535+ i level for Flex 2,3,4 reasonable?

[Sole-Warrior]

I used to laugh at a post "535+ flex 2" But I'm starting to change my mind.

So many players in flex pugs are below mediocre at best. 525 dps with legendary cloak and gem, a raid finder 536 wep on Galakras with constant stream of adds only pulling below 130k AOE, or 100k single target dps sustained is considerably low. The group was not one in which the adds get bursted down and those who are lower i level had nothing else to kill, the dps was terrible enough that we had constant stream of adds, i was a healer and took down at least half of the banners and totems cause people don't want to shoot them down. Had to call out to shoot down Galakras in a time frame when there was not a single shammy alive, and even after the adds were down, Galakras health went down slowly. We had one player refusing to follow our instructions to stack, we didn't wipe only BECAUSE of him but he died which didn't help. But without sufficient DPS, the fire damage becomes unhealable and we wiped.

This has been on going on for a while. Unless I join a 535+ or 540+ which is about the I level needed to afford plenty of mistakes, the group wipes constantly and does not down many encounters. Am I just unlucky or is this experience widespread.

[threads]

I see a lot going 540+ just due to the fact that there's a lot of people with 535 timeless gear that have no idea what they're doing. Personally when I pug I stick to the 540+ now because it's so much quicker.

[Kraineth]

I think you mean "Galakras"....

On topic: The reasoning behind high ilvl requirements for flex is because whether you believe it or not, a large portion of the WoW player base will simply never be able to pull the dps/hps that their gear allows them to do, simply because of sloppy play. Call me elitist but its true.

That being said my guild runs flex on our ~530 alts and killed all of it just fine this week, so it is possible, but you need a higher caliber group of players

[minkage]

Very reasonable.

540+ are usually normal/heroic raiders looking for similar players for quick runs.

Ive done quite a few openraid runs these past few weeks and the ones that didnt set ilevel/experiance requirements were horrifically bad.

1 group I joined had been stuck on siegecrafter for 4 hours and were definately not making any form of progress. Most of the DPS were pulling barely 100k, there was a distinct lack of healing and nobody but me could do the conveyor belt. I left after 5 wipes when things didnt improve or even look like remotely improving.
I joined a thok group yesterday that was struggling big time and took over organising stacking, where to kite and so on. Each wipe lead to partial improvement so I stuck it out. but man it still took like 15 wipes to get a kill and god knows how long they had already been in there.

My wing 4 group this week had a 540ilevel requirement and funny enough we 1 shot everything including garrosh.

[Archimand]

im running a weekly run with some friends and some randoms so far the requirement is around 535 ilvl
we cleared 14 boss with couple of wipes and me raid leading

the ilvl doesnt seem to harsh however you need to have ppl that know what they doing for it to be sucessful

[Unproven]

I see a lot going 540+ just due to the fact that there's a lot of people with 535 timeless gear that have no idea what they're doing. Personally when I pug I stick to the 540+ now because it's so much quicker.

pretty much this.. still 80% mouthbreathers outthere who think flex is just another afk fest as LFR is.
perfectly reasonable

[RoKPaNda]

Nope, it's fine to set the ilevel much higher than it needs to be. Your run, your rules. I always like seeing the advertisements for that and then seeing people rage about it in trade.

[Eats Compost]

It's perfectly reasonable. As people have been pointing out, there are a lot of awful players that do have the minimum gear to complete the raid, but won't be playing well enough for that to matter. It's fine to err on the side of caution. Sorry to the folks who don't meet the more strict ilvl requirements, but you just end up being a potential liability because of how many bad players there are out there. Sad, but true.

It's also worth noting that, for groups larger than 10 players, you really are dead weight if your performance is below-average; that is, not high enough to make up for the HP boost that your presence brings. Any flex group larger than 10 people, quite naturally, not going to be interested in people with a lower ilvl if they can help it. In my guild flex runs, we do take people with lacking ilvls and even lacking skills, but that's because we're confident that the core of our guild can carry them. That kind of luxury of certainty doesn't exist in pure PuGs.

[durrtygoodz]

Depends how good geared you are and how much you want to invest in your run. I made an 11 man flex for part 2 to try for KTT and basically wrote in trade "no ilvl requirement but don't be crap", had people ranging from 510 all the way to 555, and made sure people were assigned to do stuff before each pull. I didn't care about low dps since I basically made up for it. But if you're only 540 yourself it's harder to do that I guess

[Invictus9001]

ithe ilvl doesnt seem to harsh however you need to have ppl that know what they doing for it to be sucessful

iLevel requirements MIGHT be more fair now, given the fact that it'd just be impossible to heal/tank/dps a normal encounter and be sitting at a 500ish iLevel. Personally, my main has a 537 iLevel, a mix of Timeless gear and Raid Finder stuff, having cleared the first 2 wings of SoO. I'd LOVE to do Normal, but don't have a guild large enough to do raiding strictly in-guild, and have yet to chance using something like OpenRaid.

