Patch 5.4 patch notes
Virtual Realms feature revealed
The Proving Grounds are coming
The latest patch 5.4 newsArcane Brilliance: Adventures with and observations on the Raid Finder
by Christian Belt 
Nov 5th 2011 at 10:00PM
I have to admit: Nothing in patch 4.3 excites me as much as the Raid Finder. Not transmogrification, not the Deathwing raid, not the fact that we're drawing ever closer to me being able to roll a Pandaren kung fu mage. Nope, I'm excited about the Raid Finder.
There was a time during my WoW career when I was able to adjust my schedule around my guild's raid nights, but that time hasn't really existed for some time now. My family has grown, my work responsibilities have grown, and my WoW time has become increasingly limited and far more unreliable. I play when I can play these days, and it's nigh impossible to plan a raid schedule around that. I'd wager I'm not alone in this.
So the idea of being able to see much of the same endgame content and gear up enough to help my guild on my own schedule much the same way I gear up through 5-mans now ... that just thrills me to death.
But putting together a 25-man raid is an exponentially more complex endeavor than simply throwing together a 5-man run. How does this Raid Finder tool function in practice? Well, I've taken my mage to the PTR, and I've tested it out for myself. And I'm here to tell you:
It totally works. And it totally doesn't.
The Raid Finder will totally find you a raid
First things first. As a tool to locate 24 other well-geared players to fill a raid or as a tool to fill a few empty spots in your guild's raid, the Raid Finder performs as advertised. You can absolutely take your lonely mage, queue him for a raid, and be coupled with 24 raid-mates in a matter of minutes. On the PTR, with a limited playerbase (but one which I assume is extremely interested in testing out this new functionality), my mage was finding raids in 10 minutes or less, a far shorter wait than he has on the live realms for 5-mans.
It's tremendously convenient, user-friendly -- and even in the early stages of testing, almost seamless. I encountered the occasional disconnect, but by and large, the Raid Finder will find you a raid, and fast. We'll see how it holds up when millions of players are using it, but it seems like the framework is solid.
The system generally puts together a balanced raid. The gear requirements are fairly steep, ensuring nobody comes in undergeared. The setup selects two tanks, six healers, and 17 damage dealers, and it analyzes gear to try and provide a good mix of melee and ranged DPS. What you end up with, most of the time, is a reasonably varied selection of the parts you need to organize a raid.
The trouble generally starts once you're safely in and ready to start downing bosses.
Lack of leadership
When queuing, you can select whether or not you want to be a raid leader, and the system automatically chooses one of those brave individuals to be the actual leader of these 25 disparate personalities. The problem is that oftentimes, that guy -- the one who just a few minutes earlier clicked a box agreeing to be a raid leader -- is in no way prepared to be an actual raid leader.
The first raid leader I got proceeded to lead us in absolute, serial-killer silence. I could hear him breathing over voice chat ... at least I think that was him ... but he was otherwise completely mute. Being a raid leader is far more complicated than being the dungeon leader in a 5-man. There are things you need to do. And there is absolutely no prerequisite for clicking that Yes, I want to lead this raid button. You do not have to have raided before. You do not have to know the fights. You do not have to have the capacity for verbal communication. You do not have to have opposable thumbs.
And once you get into the raid and discover that your raid leader is a mouth-breathing sociopath -- or even worse, a warlock -- there is no way to replace him. This is a problem.
It's a simple fix, though, and Blizzard has ample testing time left to address it. Just give us a way to vote on a new raid leader once the raid is formed.
Lack of ability to be led
Though having a bad leader is a crippling blow to any raid, a far more difficult problem to control is the sad fact that a vast majority of players don't seem to be able to listen to a good one. Putting 25 random players together reveals a sad fact: As a playerbase, we simply don't know how to listen or follow simple instructions. It's bad enough when you have an experienced guild and a raid of people who respect each other. Now imagine that those 25 people don't know each other, will never see each other again, and have as their primary motivation some quick loot before their guild run starts in an hour.
