1841

Even for LFR raiders (maybe normal too) the prince quest line is a pain in the ass. My hunter has 5 wisdom and 1 power. I need 10 of each. The first 2 lfr segments can drop either token, and the next 3 drop only wisdom. Great system there. Add in that it’s entirely RNG based, and it’s pretty awful. I’m done gear-wise with the first 2 segments, but have only 1/10th of the sigils I need from there. I picked up zero this week, so that was fantastic.

The LFR loot system in general leaves a lot to be desired. My warrior is getting flooded with loot in the new Zandalari raid (yeah, Bliz is back at that well…) but the game seems to know what items I don’t need.

“Hey buddy, I see you have a perfectly itemized set of 496 legs…we’ve got your back, take these shit itemized 502s. Oh, you didn’t like those legs last week…well, have them again. Make the vendor happy.”

“Hey, you know how we gave your fury warrior a one-hander last week? Here, have a two-hander. Yeah, they don’t go together, what’s your fucking point?”

“Hey, remember when we gave you that genuinely sweet unique-equipped ring last week? Here it is again. Because fuck you.”

I’m sure there are plenty of dudes in those raids who would love the loot I’m going to hand to the vendor, and I’d love for them to have it free of charge, but there’s no way I can give it to them, so yay.

My hunter on the other hand can’t get shit, so that’s even more delightful.

1842

Not sure what you want - random loot is the same in regular raiding. If they gave you exactly what you wanted every time a boss died you’d be done in two weeks, and then complain about that.

1843

I believe he wants to be able to trade the LFR loot.

Which seems pretty sensible.

1844

It isn’t the same at all. In regular raiding, if the same thing drops twice, there’s probably somebody else who wants it. Furthermore, in regular raiding, you are always going with the same group of people, so you can be happy for somebody else getting an item they want, even if you don’t get anything, because you know them, and because you know that it will help your group do just a little bit better the next week.

With LFR, enchanting seems like almost too good of a profession. On my server, I think the mats you get from DEing an item are worth hundreds of gold.

1845

Then drop rates need to be lower to account for that…

1846

Check the Black Market Auction house. Last I checked on my server, it was full of un-bid-on invites.

1847

Heck, they’re down to like 3k on my realm’s AH.

1848

I completely agree that something is broken in the Sigils of Power drop rate. My alt is about four weeks ahead of my main on the legendary quest because Sigils of Power just wouldn’t drop for him. At one point around January I was at 5 power/9 wisdom. It took me 12-14 weeks to get up to 10 Sigils of Power, including one dry spell of about 6-7 weeks in which Sigils of Power didn’t drop at all (but I received 3 Sigils of Wisdom in MSV).

I’m not on the same page with you so much about getting equipment that you can’t use. I’m willing to accept a lot of it as bad luck. However, Blizzard does seem to be applying a blind logic to the LFR drop tables that if it drops in Normal/Heroic, it has to drop in LFR. This leads to strange situations such as trinkets or belts that drop across two or three bosses. It’s one thing to get a piece you already have from the same boss. I’m more willing to accept that as bad luck. But when you’re getting the same trinket multiple times from different bosses, something seems off.

Another issue is that many classes and specs just have a lot more drops in general. For each LFR Throne of Thunder boss that drops a T15 LFR token on my DK, most bosses have 2 or at most 3 things on their loot table that can drop for a DPS DK. But for my Brewmaster Monk, each boss has four or even five items. So even if you get through the 15% “gate” of being awarded loot, the amount of gear on these bosses makes it much harder to get your T15 bonuses as a Monk in LFR.

A third issue is necklaces. I’d say a vast majority of the population (95% or more) is going to buy the ilvl522 Shado Pan assault neck before they do ToT LFR, or soon afterwards. So most all of the LFR neck rewards are going to be booby prizes.

It seems a lot of these issues could be worked out by doing a simple tuning pass on the LFR loot tables, even if it creates differences from Normal/Heroic.

1849

I think I picked one up for 3,500 on my realm after trying to get in on some low bids (< 2000). I kept getting outbid, so just decided to go a little crazy and stop wasting time running out to the BMAH.

I’ve mostly enjoyed the new raid (in LFR). I think they’re doing a decent job at making the fights different enough from each other, and the 4th wing seems like it’s going to have a lot going on as well. My two biggest disappointments with ToT are:

  1. The amount of trash in the first wing. Is it some unwritten rule that any troll instance has to go overboard on number of trash mobs? ZG and ZA were the same way, and even the 5.0 raids go bonkers with troll trash when we get to those sections. The remaining ToT trash isn’t anywhere near as bad.

  2. Magaera. This fight looked so cool in the pre-release write up, but it’s turned into nothing more than stand right, kill right head, stand left, kill left head, repeat. It’s the closest thing to a tank-and-spank encounter as we’ve seen so far in Throne. Jin’rokh comes close, be he’s the first boss so you expect him to be less complex.

The other fights have been a lot of fun for me so far. Horridon is a blast as an AffLock, as I’m always juggling to keep stuff up. Council is ok, but would be a lot more interesting if it wasn’t easier to just cheese the mechanics by burning Sul from the start (which is the default strat now it seems). Tortos is good, but I would love to be able to auto-kick people who just hit the shells because they can (which means the stone breath probably needs to hit harder). On Ji-Kun, I’ve been having a blast on the egg team, flying between the nests. Durumu is a lot better now that they got the kinks worked out of the disintegrate phase. Primordius isn’t as interesting as I thought it would be, but it is different. Dark Animus is another potentially interesting fight, that too many people are trying to cheese by AoEing everything.

