Pick-up group experiences? How has flex been working for you?

[Deleted]

Hey again guys and girls,

How has Flex pugs been treating you?

My overall experience has been pretty much 50-50, getting into bad ones and good ones occasionally. I've got 5 toons and I do as many flex raids I have time for.

Yesterday with my main I joined a Flex group for 2nd part. We were almost full and finding 2nd tank was taking time. Leader decided to get greedy of the item levels. He then said that he is going to replace couple dps's from the lower end because he's getting whispers from bigger item level players. I happened to have the lowest item level, 527. After being in the raid for 45 minutes and helping out getting people - I get kicked because leader found a player with higher item level. No idea how much higher it was.

[clevin]

Did my first Openraid Flex (3rd wing), was fine. Few wipes on Malkorok and Spoils, but killed them. People were generally good. If you do Openraid Flex you can rate the raid after and should for things like that RL who kicked you. It's one thing to say "Sorry, looking for 535+, you're 527" but another to kick that way.

If it's a trade channel pug, just put the RL on ignore so you dont run with him.

[Deleted]

It was OQueue raid.

[vindicatorx]

On a dead server still doesn't do shit but allow the guilds who had 1 or 2 extra add to their 10 man.

[mistahwilshire]

The first week was rough but now that lots of people are either tied or ahead of the Flex release in Normal and they know the fights, it's been pretty smooth and pretty fun for gearing up alts.

[BergErr]

9/10 full pug flex runs has turned to shit, flex where 5+ ppl are from same guild seem to work fine.
Also been rejected from flex runs because my ilvl were too high =D

[PhillieB]

Trade pick-up grps have been absolute crap, my server (Aszune EU) is quite small though so mostly it's due to ppl are non-raiders and pretty clueless. The Open raid 530+ grps I've joined have been working out really well though.

[Deja Thoris]

Mostly good (maybe run 3 or 4 of them)

I joined one for p3 and asked about comms. The RL said "LOL what u need that for u know the fights". I (and some others in the group) think p3 needs comms or at least some discussion as to assignments his attitude made me a bit sour. After we wiped on trash a few times because they treated it wrong we promptly died to non swirl soaking on Malkorok because of.... no assignments.

I left the group. I realise raid leaders set the tone for the success of a group so I made my own. It was awesome :P

[Ninotchka]

Trade pickup groups have been crap, but I've had two good oqueue experiences.

[Vorret]

Very mixed experience. Only did some with Oqueue so far, first one I joined and they were already on Sha ... proceed to wipe ALOT until it disbanded.

Next one was a fresh run, 1 shot the first two bosses, wiped twice on the 2nd boss and people started leaving.

3rd one was again the final boss, did it in 2 tries.

Not a "bad" experience but people are as disrespectful of others in Flex as they are in LFR so to me it's the exact same thing with less people and better loot.

[trident00]

My experience has been overwhelmingly positive when running my own events through OpenRaid. Been positive, not without wipes, but overall just awesome. It's probably my favorite feature of the patch.

When jumping into others by pugging through trade or OpenRaid chat it's been more 50-50. That's just part of playing with people who have an unknown level of skill, so it really hasn't bothered me. Some groups are bad and some are good.

[Sillychan]

About 50/50.

Flex has been wonderful for me, because I can raid with my old guild on Stormreaver, and with friends on Illidan etc. It's been great to run alternates for our guildies that don't want to commit to a 10m alternate team (we're 25m).

For OQueue, it's been hit or miss, mostly miss. I've ran into a lot of people who aren't doing the bare minimum expected to raid -- gem and enchant their gear. DPS doing sub 60k dps etc. I think it's likely to do with the ease of entering oque rather than Flex itself though.

Overall, I'm really happy with Flex.

[Halicia]

Did my first Openraid Flex (3rd wing), was fine. Few wipes on Malkorok and Spoils, but killed them. People were generally good. If you do Openraid Flex you can rate the raid after and should for things like that RL who kicked you. It's one thing to say "Sorry, looking for 535+, you're 527" but another to kick that way.