I've been in some bad PUG raids before. But prior to trying the Raid Finder, I have never before witnessed such a green-tinged cloud of simultaneous brain-farting as I have in the past week. It's truly disturbing. Mass fire-standing. Pulling before the raid is set up, wiping, then pulling early again. Repeated failure to grasp even the simplest mechanics of a fairly basic fight. People going AFK without telling anyone. Tanks going AFK in the middle of the fight.
I honestly don't know how to address this issue. These are generally well-meaning people who appear to lack the ability or motivation to be lead. It's an issue that exists on the live realms but is brought into sharp focus in this new raid system. I'm hoping that over time, the community will self-regulate itself to the point where this is less of a glaring issue.
A vote-kick system that's far too limited
The current system for vote-kicking folk on the PTR is limited in the same ways it's limited in the 5-man Dungeon Finder. Which is to say, way, way too limited.
When you get the troll who thinks it's funny to repeatedly pull the boss before everybody's ready, or the tank who simply cannot do his job, or the healer who insists on wearing DPS gear, or the 12-year-old racist who can't control his Vent outbursts, or the AFK warlock on follow, or the raid leader who won't lead the raid, or the guy in Russia who is apparently playing WoW on a TI-86 calculator over a satellite phone connection ... You need to be able to kick that guy, and you need to be able to do it quickly.
This isn't a 5-man dungeon run, where three douchebags can queue together and kick anybody they like. This is a vote-kick that requires a majority of 25 people. I firmly believe the vote kick for the Raid Finder should be basically unlimited. When the community can rid itself of the idiots without having to sit out a DCed tank through a 5-minute mandatory wait period or having to endure the 5-man group of trolls who queued together due to limitations on how often you can kick people, I believe a great many of the issues we're seeing on the PTR will diminish.
This is probably the single most vital change that needs to happen before this tool goes live. Unlimited kicking.
And now to try to end on a positive note ...
I've focused on the negatives, but holy crap, am I still excited for this thing! Once some of the leadership/douchebag player kinks have been worked out, this is still a fantastic new way to experience amazing content. By and large, my mage was getting quick groups, and then he was able to experience a toned-down version of the most difficult content in the game with a group of strangers. You still have to be good, and you still have to do your job, but this also provides an opportunity for you to raid how you like without worrying as much about what your guild raid setup needs, what spec you're expected to assume, and what kind of loot your guild leader's girlfriend will ninja from everybody on this run.
The content appears to be tuned so that even a less-than-ideal grouping will be able to succeed. The loot is excellent if not completely top-tier. The fights still need to be learned, but the Dungeon Journal helps alleviate some of the ignorance, if you can get people to actually take a second and read the entries provided therein. I was able to enter a raid, do my job, and feel a sense of accomplishment when we finally downed the boss. The interface is very intuitive and well designed. It's the players who generally screw it up for everybody.
Other things I'd like to see added include:
- Overwhelming incentives to finish the raid. It needs to be something that will motivate even the most flaky among us to stick things out and keep those with the urge to grief in line long enough to get their goodies at the end.
- A rating system for players. I understand this could be abused, but that could be controlled with some thoughtful limitations. If players know they have a permanent reputation rating that other players can see, perhaps they'll be less inclined to be asshats. This would not necessarily be limited to the Raid Finder, and it would probably take quite a bit of work to institute properly.
- The difficulty level is probably about right, but if the problems with the playerbase aren't addressed, it may need to be tweaked even lower, or else nobody will be finishing these raids.
- I want long, long deserter debuffs for those who drop early and shorter debuffs for those who get themselves kicked. I want a massive disincentive for quitting and at least some for being a twerp and getting yourself kicked. I understand that there will be some who get kicked for no good reason, but with a 25-man majority vote required, this shouldn't happen very often, and the debuff should be of relatively short duration so that those who do get kicked unnecessarily won't have to suffer much. The deserter debuff for the Raid Finder currently only applies to queuing for the actual Raid Finder, so those with the debuff can still queue for other things.
