The eventual fate of LFR when expansion 5 launches

[Darrowshire]

I'm just curious as to what you guys think of the fate of LFR in the future. Is flex raiding a sign of things to come, providing a puggable raid that's easy enough for everyone to do - and making LFR less and less appealing, or is it meant to try and help casual raiders looking to eventually move to normal modes handle the adjustment better?

Basically, what I'm trying to ask is... Do you think LFR will be phased out for new raids when the next expansion launches in favour of flex raiding, or will Blizz attempt to balance 4 difficulties?

[Pebrocks The Warlock]

Blizzard has said that Flex is not meant to replace LFR or have LFR be gone anytime soon.

[PrairieChicken]

Blizz will shove people into LFR for ever and after

[Darrowshire]

Blizzard has said that Flex is not meant to replace LFR or have LFR be gone anytime soon.

Shame. It's a sweet spot of difficulty between LFR and Normal and encourages people not to be mindless fuckwits to each other

[Sithalos]

They'll add a 5th difficulty setting where you just go on a content sightseeing tour. None of the mobs attack you, and you just sail across the raid on a conveyor belt.

[Baphomette]

I expect Flex to replace Normal, not LFR.

[Darrowshire]

I expect Flex to replace Normal, not LFR.

With scheduled rollouts? Not a chance.

[DSRilk]

Shame. It's a sweet spot of difficulty between LFR and Normal and encourages people not to be mindless fuckwits to each other

It's not a shame at all. They're for totally different audiences. Bicycles didn't go away just because cars came on the scene. Flex is for groups having a hard time with normal either due to difficulty or attendance, LFR is for people like me who just don't have time for a schedule of any kind. If I have a couple hours one day, sure, I'll try and pick up a PUG raid perhaps as it's more fun than LFR, but LFR is great for the vast majority of the time when I have maybe an hour tops and it could be 4pm one day and 1am the next. LFR may be pretty simple, but no more so than mindlessly running a dungeon or dailies.

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With scheduled rollouts? Not a chance.

You seem to be assuming that Flex would maintain its delayed roll out if normal went away. I could easily see flex eliminating normal if people really take to it and Blizz finds themselves pressed for dev time.

[Monteverdi]

If anything, Flex will replace Normal. That said, I don't see it happening - Flex fills a needed niche, as does LFR, Normal, and Heroic. I don't see a need to remove from or add to this list.

[Darsithis]

Flex is meant to help with the lack of PuGs. It isn't supposed to replace LFR and it won't replace it. I don't see LFR ever going away. Flex will be very very useful for people who crave the unity of a premade group but don't have time for scheduled raids.

[Mormolyce]

Flexi competes with NM, not LFR. They're "thinking about" how they will handle that in future. I expect both to stay in the near term. The only reason Flexi was not simply applied to NM in the first place is that that would mess up a lot of existing NM guilds, if WoW was built from scratch today we would have:

LFR (most accessible - you can queue for it with no downtime while forming, discussion, strats, politics, etc)
Flexible NM (some organisation and time investment required, easy to pug, less restrictive of number of players)
HM (heavy organisation and time investment, strats and performance required, probably not flexi due to balance considerations)

But a lot of people raid NM at the moment so if they just implemented that those people would feel the need to min-max their rosters and how many to bring to each fight, would cause problems.

With scheduled rollouts? Not a chance.

Obviously if Flexi replaced NM there would be no need for staggered rollouts.

Think of it less as Flexi staying and NM going, more as Flexi mechanics applied to the existing NM raid. Merged if you like.

[MoanaLisa]

LFR isn't going to go away. That's been made clear so it's not even really a question. It serves a specific purpose and audience and does what it does pretty well. It's fine not to like it. It's really more of an epic normal dungeon placed in a raid space and there's nothing wrong with using the art assets and the like for that purpose.

Flex, normal and heroics all serve different audiences too, the first more so than the latter two. Normal/Heroic are pretty much inextricably linked if for no other reason than Normal gates Heroic.

LFR could and should lead people who want to be more social to flex although it's an end and progression path in itself. Normal/heroic stays about the same as now. Over the very long run I won't be surprised if flex becomes very popular.

[smartazjb0y]

Hopefully Flex doesn't replace normals, I think the 4 difficulty modes are perfect and serve almost everyone