If it's a trade channel pug, just put the RL on ignore so you dont run with him.

if its a pug, have the gear & performance expected of the pug in order to clear the boss.

joined several pugs where people simply didnt have the basic numbers required for wing3, so resulted in wipe after wipe.

also had the slightly more rare player that treats flex as LFR, but thats usually cured by removing the offending person who cant be bothered to do mechanics or listen to instructions.

[ihatepeople]

Trade pickup groups have been crap, but I've had two good oqueue experiences.

This....I've ran into some groups that didn't even know what to do and/or failed miserably at even the early bosses. I've had two decent groups out of probably 6 or more runs. PUGing makes me wish I never stopped main raiding lol.

[RickJamesLich]

Be careful which groups you go into, personally I try to join 535+ or 540 if possible (even on lower item level toons, I just link achievements). Perhaps OP was booted for low dps? I dunno, but I see a lot of guys in that range that have timeless isle epics but dont' really know how to play their class (timeless isle makes gearing up an alt really easy lol).

Right off the bat though, if the raid leader isn't being very vocal and if you see people in crap gear that are expecting to get carried, I'd consider leaving the run and saving yourself some time.

[Nobleshield]

TBH unless you are at 25 people there is NO reason to kick someone out of a Flex raid barring actual underperforming. That RL sounds like the typical douchebag who, in the Wrath era, would be all "LFM ToC10 5.5k gs or no inv" who tries to trivialize mechanics with iLevel.

For me, my guild runs a Flex every week instead of one of our scheduled raid nights, but we don't do all of it we use it to practice for our progression boss (Galakras currently) and go a bit further to see what is awaiting us.

[Fluorescent0]

I've been in a pretty great openraid group today @ 2 PM GMT+1 on my monk tank. Oneshot every single boss in wing three while doing all three achievements. Felt pretty much like a guild run overgearing everything.

[Javster]

Kinda depends, I guess. I organize a guild flex run once a week to include guildies that don't run in our normal 10-man. We end up inviting friends here and there. If the group is less than 15 it tends to flow smooth, once you go above 15 focus starts to break down and it can turn bad pretty quickly.

A couple of week ago, we cleared the first wing in less than 2 hours with 14, 7 of which were regular raiders. The following week, we wiped for 2 hours on the first boss in the second wing with 20 and only 6 regular raiders...

[clevin]

Be careful which groups you go into, personally I try to join 535+ or 540 if possible (even on lower item level toons, I just link achievements). Perhaps OP was booted for low dps? I dunno, but I see a lot of guys in that range that have timeless isle epics but dont' really know how to play their class (timeless isle makes gearing up an alt really easy lol).

Right off the bat though, if the raid leader isn't being very vocal and if you see people in crap gear that are expecting to get carried, I'd consider leaving the run and saving yourself some time.

Right now, though, the issue with 535-540 groups is that you're basically asking people to have close to heroic T15 gear which excludes a lot of good players who are in 510-530 gear and who, arguably, are one of the targets of Flex. Obviously, as we go further into 5.4 this won't be the issue as people get gear.

The openraid pug i did was 510+ and if we'd had a higher ilevel (say, 520 or so), it might have gone slightly faster, but this is a PUG that, on 3 nights, cleared through Spoils. That's not bad for a 510+ PUG. I can only comment on the third night since I wasn't there earlier, but the wipes on Malkorok weren't due to gearing, but to people not quite getting the fight and not standing in swirlies sometimes. Once people got that and had seen it a few times it was an easy kill (i.e. DPS wasn't the issue). Same for SPoils - the Mantid folks needed to see the fight a couple of times, then it was a pretty straightforward kill.

[Dristereau]

Have yet to see to experience a true PUG version of Flex as I've been running it with my Guild on the alt raid. Managed to get 8/8 down last week and Immerseus Normal and this week 9/12, after a couple of wipes on Malkorok. However a guy in my old guild has run a few, and from what I can tell managed to kill a fair few bosses in Flex, so it can't all be bad

Will have to try it out next week, get some experience/gear on my many alts