LFR is a fucking joke. And I don’t mean that in an elitest “only bads run LFR i run mythics so i’m better than everyone lol people actually still run challenge modes too omg omg omg what peasants” kind of way. I mean it in a “the raid mechanics literally don’t matter, you can stand there and not move out of fire and tank shit as a DPS and not only do you not die, you barely take any damage” kind of way.
People ignore adds and they stay alive for the entire fight and it doesn’t even matter. I was tanking major adds as a hunter and not popping defensive CDs and still not taking very much damage.
You almost don’t even have to push back against Shadowforce or the wind buff on Iskar. You can literally ignore mechanics that push you off a platform and depending on where you were originally positioned, you might not fall off.
Basically, it appears that the only obstacle standing between the “push-button-recieve-loot” game design they’re implementing here is being vote kicked for inactivity, and even then, that doesn’t happen unless you’re a) the tank, or b) you die and don’t rez and someone notices and spams chat about it till there are enough votes to bring up a kick dialogue, which may not even pass because people literally don’t care. And hell, even an AFK tank might not get vote kicked if the group gives too few shits to bother with a kick. I’ve seen hunters kicked for Aspect of the Pack more often than AFK tanks.
This isn’t satisfying, this isn’t “allowing people of all skill levels to experience the content”, this is insulting to people, even more so now that they’re made LFR essentially mandatory by bringing back Valor upgrades. They claimed to want to move away from the “obligatory 4 runs a week” model of wrath, and yet here we are, with 4 levels of raids again.
Sure, it’s not OBLIGATORY, but if you’re running the hardest mode, and you still need gear, you feel obligated to run all the other levels to try and fill those holes. Which is exactly what was happening in ICC, and the exact reason they got rid of the four different difficulties of raiding in the first place.
If LFR dropped actual tier, you can bet your ass I’d be running this shit every single week trying for tier shoulders, since I *STILL* haven’t gotten any from the other levels of HFC.
And speaking of gear, that’s probably the most frustrating thing of all. As someone who quit the game a couple years ago, lost their raid spot, and used LFR to catch up and get back in to raiding when I re-subbed, it’s almost worthless for even doing that. You can get the EXACT SAME ilvl of gear out of mythic dungeons with a billion percent less stress, the same ilvl or higher out of garrison missions, and it’s just as useful or even more useful if you’re looking to jump into “real” raiding. LFR drops loot specific to LFR, it doesn’t give you tier, so if you start running “real” HFC, you’re basically starting over from scratch with the gearing process anyway. You might as well just run dungeons since it gives you the same quality of loot, but at a much less stressful price. There’s no point in running LFR to learn the fights, something else I used to do, because the fight is SO different even from normal, you’re not learning anything by experiencing the fight.
They should have just added a Valor mechanic like the “free oil” shipyard mission. Click a button, wait X hours, expend essentially no effort, get Valor. Because that’s what LFR basically is, click a button, suffer through the worst of the worst people this game has to offer attitude-wise for X hours, expend almost no effort, get Valor.
I used to like the concept of LFR, I really did. Excluding the horrible, worse than scum on the underbelly of Warcraft, terrible people that inhabit LFR groups, it used to be a good, functional part of the game that legitimately did give players a taste of raiding content and had legitimate reasons to entice geared/more skilled players to keep coming back to the “easy” content. Now it’s a dark place no one goes to unless they have no choice.