PST - Episode 117

[Lore]

This week:
0:51 - Do you prefer expansions to have 10 levels, or 5?
4:42 - What's the best setup for a raid instance? Multiple instances? Optional bosses?
9:55 - Is the Warlock Green Fire scenario too difficult?
15:30 - With how fast you can gear up in T14 LFR now, will queues get longer?
19:55 - Can Hunter Aspects be made interesting again?
27:03 - How can I pay attention to a boss fight while also dealing with a complex rotation?
33:21 - Does Mists of Pandaria need more 5-man content?
40:46 - What do you regret most in your World of Warcraft history?

[steveh]

As for the tier 14 LFRs, us middle of the road raiders (4-6/12 bosses down in tier 15 as of now) will use tier 14 LFR for quick VP. I find it enjoyable to go ret on my pally and just blow up Elegon or Stone Guards or whatever. The level of noob in those LFRs now is a bit higher, but when I'm only getting 200 or so VP from normal mode raiding at this point, I find myself scraping around for VP so I do a variety of things. To the point of the 5 mans as well, I do bash out a daily dungeon for VP and a scenario. Not to mention doing the new dailies when I can. Obviously when all of tier 15 LFR is released, I'd probably go there for VP and some offspec gear, but maybe if I want to cap my VP, I'll run all 9 LFRs to net me 810 VP on a weekend for an alt or something.

[Gregasaurous]

As a kind of matter of fact point in response to a point Lore made in the first question, a Prot War with T14 2-set (something about the set bonus glitches the spell ID, it is not possible to do without the 2 set) can use Last Stand and then Rallying Cry (in that order) at the same time. I usually go up to around 1.1m health when I do this in a raid.

[Lantis]

No "new" 5-man dungeons is confirmation that we're getting ZA and ZG again.

[Gregasaurous]

No "new" 5-man dungeons is confirmation that we're getting ZA and ZG again.

Actually, RFC got revamped between Cata and Mop....... I can't imagine that was done for no reason.

[ChampStanley]

No "new" 5-man dungeons is confirmation that we're getting ZA and ZG again.

That's pretty funny.

I don't know why the troll 5 mans get so much crap. I thought the revamped ZG was really well done and more fun than the original raid and ZA scaled down from 10 to 5 quite well while retaining much of the originally flavor.

That 5 man content in MOP is so marginalized is, to me, too bad. My best WOW memories come from 5 mans: from all clothy Scholo runs in classic to Heroic Magister's in BC to even poor unloved Jindo in Cata. My all time favorite night of WOW was when a bunch of us went into the ICC heroic 5 mans with no idea what to expect. I'm someone who'd take fun 5 man content over raiding any day of the week. For whatever reason there isn't much interest in challenge modes in my guild. Valor alone isn't enough of an incentive I guess.

[Tengenstein]

Becuase in 6 months of running Zuls I did more ZA or ZG runs that runs of any single wrath 5 man in 2 years.

[eald]

Becuase in 6 months of running Zuls I did more ZA or ZG runs that runs of any single wrath 5 man in 2 years.

That has to be with timing from blizzard and the reward associated with it; ZA, ZG are by themselves better content than the Hour of Twilight 3 dungeons but LFR, the reward from this dungeons and the way they approached the queue made them less prone to be hated.

So if you replicate the VP considerations (don't put more VP in the new ones), maybe don't give better loot from them so you don't skip LFR and you access them via two queues: the New Dungeons in Random queue and the regular all random queue, they won't be intrusive and we won't hate them as much. This is of course trying to integrate those hypothetical dungeons in MoP; but I think the problem is that removing dungeons, allows devs to focus in the other content, that is why (I think) they wont make any dungeons in the middle of an expansion.

[Shammer]

The biggest issue I see if it's an issue really at all with LFR taking over for LFD is the weekly reset vs. the daily reset. Not that I want to wait in que times for over an hour every single day. Once a week is bad enough. But with LFD with there was that 1 piece I just needed I could take a shot everyday at it. Which hold true "IF" you get the extra charms now. But it's just another extra thing you hope you get. I think once and LFR is 2 teirs old that maybe for the sake of leveling alts and such it looses the weekly reset.