- Voice chat enabled automatically upon entering the raid. Getting 25 random people on Vent is simply a mess. But voice chat is just too important to have. There's a default system, imperfect though it may be, and we might as well use it. You'd still have the odd soul who either doesn't have a microphone or doesn't want to use voice chat for whatever reason, but as long as the majority of the raid is able to speak to each other, things should go much more smoothly.
The important thing to focus on, I believe, is this: With the Raid Finder, if you want to raid in World of Warcraft, you totally can. That's big.
Every week, Arcane Brilliance teleports you inside the wonderful world of mages and then hurls a Fireball in your face. Start out with our recent beginner's guide to being a mage, then check out our three-part State of the Mage columns on arcane, fire and frost. Don't forget to look at some of the addons your mage should probably be using.Filed under: Mage, Analysis / Opinion, (Mage) Arcane Brilliance
Reader Comments (Page 6 of 7)
tiperkins Nov 6th 2011 6:30PM
As an active raider who runs current content I agree whole heartedly. What you stated are exactly my fears for the RF system and are a big part of why I only raid and don't run heroics anymore.
Jayjay Nov 6th 2011 9:46AM
I really really hope the LFR tool doesn't suck as much as the LFD one has for things like heroic mode dungeons. During Wrath (and I am a vanilla player btw not a wrath baby) I managed to gear all my alts and loved doing the dungeons on LFD, even though yes there were a-hats to deal with - at least I only needed to suffer them for about 30 mins. Come Cata and I'm forced to spend HOURS in some instances and my love for my alts dwindled. I just got my main geared enough to raid with the guild, doing as many runs with guild as possible and gritting my teeth through the LFD groups. Then I stopped. My alts remain badly geared (rep gear/created items) and have basically become farming toons. I also don't spend as much time in WoW as I used to except to raid because I just can't force myself to go through LFD heroics and deal with awful people soley to get gear for alts.
Kael Nov 6th 2011 10:02AM
I've had a question about the raid finder that I haven't seen talked about yet: are the mechanics of the fights different from normal difficulty, or is it just that the bosses do less damage and have less health?
dart_68 Nov 6th 2011 10:55AM
I've always thought that a rating system that upgrades players rather than downgrades them would be less prone to abuse. Someone who would downgrade another player out of spite would not be willing to upgrade the same person. Everyone starts out essentially neutral and other players could upgrade them at the end of a run. The more upgrades a player has the less wait time in queue or other penalties. Only rules I would implement to avoid abuse would be that players from the same guild or even the same realm could not upgrade each other.
3teek7 Nov 6th 2011 12:38PM
I think Blizzard has started getting a real handle on how heroics should be handled and how players should be prepared for upper level PvE. I think more can be done, though, because heroics is an odd bit.
Heroics were meant to a) introduce players to raid fundamentalism, like certain boss mechanics and fight strategies and b) as a system to help players upgrade gear not just from drops, but from points. But there's a problem, as b) often trumps a) in most player's eyes. If you don't know fight mechanics for most heroics, your odds aren't very good. If a group wipes in a heroic, odds are impatient players who are just trying to grind for jp/vp will either call bad players out, who then often leave, or just leave themselves. A wipe basically slows the whole thing down, and multiple wipes ends the entire thing altogether.
I think Heroics should still emphasize educating players about PvE fights, and maybe in MoP with more ways to get VP, this will happen, but I think a few other features can be added as well.
1. Training rooms that simulate boss attacks for a player to avoid (maybe with some kind of gold or jp incentive, maybe not) to teach a player how to avoid and work around these kinds of attacks. Rather than just have a target dummy that we can stand perfectly still by and just rail dps on them, we can get a more accurate method of measuring rotation dps as well.
