking a 44ilevl diffrence bettwen LFR and heroic and a 25 ilevel difference between normal and LFR.

That's almost a 2 tier jump in power just from normal modes. If you were doing any sort of raiding your raid leader would make you do flex instead of LFR as its almost next to pointless due to the gear gap.

[ascari]

That is the defeatist, spoon-fed, instant-gratification-seeking bullshit that plagues the MMO market these days.

Dude, why does it bother you so much? You don't have to do it, most of the people that do LFr probably never cross your path anyway in your raiding guild. I don't understand the problem. It doesn't affect you in any negative way. You still have your heroic and normal modes to go through. The others are for everyone else who can't do those two difficulty levels. They pay subs, activision profits, wow gets more xpacs, more heroics for you to conquer. So I dont understand the problem.

[Prag]

Because why not, really? I think it's an awesome system. For the super duper hardcore, it's a way to keep them engaged in the game when they aren't in their main heroic groups and an alternate upgrade path for whatever reason. For the casual, it's another way to spend time with friends. For the bad, it's a way to see content without dealing with the often frustrating experience of LFR.

[Normie]

Yeah well or those people want to maximize their performance in a raid environment. You know a raid, not LFR. It's like if you play a ballsport and taking extra practice hours to get better.

First of all, virtually every person posting to this forum will not maximize his/her performance by improving his/her gear, because the gear is a .1 - 2% bump and meanwhile the elephant in the room is execution, which is more like 20-100+%. What you will do is improve your performance, but not nearly as much as if you executed encounters perfectly.

Second, if you don't enjoy playing the game the way it's laid out for you, you can quite easily change how you play it, or you can quit.

If you don't like running LFR for a roughly 4+4 = 8% drop trinket, but you feel you must do it because of peer pressure or inner compulsion, then I suggest you think about why you are playing the game at all, if it is just making your life miserable, or causing you to behave like a flaming asshole in LFR, thereby bringing misery to other lives.

And although those LFR trinkets have great procs, the fact that they are missing a shit ton of primary stat when compared to other normal/heroic trinkets does make their value modest, or negligible, in most circumstances.

[Sierra85]

I just don't understand the concept they define Flex to be; to raid with friends and family. Why would one run flex if they have the numbers and just run normal?

it's probably to do with the reason that if someone bails mid raid you dont have to stop, you can just keep going. People with family and RL don't like hanging around waiting for a raid to fill etc.

[Normie]

That is the defeatist, spoon-fed, instant-gratification-seeking bullshit that plagues the MMO market these days.

"Because these people don't play the game in the way that I and a couple of percent of other players do, any rewards they receive are spoon-fed instant-gratification bullshit."

Did I translate that correctly? Thought so.

[Sierra85]

People play the game for different reasons, and one specific "way" of playing is not the correct way.

We're all just trying to have osme fun.

[Gilian]

Players burn out much faster when they have to gear up through LFR then need to do normal and then finally get in heroic mode. Then next tier you can skip LFR but still need to at least clear normal once if you are lucky enough. There are many possibilities where you will be raiding normal multiple times and then finally get to do heroic and become sick of seeing the same boss that many times.
In my case the guild I was in, best 25 man raiding guild on the server and had cleared all heroic content in previous expansions, kept farming normals for gear which we didn't really need. I even tried to convince them not to but they had a different opinion. (Execution > gear every single time but a lot of people apparently don't understand this.) On top of this I HAD TO do LFR to catch up for just a few weeks of MoP. This guild even did LFR runs (which I didn't attend) for even more gear at the beginning untill it was completely pointless and that was while we were attempting HC bosses in MSV. So when we finally got to do some fun stuff it wasn't worth the occassional guild drama and poor performance (which are inevitable basically) anymore and I left.

You can say whatever you want but doing the same raid with just a few extra mechanics and more HP and damage feels almost exactly like farming content and farming content for gear is not why I want to play this game. I doubt many people really like doing the same LFR every week for months in a row either.

I understand very well that multiple difficulties are needed so everyone can see the content and has something to do. But most LFR heroes don't understand how others who do want a challenge feel now. Part of the game is basically ruined and turned into a farmfest for some people. But I guess we can shrug that off and just say "but you don't need to do LFR". Easy when you have no clue what you are talking about (LFR only or heroic only raiders).


I now do challenge modes with friends and I am having a blast. This is also the same content I have done so many times but the step to get from nothing to CM's is much smaller than going from nothing to heroic raiding so I can deal with it.

Imagine when we also get Flex raiding. Let's just all pretend it doesn't have any bad influence and tell everyone who complains that they are not forced to do it.

[Raelbo]

Before I rant --- I love the idea of flex - I think it should be implemented for all difficulty levels.

If you want flex for all difficulty levels, Blizzard would need to balance each and every raid encounter for 16 different raid sizes. Even after doing this, there would be guilds playing the system and figuring out the optimal number of raiders to bring to each encounter in order to chase world firsts. It would be a chaotic mess.