[The_Pancake]

I agree with Shammer that the thing I disagree with most about the change from 5-mans to LFR as a catch-up mechanic is the difference in reset periods. No matter how you slice it LFR is and always will be slower to catch up in than 5mans would. With 5-mans you don't even need to wait a whole day to get another chance at a drop because you could keep queing for random and keep running the same dungeon multiple times a day (especially since at the time that they were new both the Zuls and the HoTs each had their own queues separate from the others so with only 2 or 3 to pick from you could just spam-farm them all day until you got your drops). Further, in both Cata and Wrath chain-farming 5-mans also awarded you with an endless supply of a currency that also helped you catch up (the emblem system from Wrath and then with Valor gear changing to Justice with each tier in Cata).

5-mans were faster per run than LFR, were less stressful (most likely because there are fewer people), plus you got to roll on *something* on every boss. Even if all you were doing was greeding on something to vendor or rolling DE you still got that feeling of "kill boss, get (chance at) reward" for every boss kill. In LFR you don't even get gold from repeated boss kills unless you use a charm (ie when I was farming ToES LFR for a weapon there was zero compensation for killing the first 3 bosses).

I understand the intent behind wanting to keep LFR and previous tiers in general more relevant instead of just having them overshadowed by 5mans in the very next patch, but I still feel that 5-mans have a very important role in the game (as an activity, they just need a purpose now). I mean they moved away from the "hard-cata" heroics because they wanted them to be something that you could que up and do in a short period on a lunch break or something, but if there's no reason to run them then it really doesn't matter if you can do them during your break or not. It's sort of the same issue that Scenarios are having, they're fun enough and quick enough to do, but there's not really a reason to do them.

I think they need to find some way to break up the various things players "need", and then divide them between LFR, 5-mans, scenarios, and dailies. Things like gear, valor, justice (which also needs a new purpose in and of itself), charms, reputation, and maybe even various types of profession mats. Maybe LFR (and raiding in general) is our primary source of gearing/catching up, and heroics are our main source of valor, and scenarios give us justice and maybe some sort of profession mat (maybe motes/spirits of harmony as a common/guaranteed reward in the box at the end which can already be traded for other mats), and dailies just give us charms and rep. And then as long as none of them step on eachother's toes too much (like valor rewards would need to be removed or reduced to make 5-mans the main source), they all remain useful and separate. And then they could continue to add new 5-man content in different patches just as something new to do without worrying too much about having to give them better rewards (look at scenarios, the ones they added in 5.1 didn't give any better rewards than the 5.0 scenarios, they were just new content to break up the monoteny).

[Nagassh]

Warlock Fire quest has been done in gear as low as 470 - it's easier with higher gear (with 503ish gear I was able to kill him before the second felhunter phase), but it's doable in low gear as long as you execute the mechanics properly, it just takes longer.

One of the most enjoyable things I've done in a long time (even if my keyboard was in mortal peril after a 2% wipe).

[tawnos]

Yah on my rogue i've done t14 LFR every week and used a number of tokens on lei shei and empress - still don't have 4p t14 LFR. Haven't seen any huge increase in drop rate since 5.2 either.

I have always had a hard time with the claim that LFR queue time is largely insensitive to overall population - if this were the case there would not be significant systemic differences in queue times. Queueing on a tuesday night should not consistently produce a radically different queue time than e.g. queueing on a weekend morning/afternoon if the pool of players was sufficiently large to the point of only the class balance dictating queue times, but it does. This would tend to indicate that queue times are influenced at least to some extent by the total pool of players from which the raid is constructed and not just by role balance (unless there is some sort of systemic reason for role fluctuation). I don't know if that will cause problems as the population spread out across LFR but it certainly seems possible.

I very much doubt anyone has failed to practice the rotation on a dummy but 1 or even 10 times of running through a rotation for 15-20 minutes is not even close to the level of repetition required to really have the requisite muscle memory. LFR really provides a better way to practice (at least for dps). I use CLCinfo for pretty much all the dps specs i play - i just look at it as a somewhat better version of a toolbar placed in a centrally visible location that has an extra icon with a rotation suggestion. Slavishly following the rotation suggestion isn't really a thing despite what many people seem to think (or want to think i imagine).