2. Dungeon grades: individual report cards a player can see after every boss fight or dungeon. Grades them in several categories specific to their class (damage for dps, threat for tanks, healing for healers) and more importantly, on how well they managed to avoid boss mechanics. Also can grade players for special mechanics they used, like misdirects, spell steals, great aoe heals, saving heals, and interrupts. It gives an objective and official analysis of a fight that allows players to see what they specifically did well and did wrong. If its private and officially from blizzard, hopefully players take it better than peer criticism which they may see as unfair or misdirected.
3. Make Deadly Boss Mods or other such addons built into the game. Or heavily heavily encouraged.
tmenzel Nov 8th 2011 2:26PM
"Training rooms that simulate boss attacks for a player to avoid (maybe with some kind of gold or jp incentive, maybe not) to teach a player how to avoid and work around these kinds of attacks."
I've been thinking along similar lines, and I want to expand on this idea. What I'd like to see is a series of "personal challenges" or "solo instances" you could enter.
Challenges would be based on role, and would have several levels of difficulty.
DPS challenges could be things like "Do X DPS without taking damage from the fire." "Switch to the indicated target within 4 seconds." "Maintain X or more DPS for three minutes, then move into the green circle and produce 2x DPS for 20 seconds."
Healing challenges such as: "Heal a 25-npc raid without any deaths." (and on impossible difficulty, some of them stand in the fire.) "Provide X HPS for 3 minutes, and then 2X HPS for 40 seconds." "Heal two NPC tanks as they swap threat on a boss." (and in a harder mode, the swapping becomes irregular.)
Tank challenges could be like "Hold threat on a pack of mobs while NPCs DPS them." (harder modes add more mobs, have DPS target the wrong ones, etc.) "Survive a boss's attack rotation for 2 minutes." (which will require the use of more cooldowns in harder modes.) "Perform consistent tank swapping with an NPC tank." and others such as "Pick up the adds as they spawn, move them into the green circle during phase 2." and "Face the boss in the indicated direction, once every 15 seconds for 2 minutes."
Players can't queue for LFR until they've completed the "Bronze" level of all challenges in the role they're queuing for. "Silver" level challenges reward JP. "Gold" level challenges reward VP. Completing all of the "Impossible" level challenges for your chosen role gives improved queue placement, preferred raid leader status, or some other bonus (maybe a title, pet, etc.)
Moanique Nov 6th 2011 12:26PM
Someone up-thread was commenting that players on the PTR are, as a group, somehow more serious than on live which means that LFR will only be worse once it goes live.
I beg to differ.
I've met many, many players on the PTR over the years who didn't know jack about anything. The only reason they were there was to play with pre-mades, etc. I'm not saying that I think that LFR will not have some huge problems when it goes live, I think it will. But mostly the problems are people problems. Aside from that, as people play through things a few times some will get better and will be able to carry the empty slots.
Raid mechanics should be left in but with greatly reduced effect and perhaps dire warnings that you'd be dead right now in normal mode.
All of that said I don't believe we'll see LFR become a really viable tool until MoP at which points raids will have been designed with an LFR mode in mind. I'm not so sure that this is the case with 4.3. To the extent that LFR was tacked on after the raid was designed it's not likely to provide an optimal experience.
As with all things like this, it's going to take a patch worth of experience with it to smooth out the subtleties.
rayden54 Nov 6th 2011 1:13PM
You want a long deserter debuff? If they can't fix the problem with kicking and jerks, then hell NO. I'm not going to waste 2 hours of my life because someone ninja pull the boss or constantly go AFK.
You really want those people to get shorter debuffs than the people who can't put up with them anymore? Worse a system like that actually encourages people to act like jerks in hope that they'll be kicked.
Matt Nov 6th 2011 2:33PM
NERF MAGES!
bub Nov 6th 2011 3:19PM
You dont need to have an active sub to play on the PTR so you get a lot of kids who just play for free so they can troll and then people who havn't raided in a guild in a very long time but want to see what the new content is.