The concept of Flex raiding only works in a non-competitive environment where the variance in difficulty between raid sizes does not become a motive for setting the raid size. Co-incidentally, when you are talking about serious guilds, the roster tends to be fairly committed and the need for a flexible raid size is a lot less. Flexible raid size adds particular value to more casual guilds with a high degree of variability in terms of week-to-week attendance and also for puggable content, making it very well suited to a lower difficulty setting.

I hate having multiple difficulty levels. Does anybody seriously enjoy killing the same damn boss 100+ times per tier?

The intention is that people do the bosses on the difficulty suited to them. If you choose to do LFR, and Flex and Normal/Heroic, well that is your choice, and I can guarantee you that only a very, very small percentage of the playerbase will be doing this.

While I reckon the argument regarding top guilds being "forced" to do LFR is largely gone, I get that there will now be heroic guilds who will feel compelled to run Flex mode every week, and I agree that Blizzard need to look at that one. I reckon they should maybe make Flex share a lockout with Normal/Heroic, but I guess there are other people who don't like that idea.

Solution: One difficulty (heroic) with flex.

Terrible idea - and one that shows an absolutely shocking lack of empathy at all for the 99.5% of players who aren't currently clearing ToT HC. It also shows a complete misunderstanding of the intention of flex raiding.

The fact that Flex raiding caters to a flexible number of raiders is NOT the primary intention of Flex raiding at all (in spite of the name). The primary objective of Flex raiding is to create a new difficulty level, below normal mode. It just so happens that such a difficulty setting would be well suited to a flexible raid size, and because of the benefits a flexible raid size brings to a raiding group, it makes a lot of sense to add this feature to this difficulty setting.

The reason for the introduction of a lower difficulty level was precisely because so many raiding groups simply can't cope with the difficulty to which normal mode raiding has escalated.

Every month, any bosses that have been killed by at least 100 different guilds take a 10% nerf

This idea that it is "fine" for the vast majority to wait around 6 months before the nerfs make the content accessible to their skill level to actually participate in raids is condescending, insulting and ridiculous.

When SoO drops there are a lot of raiders of many different skill levels who will want to raid at a difficulty level that is challenging for them without being impossible.

IF you want to insist on there being one difficulty, then the only solution is to set that difficulty below where Normal currently is. How would you like that?

There seem to be a bunch of people out there who are under the delusion that providing easier content for the majority of players is the compromise. You guys have it all wrong. The provision of Heroic and even normal modes is the compromise. You would do well to remember that when calling for the removal of content not tuned to your personal preference.

[Deleted]

I complain that for the drop I have to run those bosses 3 times, 2 of them in a difficulty setting like little league or t-ball. That's normally a waste of my time, but it's a way to improve my charakter because Blizzard decided it this way.

Make a lockout so that you only can run nhc/hc and one of LFR/Flex. Don't know why this would be a problem.

No blizzard gave you a choice that you seem to be unable to make, instead you'd rather have blizzard play the parent and give you a bedtime.

[Raelbo]

In my case the guild I was in....kept farming normals for gear which we didn't really need. I even tried to convince them not to but they had a different opinion.
<snip>
But most LFR heroes don't understand how others who do want a challenge feel now.

Taking these two excerpts from what you said, I think it's pretty clear that the problem is NOT LFR, or the "LFR heroes" it was designed for. Your own 25 man guild seems to have been the real problem, insisting on running content which you yourself recognise they didn't need.

While I fully sympathise with your position, blaming LFR for it is unfair. The truth is you were let down by 25 man heroic raiding peers who seem to have lost sight of what you believe the point of raiding should be: the challenge.

Imagine when we also get Flex raiding. Let's just all pretend it doesn't have any bad influence and tell everyone who complains that they are not forced to do it.

I don't disagree with you on this one. I can see why they elected to give separate lockouts for loot, but personally I think it should share a loot lockout with normal/heroic. It's something I even noted before flex was even announced and there were discussions about adding a lower difficulty setting.

Maybe what is needed is a system where each boss can be looted once per lockout, across all difficulties - similar to what happens with rep and Titan runestones in ToT. You should have the option of switching off loot eligibility when entering LFR/Flex to allow people to run those modes (for VP for example) before they run their normal/heroic raid. If they have already cleared bosses on normal/heroic, then the loot should be locked in much the same way as it is when running a LFR wing for a second time during a lockout.

[Normie]

No blizzard gave you a choice that you seem to be unable to make, instead you'd rather have blizzard play the parent and give you a bedtime.

The "forced to" people would have us think that it's Blizzard doing the forcing. While I don't doubt that the sensation of being "forced" is real, it's actually coming from the competition that players have created and entered into on their own.

There is no PvE leaderboard (aside from Challenge modes) in WoW. Whatever leaderboards exist are the mutually-agreed creations of players. It is players who decided that raiding should be a competitive activity. It is players who created the "every last thing to advance your character" ethic. It is players who "force" other players to run LFR for set bonuses and trinkets.

Blizzard makes the raids, but players decide how to raid.

If you're playing football, and it's required that you spend 5 hours a week lifting weights, and you hate every minute of it -- but you enjoy hitting golf balls, and on the golf team you have to hit golf balls 5 hours a week, maybe you should be playing golf.

[Deleted]

Normals are incredibly overtuned.

Maybe if you only play with bads yeah, not so much if you got players that know what to do.