Posts with tag raid-finder

While recording the WoW Insider Show this week, my two co-hosts Anne Stickney and Olivia Grace were discussing heroic five man dungeons and made the interesting point that, while Cataclysm used new heroics to help people catch up in gearing as new raid tiers were released, the advent of the Raid Finder might mean that it isn't necessary anymore. If you're running LFR as your primary way to see/experience raid content, then you'd simply run previous LFR's in order to gear up and collect valor points for the various reputation vendors. This would allow you to get geared enough for further LFR as new raid tiers are released, and keeps the previous LFR's relevant. If you're running the current 10 or 25 man raids, you can use the LFR's for those raids to bootstrap yourself appropriately if you're not already geared well enough from the previous tier of raiding.

Either way, you don't need new heroic dungeons for the task - between daily quests, scenarios and LFR, the Cataclysm model which placed new five mans in patch 4.1 and 4.3 might no longer be necessary. Challenge modes keep the heroics that launched with Mists of Pandaria evergreen, since you can't outgear them, but is that enough for fans of five mans? While both Wrath of the Lich King and Cataclysm introduced post-launch dungeons, Burning Crusade really only introduced Magister's Terrace in its last content patch. This makes me wonder if we really need any new five mans, and if we do, what would/should they be?

Gearing a character for raiding was a predictable and straightforward task. Get a few bits and jump into the latest 5-mans, which were very easy and certainly achievable with PvP gear, as long as you were one of the classes that didn't do too badly from it. Preferably not a plate tank, then!

If you were adamant that cheaty PvP-based gearing wasn't for you, you could just run a few of the normals and earlier heroics, such as the Zul'roics or even the ones before, to get yourself geared to an acceptable level for the 4.3 heroics. What's more, your main could send your alts decent, current gear with their inevitable glut of valor points, and your justice points bought you the previous tier's gear.

Why the Cataclysm retrospective? As a reminder of how easy it was, in Cataclysm's twilight hours, to level and gear alts to a raid-ready level, or, for that matter, to a competitive PvP level. Quite apart from the ease, it was really the only thing left to do, after months upon months of Dragon Soul.

In case you missed the big news, the Thunder King will be upon us in Patch 5.2, coming to you (live!) sometime in the next couple months. Unfortunately, many of you are just now receiving Mists of Pandaria under the tree, or are getting back into the game after reaching level 90, and are overwhelmed with all the endgame options available to you. Don't worry about it! By following this guide, we'll get you from a fresh level 90 character to a full clear of all 5.0 raids in three weeks or less, with no expensive outlays of time or cash. Plenty of time to prepare for dinomancers!

Prerequisites

First, you need to have a level 90 character. If you don't have one yet, it's okay: the experience required to level from 1-85 was significantly reduced when Mists of Pandaria was released, so you'll be able to catch up quickly. Once you reach 85, hop over to Pandaria and enjoy the new quests. You'll gain a level for each zone you clear, more or less. You can also run some normal mode 5-man dungeons if you'd like, though go easy; you'll be running the heroic versions quite frequently at 90.

Second, you'll want a DPS spec and a good set of starter gear for it. Completing the Dread Wastes or Townlong Steppes quests will get you outfitted; if you don't have DPS gear laying around to actually complete the quests, Len of Arms will happily sell you a set of 408's to get going. You can also search the auction house; many blue BoE's in the ilvl 430-450 range are listed frequently, for pretty reasonable prices.

One of the things I've noticed since Mists of Pandaria launched is rooted in a quirk of human psychology. The commonplace becomes expected, the expected becomes tedious, and what was once a reward seems less so. I'm talking about what happens when you use an Elder Charm of Good Fortune to get an extra roll on loot for a boss, whether it be in LFR or a guild raid, and you get extra gold instead of an item, or an item you already have.

Ultimately, you haven't really lost anything save the Elder Charm itself, and there's a hard cap of 10 on those, so you would have ended up using it sooner or later anyway. But it feels like a loss, strangely enough, when you use the charm and see the word gold pop up, even though it isn't. I was thinking about this while reading a forum thread with a response from Draztal today.

Draztal - the big LFR loot whiners topic

Quote:

That's basically what all the whiners are saying.

At the risk of sounding "old" but I remember years ago; if you were pugging current content raids, you were lucky if the group could even kill the boss. Never mind also getting loot.

Perhaps what's happening is that some players are having the illusion that because the roll is happening, something must drop eventually (eventually being, more often than not). But, if I may, I'd suggest you guys note down how many drops (for your character) do you encounter in your guild raids of a given week and how much competition you have going on for them.