"You really want those people to get shorter debuffs than the people who can't put up with them anymore? Worse a system like that actually encourages people to act like jerks in hope that they'll be kicked."
This is a really good point, in fact I think its the best point in the whole thread.
Aje Nov 6th 2011 6:31PM
interesting article... but doesn't belong in arcane brilliance.
Daryl Nov 6th 2011 10:04PM
maybe have a partial system, you can only start raid finder if you already have a small raid, say eleven.
That way you already have some structure and a RL.
Some successful raids I've been on were guild runs where I was one of say five who were pugged. So mainly tacked onto a guild run.
Daryl Nov 6th 2011 10:16PM
Maybe the players who join a raid pay 100g which is refunded when the 3rd boss is down. Maybe the 100g is then re-paid then to finish the run and is refunded when the last boss is down.
avgjoe Nov 7th 2011 5:41PM
i routinely dungeon with 3 folks. the kick system counts kick votes as 1 vote per group that started. 3 folks = 1vote.
harr01 Nov 7th 2011 3:20AM
"I have never before witnessed such a green-tinged cloud of simultaneous brain-farting as I have in the past week."
This article surely deserves an award for the funniest line I've read on wowinsider in years.
JDawgShiori Nov 7th 2011 3:42AM
I foresee raid leaders getting flamed much harder than tanks in random dungeons.
nadra Nov 7th 2011 11:14AM
Great idea Blizz.
Herd 25 random drooling lobotomised chimps together in one area who can barely tie their own shoelaces, show them some raid loot and then tell them that they can have it... only if they can down the tricky boss in front of them... the one that needs coordiinated execution timing and good communication.
/popcorn
Just wish there were some way to spy on the LFG raids kind of like a hidden camera. Bet Blizz could charge ppl for the entertainment value alone :D
Diablo Nov 7th 2011 12:29PM
The solution to this problem, is a feedback system that is monitored/moderated by the community. Bail early on a run, you lose points. Get kicked, you lose points. If the system took points away, and the only way to earn points was by other players submitting a manual form that took a few seconds to complete, and included some sort of reward (extra gold, flask, something minor) that was given to 5-10 random players from each raid, eventually the system would normalize and have prevention in place for haters. If the only player-based commentary was voluntary, and drawn at random, people would not be able to arbitrarily effect people's scores, and the system could automatically dock them points for being annoying/dumb. The AFK issue could be handlded by the system in the same way as it is in a BG, just have a dialogue box pop up that says "the following player is AFK, do you wish to report them?" and they lose points.
There also needs to be a tool to replace/demote a raid leader, and a very long debuff on people who leave group. The deserter buff for 5 mans needs to be 60 minutes, and it needs to be 2-3 hours for a raid. Bailing on the group should prevent you from finding another one for the same amount of time that you would have spent if you completed it. This was really bad back when ZA/ZG first came out, and people would bail when they didn't get a drop, or when the group got bogged down. The 1 hour long debuff would discourage this.
tmenzel Nov 8th 2011 12:39PM
"A rating system for players. I understand this could be abused, but that could be controlled with some thoughtful limitations. If players know they have a permanent reputation rating that other players can see, perhaps they'll be less inclined to be asshats. This would not necessarily be limited to the Raid Finder, and it would probably take quite a bit of work to institute properly."
This. Please.
aranta Nov 9th 2011 8:02AM
I think the article is written by a current raider whoexpects everything to be the same in the new facility. This isn't for people like you. Move with the times.
This is to let casual players see the content. So stop talking about vent. That's for current raiders. Casual players don't want that level of coordination.
Don't go on and on about 'knowing the fights', they should be easy to understand. If there's anything tough about them then put that featrure into the 5 man to train the playerbase.
Why do we need to 'finish the raid'? This is ideal for people ducking in and out when they have time. Why should I need to dedicate a whole evening to getting through a PUG raid when I can do the odd boss there and there?
A rating system for players - this would just push the elitism even more. The LFR system is supposed to be opening up content to casuals, not pushing us down.