People are definitely starting to get the hang of the fights, but I’ve been part of a lot of raids where people tried to ignore the mechanics and the raid ends up wiping. I’m sure there are some things that, in a month or two, will be ignored as people can heal and dps through them, but right now we’re not there, at least in my experience.

I believe he wants to be able to trade the LFR loot. Which seems pretty sensible.

I have to side with Blizz on this one. In the original system, with loot roles and trading, there was just too much drama going on, and it really slowed things down. Raids move much quicker after a boss is dead, and there’s (thankfully) none of the loot and sell or begging that used to happen.

It’s not perfect yet, but I think when 5.3 hits and we start getting increased chance for loot on bonus rolls and the ability to select a loot spec, the system will be getting a good bit better. I’d prefer to see the increase chance for loot happen on the regular roll as well, but I’ll hold judgment on that until I see it in practice.

1850

I’ll confess, I never read bossfights any more if I’m just going to LFR. Either whatever tricks the boss has are easily spotted, or I get a screen warning, or we wipe and someone explains the fight in a brief way for the next go.

While I’ll fess up to the laziness factor in this, I also find it lets me have a lot more fun with LFR. The depths were a lot of fun, not knowing what the bird was up to. The big troll fights in last stand were also a lot of fun without knowing everything that was going to happen in advance. The fact is, I don’t mid wiping a few times while learning a new boss. I do get that a lot of people in LFR are just there for fast loot, but I’m going to be running these places for a while, probably. I’m in no rush to burn out.

1851

When I came back and started raiding LFR, I started reading strats like I used to, but found I was spending a lot of time reading guides that talked about normal and LFR, and just said “don’t worry about this in LFR.” I did a little Googling and found LFR-specific guides over at TenTonHammer.com (ex: http://www.tentonhammer.com/wow/guides/raids/throne-of-thunder-lfr-1). They’re really, really basic and take about 2-3 minutes to read per boss. It’s been perfect for me…I don’t go into the raid concerned that I’m going to die simply because I didn’t know something and I don’t have to spend a ton of time combing through normal strategy guides or videos. The only issue I had is some of their strats weren’t completely accurate (Durumu was particularly off when I first read it).

One other thing I meant to comment on, I’ve been toying around with starting to level my protection warrior, and even maybe hitting up LFR with him at some point, but the more I read through the LFR strats, the more I think it’s got to be pretty boring as a tank. Whereas dps, and to some degree healers, seem to have something different to deal with in most fights, tanking seems to come down to dealing with some debuff that’s basically there to force you to tank swap. The only difference is whether is stacks (trade at 4-5!) or it’s a single level (trade as soon as you see it!). I know there’s some fights that are a bit more complicated in terms of positioning, but they seem few and far between.

1852

With the new active mitigation tanking model, you’re always watching incoming damage and trying to manage and optimize your cooldown and mitigation ability usage. So to me tanking isn’t at all boring compared with DPS. Especially on fights like Horridon which combine the skill of picking up adds with managing damage spikes.

1853

Yeah, I’ve tanked a few 5-mans, and it’s all about stopping harm. Even in mostly greens I can tank 5-mans and not need too much healing if I stay on top of things. If I don’t, the healer can’t keep up sometimes. It’s not facerolling.

1854

Huh you are encouraged to do heroic / low raids to buy powerful gear ( capping vp). I have pretty much only been doing LFR with some pug runs of tot norm that only kill jinrok and I am already ilvl 511. If I didn’t need legendary quest items/ tier tokens there would be almost no point of me running tot LFR anymore. I have pretty much all the 522 gear from vp in non tier slots.

1855

Thanks for the feedback on tanking. Hey, with the upcoming reduction in XP I might actually dust my warrior off after all.

Any thoughts on the new wing? The first two fights (Iron Qon and Twin Consorts) were really surprisingly meh. Twin Consorts especially was even more of a tank-and-spank fight than Jin’rokh. It’s rare that I walk away from a new fight wondering if there were actually any mechanics I should have been concerned about.

Thankfully Lei Shen was pretty incredible. Definitely one of my favorite fights of the expansion. It feels like they really tried to cram in as many different mechanics as possible, but it’s all well-thought out. I’m still not sure exactly what was going on because it felt like there was always something to watch out for. Of course it helped that when I zoned into the instance it was directly to Lei Shen and the raid was already up to 6 stacks of determination. I may feel differently by the end of the week.

1856

Lei Shen is the one that’s going to make me watch a video for LFR. My LFR last week was going pretty smoothly till we hit him.

1857

The one I’ve had fails on is Durumu. Lei Shen was remarkably smooth. (Also had a wipe on Dark Amicus, but that was utterly useless tank syndrome).

1858

Dark Animus still seems like a dice roll to me. If the group can survive through the inevitable wave of Large Animi(?), then I’m pretty confident there will be a kill. It’s all about getting through the crimson fire and the teleports it seems.

Durumu has become increasingly like Elegon. Now that the graphics and mechanics are fixed for the disintegration beam phase, you’re always going to lose a few clueless folks, but the remainder of the group tends to get him down pretty easily.

1859

Went back last night and Lei Shen caused no more trouble once people realized to stay in their areas.

A big problem I’m having lately is hour-long queues for LFR. It’s actually driving me away from wanting to play. Last night, for instance, I queued for the raid an watched “24” on Netflix for an hour before the trumpet warning came. A few nights ago it logged me out for inactivity while I was waiting.

1860

Come to think of it, my server seems pretty dead in general lately. Even the AH is only returning about 1/3 the cash it did just a couple months ago. Is it feeling a bit abandoned to anyone else?