What put a bad taste in my mouth regarding GearScore requirements was.. GearScore.. coupled with people looking for a 'cruise control/AFK and loot' run on everything during Wrath. The server my wife and I used to play on wanted 5500+ GearScore requirements for most (85 to 90%) of PUGs, when I was in other groups that ran ICC decently, if not brilliantly, when allowing people with 4900-ish to 5k GearScore. The overabundance of people looking to facepull/faceroll drove us off that server, and I do not regret leaving it one bit.

[Blizzhoof]

I think it's reasonable for unknowns, but I think it's a bit idiotic when somebody shows you an example of their prowess and it's ignored due to ilvl. It doesn't really affect me since I don't play alts, but I have a friend in my guild who can't get his 530ilvl WW Monk into a flex run even when he links them his Heroic Spoils achieve. I think if you're 10/13H, then you're probably capable of playing at the level required.

[kamuimac]

iLevel requirements MIGHT be more fair now, given the fact that it'd just be impossible to heal/tank/dps a normal encounter and be sitting at a 500ish iLevel. Personally, my main has a 537 iLevel, a mix of Timeless gear and Raid Finder stuff, having cleared the first 2 wings of SoO. I'd LOVE to do Normal, but don't have a guild large enough to do raiding strictly in-guild, and have yet to chance using something like OpenRaid.

What put a bad taste in my mouth regarding GearScore requirements was.. GearScore.. coupled with people looking for a 'cruise control/AFK and loot' run on everything during Wrath. The server my wife and I used to play on wanted 5500+ GearScore requirements for most (85 to 90%) of PUGs, when I was in other groups that ran ICC decently, if not brilliantly, when allowing people with 4900-ish to 5k GearScore. The overabundance of people looking to facepull/faceroll drove us off that server, and I do not regret leaving it one bit.

the thing is people are used to certain skill lv of people they play with over the years and at some point just dont want/lose will to teach how important is stull like staying out of fire using personal cds etc etc how long can u repeat same things over and over and over again - most people if they could choose would gladly be doin flex only with 560 people since more or less thats the lv of someone who has been clearing normal modes for 2-3 weeks now. flex is farm for most people and progressing through same raid few time a week is just burning out and people cba to do it -_-

[Thelxi]

There is a jaw dropping amount of people in 520-540 gear that manage to do BELOW 100k dps. Not to mention tanks of the same ilvl having absolutely no clue about anything being an even bigger burden.

I only run 540+ or 550+ on my ALTS because I can't be bothered wasting time like that again.

[Otimus]

As it's your run, it's your rules, so do whatever you want.

That being said, it's "good" to know that when or if I ever come back to WoW, I can be assured I'll never be allowed to pug a Flex run while it's current :/ (Or probably ever!) Sooo... no different than it's ever been, I guess :/

[Glaziola]

When I want good runs with no wipes I go 550+

[Asmekiel]

A raidleader can make his own rules. Having said that, requiring people to have gear equal to what it drops is silly.

[Inthislzon]

I do 540+ OR 530+ and Ahead of the Curve ach, as people that already cleared normal are usually able to deal decent damage on 530+ gear

[Memory]

I am very curious about Flex, I tried only LFR so far. I mean, in my head _Normal_ should be puggable LFR is... appalling. I'm curious to see how Flexible difficulty is.
But I do find it understandable that people wanna go for an item-level overkill.
I mean, look at LFR.
The problem is that LFR requirements are so low that it's easy to get an item-level overkill.
With Flexible it's not possible yet. In fact, it seems it was intended to cater towards premades. No premade = need for an overkill with higher requirements than LFR.

[theburned]

It's perfectly reasonable. As people have been pointing out, there are a lot of awful players that do have the minimum gear to complete the raid, but won't be playing well enough for that to matter. It's fine to err on the side of caution. Sorry to the folks who don't meet the more strict ilvl requirements, but you just end up being a potential liability because of how many bad players there are out there. Sad, but true.

It's also worth noting that, for groups larger than 10 players, you really are dead weight if your performance is below-average; that is, not high enough to make up for the HP boost that your presence brings. Any flex group larger than 10 people, quite naturally, not going to be interested in people with a lower ilvl if they can help it. In my guild flex runs, we do take people with lacking ilvls and even lacking skills, but that's because we're confident that the core of our guild can carry them. That kind of luxury of certainty doesn't exist in pure PuGs.

Actually according to blizz an average dps increases the dps with 14% while the hp goes up 10% so as long as you are doing 80% of average dps you help the group though you need to compensate for a healer, around 1/7 ratio

[Imperviable]

A lot of people complain about the ridiculous gear requirements but they really need to understand that pugs have no other information to go on besides gear. If I had the time to look through every profile and see if people are gemming, enchanting, and reforging correctly, I could see a lower gear requirement. However, no one has that time. While a higher gear level might not guarantee more dps, it has a better chance than taking someone lower.