Raid Progression and Raidfinder

[Yriel]

I just had another week where i got not a single drop in the raidfinder. And that´s ok. It´s enough time till the next raid tier arrives.
But it got me thinking.

Ghostcrawler tweeted a few days ago that in MoP they want a raid progression and because of this there will be no catch-up dungeons this time around. If somebody is late for the party he should get his gear via the raidfinder.
Right now, where a lot of people are running the T14 raidfinder, the waiting times for my dd are between 20 and 50 minutes, for my healer between 1 and 10 minutes. Weeks where i get no drop at all are common although often i get one drop and very rarely two. And since these drops are random they are not always useful since i might already have that item or even got a better one.

So imagine this time next year. We well probably raid T16 by then. How is a new player or someone who changed his main supposed to catch up ? Even if anyone at that point still does the T14 raidfinder, the queue times will be tremendous. And since the raidfinder restricts entry via item level he´ll probably need drops in all slots minus one or two to progress to the next raidfinder tier. And he needs to go up two tiers.
I don´t think that will work out the way GC thinks or at least it will be incredibly time consuming. Didn´t they say that the raidfinder is not for gearing up but for people to see the content? I guess somehow that changed.

[Moradim]

my lock alt wins absolutely no gear

yes yes, rng is rng, but at least I won stuff with the old system

is a raider in 500 ilvl gear or people on their mains going to roll for 476/483 gear? nope. I wouldnt do it on my main either, which means the rest of the raid gets better odds at winning a roll.

ill tell you this much, if I was on my warrior alt and a tank shield dropped, the odds of me winning that shield were MUCH higher than 15%. even 100% if you queue with a druid tank.

[SamR]

I can almost guarantee that they will release new dungeons in later patches with "catch-up gear". At the very least, they will reduce the valor/rep requirements of the existing valor gear to make it easier to get for new people while putting in new higher ilvl valor gear. Blizzard is the master of the gear reset.

[Moradim]

LFR to me is a way for alts to catch up on gear, or to find a temporary item till you get a normal/heroic piece.

as things stand, it's just a way to get lots of 28 gold bags.

that and valor.

[Yriel]

I can almost guarantee that they will release new dungeons in later patches with "catch-up gear". At the very least, they will reduce the valor/rep requirements of the existing valor gear to make it easier to get for new people while putting in new higher ilvl valor gear. Blizzard is the master of the gear reset.

In Wrath and Cata, yes. But i´m refering to this tweets :

How can we expect ilvl upgrading to affect the tuning of future raid tiers?
Philosophically we want raids to be more about progression and less about instant catch up. (Source)
Going back to the old model where you have to progress linear through the raids from release of current expac?
That's the plan. We have older Raid Finder tiers now to provide the necessary gear.

And that doesn´t sound that way...
Raid progression.. well you may like it or not but catching up via raidfinder is a stupid idea.

[Osmeric]

well you may like it or not but catching up via raidfinder is a stupid idea.

I imagine they will jack up the drop rate of loot in older tier LFRs if they want this to work.

The problem will be queue times.

[meroko]

I imagine they will jack up the drop rate of loot in older tier LFRs if they want this to work.

The problem will be queue times.

This is what will happen, no doubt. Queue times I imagine will slow down a bit but with leveling alts alone I imagine it won't be as bad as people think.

[SamR]

If future MoP dungeons are dropping 463 loot still, I'd be shocked. It would make absolutely no sense to add dungeons that drop gear nobody wants anymore. And if they drop 470 to 480-ish gear, who's going to run old raids or LFR?

They've had one small patch so far and they already added 496 valor gear.

I wouldn't worry too much about being forced to run LFR to catch up.

[Dhurn]

In addition to higher drop rates in old LFRs they will most likely add new dailies and/or valor gear in the 505-510 range. At the same time they can make the 489/496 valor gear attainable with Justice and reduce/remove rep requirements. My gut tells me it will be just as easy as Wotlk/cata to get up to speed in 5.2/5.3.