When you factor those things in, does LFR really feel *that* different to the speed at which you gear up when you're competing against others in your guild? I'm just curious :-)

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My answer is yes, it does feel different, but not because of LFR itself. It feels different mostly because, when people use their Elder Charm they have an expectation that isn't grounded in reality, myself included. No one uses that coin wanting gold. You use the coin hoping that the item you need from the boss will drop, which is human nature. But the coin is random.

I have a love/hate relationship with pugging. I'll have a mediocre to wonderful time, random after random, and then one horrific experience makes me quit PUGs for months. I have a thick skin for writing on the internet ... er, let me rephrase that. I now have a thick skin for writing on the internet for over five years. But playing with pick up groups for the same amount of time still hasn't toughened me up.

Battlegrounds? No problem. I'm not sure why. The language and verbal attacks are often much worse there, and I know that's why many people stay away. But I guess it's more impersonal there and much more common. Maybe that's why I can handle it so easily.

It is definitely much more personal in a 5-man group. That's certain. It's not "you all suck," but "you suck, Laurel." If I'm really not doing well, there are better ways to tell me, obviously. More often, however, the blamer is the one with the problem. "Learn to heal!" -- says the rogue pulling the entire room while the tank is waiting for the casters to regen mana. "[expletive deleted]," he goes on to say. These experiences really bother me and I just can't deal for a while.

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Mists of Pandaria is here! The level cap has been raised to 90, many players have returned to Azeroth, and pet battles are taking the world by storm. Keep an eye out for all of the latest news, and check out our comprehensive guide to Mists of Pandaria for everything you'll ever need to know.

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When does a player who dips one toe into raiding via the raid finder accumulate so much raid group experience that he becomes a bona fide raider? Is that even something that can happen? I feel fairly confident that a good number of players will say it's not -- but if that's the case, then we'll have to stop putting performance expectations on raid finder players. We've all seen experienced raiders fussing and fuming about other players when they're running the raid finder, as if they expected polished gearing and gameplay from players for whom they refuse to allow it's even possible. Spot the disconnect?

The raid finder didn't only allow the so-called unwashed masses to claw their way up into pseudo-raiding. (See that lump in my cheek? That's my tongue.) It also allowed countless tautly stretched raiders to deflate with much relief, tour busing their way through the game's most epic sights and stories and then logging out for the rest of the week to kick back on the couch with a good movie and a homebrew. None of these players suddenly lost the skills and discipline they'd accumulated over years of guild raiding simply by dint of choosing to run the raid finder instead of running with a raid group. Conversely, the players coming into organized raiding via the raid finder are no different from raiders past in their ability to pick up raiding conventions as well as personal and group strategies from repeated exposure to these events.

We seem to be coming to the conclusion that the hardcore game is dead. So who's a raider in today's World of Warcraft? To make a final decision, we'd probably have to come to a consensus on what the purpose of the raid finder actually is. Even so, I'm sure we can agree that someone who runs the raid finder once or twice ever simply to see the sights is probably not considered a WoW raider. But what about someone who runs the raid finder regularly every week? Does that change if participation drops to every other week or less? Is being a raider more a matter of mindset, skill, or performance? Do you think we've simply concluded as a community that even regulars of the raid finder are simply not part of the raiding game? Tell us what the view is from your end of the swimming pool.

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There's been a bit of discussion taking place over on the official forums about the ease of the raid finder's first three bosses, released on October 9th in the US. It's no great surprise, really, that this ever-controversial feature is stirring up ire in the forums, with complaints that it's too easy. Blizzard Blue Taepsilum has weighed in, with some interesting ideas on the Raid Finder's difficulty settings.

First and foremost, the main issue Blizzard seems to have at the front of their minds is that the Raid Finder, unlike normal and heroic difficulties, is specifically designed for random groups. These are not your well-oiled machine guild groups, your Methods and Vodkas, these are a bunch of players who've probably never met each other before, and probably never will again. Sure you can join the Raid Finder as a group if you want to, but that's not really what it's designed for.

I always remember sitting in Shattrath. Sometimes for hours, scrolling through trade, seeing the same messages over and over again. "LF1M Shadow Labyrinth, CC."

Every so often, the discussion comes back to how grouping tools are ruining World of Warcraft's social aspects. The arguments are usually the same, talking about how before the Dungeon Finder people had to have active guilds or set up groups via trade, how the servers had a sense of community, how you have to get out there and put groups together and make friends in order to play WoW, and how that's lost now. And whenever I see this argument, I remember sitting in Shattath, sometimes for hours, trying to get a group for Shadow Labyrinth.

