"Flex" Raiding And 5.4 Woes

[KBWarriors]

Now, it's been a week since the patch hit and I've had the majority of the week to myself to fully explore the patch. I have all the Timeless Isle achieves done and have found quite a good number of Burdens to gear my character, so for this week, I've been testing out Flex raiding as well.

The mechanics are very forgiving compared to normal and the boss fights really aren't too complicated. However, as some others are discovering, I am finding that LFR groups are far superior to Flex. I picked up oQueue to do Flex raids and thank god for the way lockouts are on Flex or else, I'd never get them done on my alts.

Of course, if you go in with a main group of raiders or competent friends that have an IQ over 80, you're going to down the bosses and blow through the encounters. Flex raiding is ridiculously forgiving and easy.

However... then you try to pug Flex raids and it's your worst nightmare. I seriously met a Mage in my group last night that had the #2 damaging ability this: "Water Elemental: Waterbolt". How in the hell is that even possible? I met a Troll Warrior tank in half PvP gear who kept yelling at his group because he died too quickly until he got booted, only to be replaced by a tank who knew none of the fights and refused to look them up.

His excuse: "I have a life and don't have time to put hours of research into this game or learn fights before hand. I'm not a nerd and I work a full time job!" <--- Word for word...

Now, I love the idea of Flex raiding because it not only appeals to friends and raiders to help gear up but the relatively easy and forgiving mechanics appeals to pug players to.

However, this is just brutal. It took me god knows how many groups just to find a group that could down Nuroshen. I met DPS who were doing 30-40k DPS on boss fights (I'm not joking), I met tanks who refused to gem/enchant or reforge because it's their casual character or whatever, etc.

I honestly never thought I would see the day where more "skilled" players came from LFR than somewhere else in the game. I mean, I knew Flex raiding might attract a couple of bad apples since LFR isn't up yet but this is just horrendous... this is just bad. If you really want to raid outside of LFR, you have absolutely no excuse to not know the fights. "but but.. it's only been out for...", I'm tired of hearing that too.. Fatboss/Icy-Veins/Tankspot or countless other resources are available to explain the simplicity of these fights (especially on Flex).

Then, you have the Timeless Isle. The isle honestly doesn't leave much to do outside of killing rares over and over again hoping that Burdens drop. On a server like Illidan, if you don't make it to the rare within 5 seconds of it spawning, you won't make it, hence why there's 300 people sitting here waiting for the ship to spawn at any given point lagging the entire server out when it spawns.

Then you have Griefers. The Timeless Isle is griefing paradise. I'm not talking about the Blood Coin farmers, but the people who constantly pull elite mobs and turtles to camps to kill people. People that do that is why I'm glad [Censer Of Eternal Agony] exists.

SoO seems like a good raid so far but I'm kind of perplexed at how Flex attracted some of the worst players in the game. Probably something to do with the 540 ilvl and LFR only dropping 528 ilvl.

[Deleted]

Looks like you played with LFR heroes in a non LFR raid.

[Darsithis]

We have other threads about Flex raiding:
http://www.mmo-champion.com/threads/...rd-moment-when
http://www.mmo-champion.com/threads/...huge-pug-maker

and the Timeless Isle:
http://www.mmo-champion.com/threads/...s-and-griefers
http://www.mmo-champion.com/threads/...-All-Expansion (one you created!)

Along with more threads in Raids & Dungeons.