People never really seem to remember those times when they're talking about this. Now, I've made a lot of friends in WoW over the years. Through server x-fers, through tiers of raiding, through old school days of dungeon running. I talk to a lot of these people to this day, and I've raided actively since the days of Molten Core. And yet, when people bemoan the tools that have been added to this game all I can remember is sitting in Shattrath, doing the "LFG Shadow Labyrinth" shuffle, looking at other people also looking for groups. Watching those groups demand that any new DPS have CC (warriors didn't) and that any new tank be an AoE god (warriors weren't) so they didn't have to use that CC they wanted you to have.

WoW Archivist explores the secrets of World of Warcraft's past. What did the game look like years ago? Who is etched into WoW's history? What secrets does the game still hold?

If you missed last week's Archivist, I recounted some of WoW's earliest raid exploits. Guilds have been pushing for ways to make raids easier since Molten Core went live, whether for the glory of a first kill or simple convenience. This week, I'll continue our tour through this sordid side of raiding with more recent exploits. Many of them ended with suspensions.

Shadow Word: World First

In her heyday, Serpentshrine Cavern's Lady Vashj was considered one of the hardest raid bosses that the game had ever seen. In March 2007, more than two months since Serpentshrine went live with the release of The Burning Crusade, EU guild Nihilum posted screenshots of Vashj's loot and claimed the world-first kill. Nihilum was the dominant progression guild at the time, earning 20 world firsts throughout the expansion -- more than three times that of their closest competitor.

There was only one problem: An ex-member named Lewt claimed that Nihilum exploited a bug to kill Vashj. As with Razorgore and other bosses, the mechanism seemed to revolve around that troublesome spell Divine Intervention. Using the spell despawned the pillars that are connected to Vashj's health, leaving her with 1 HP. Lewt popped a Soulstone and killed her with Shadow Word: Death. He even provided a screenshot to prove it. He also went on to badmouth the guild about exploits in Blackwing Lair, gold buying practices, and even an unlikely situation where an officer was paying the guild leader's real-life bills.

CM Watcher clarified the way loot is going to work in the raid finder going forward, and it may be a surprise for those of us who are used to forming all-guild runs to try and farm up set pieces for the bonuses. You won't be able to use any other loot system for bosses than the new LFR roll system, even in a preformed group.

Watcher - The new LFR roll system

Posted by Ichi

It would be useful if we could form a guild group and set our own loot rules, essentially the same process we use in norm/heroic.

Within LFR, boss loot is handled on a per-player basis using the new system, regardless whether you queued as a full group or used the matchmaking features. You should still be able to change the loot method you use to handle any drops from the non-boss creatures in the instance if you are a full premade, but the boss system is hardcoded.

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If you're used to forming groups to funnel gear to a specific player or players, you won't be able to do that with the raid finder any longer. Even in a completely premade raid group, the loot system will work as it does for people using the matchmaking tool to form a random group. Everyone's chance to get loot is independent of anyone else; you can't trade an item that dropped for you, and you'll only get drops that are useful to your current spec.

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It's open warfare between Alliance and Horde in Mists of Pandaria, World of Warcraft's next expansion. Jump into five new levels with new talents and class mechanics, try the new monk class, and create a pandaren character to ally with either Horde or Alliance. Look for expansion basics in our Mists FAQ, or dig into our spring press event coverage for more details!

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There has been a recent thread on the EU forums getting quite some blue attention that's discussing the purpose of the raid finder, including some hefty criticisms of it, as you'd expect for any newer feature. I don't have the space to put all the blue posts in this article, but this is what the Wowhead blue tracker is made for. This thread made me sit up and think about what in fact the real purpose of this game feature was.

A rung on the gearing ladder

The raid finder, when it first appeared, was famously exploited for gear by guilds -- and indeed, it still is, although within the rules. Gone are the days of the glitches exploited by Paragon, landing themselves a ban. But those issues aside, the raid finder has become very much a step on the gearing ladder for any new character, and guilds put this to good use when gearing up their colleagues, going into the raid finder as a group or with several people all on the same token. So if a guild member had a new priest to gear up, a guild might join as a party of paladins, priests and warlocks to get that new priest several rolls on token drops, as the tokens could be passed between players.

Offering as it does not only higher item level gear than heroic dungeons but also tier pieces and the associated set bonuses, the raid finder was a valuable source of easily obtained upgrades for a new character. And so as it progressed, more and more players came into it that were cheating the item level requirements, making the fights longer and the rage more ragey. Do you remember the start of the raid finder? When the instances were new? How polite and excited people were to see the new boss mechanics! It was actually fun then.