I’m finally getting around to writing down my initial reaction to the various things that were announced in WoW panels on Friday and Saturday at Blizzcon. I haven’t even caught up on everyone’s discussions since then due to travelling (…travelling and XCOM expansion being released), but it seems to good to get these down first anyway. Basically my first impressions of everything in no particular order. The biggest part will be on raid changes since those are most interesting for me (well, and there are no detailed class changes yet).

Raid Changes

Putting aside the name changes (which, aside from surely causing constant terminological confusion for the next many months, aren’t too significant), and putting aside LFR (because it’s not raiding), there are still 3 raid difficulties. But we’re going from [easy (Flex), medium (10 or 25), hard (10 or 25)] to [easy (Flex), medium (Flex), and hard (20)]. Many takeaways from that.

• There’s no longer _any_ difficulty with two disjoint raid sizes. This is great. No more 10 vs. 25 issues. I don’t even want to rehash all the reasons that was a problem, except to the extent it comes up in the remaining points.
• There is no more hard-mode content with fewer than 20 people. Some will see this as a dubious accomplishment, but I’ve been arguing to do away with 10H for years. It has a lot to do with the problems I discussed in the above blog post: primarily, a game with 11 classes and 34 character types can’t be balanced cleanly around 10-player teams when you’re considering the razor’s-edge tuning of Heroic raiding. “10H WoW raiding” was simply a less great game than “25H WoW raiding.” Slightly less great, but less great. I know there are some of you out there with exactly 9 friends. What I’d want most for you is a game where the systems were made from the ground up to dovetail with 10-player content, rather than a 25- or 40-player game that was pared down as well as could be managed.
• Guilds can grow to 20 or 25. I think people will take some time to truly internalize this. We’re so used to saying “We’re a 10-person guild, how could we get to 25?” In Cataclysm and MoP, that was a valid question with no good answer. But now? The answer is that you invite people. You can! You’re so used to thinking that you can’t invite people (because there’s no “room” for them), but now you can. I know it sounds crazy, but you get from 10 to 20 by inviting people. You won’t be a 10-player guild in WoD, because there won’t be any such thing. You’ll be “a guild” and until/unless you’re raiding Mythics, you’re not pegged to any one size.
• Flexible normal-level mode raid tuning. I’d been skeptical of this–not because I thought it would be bad, but simply because I thought (in fact, I’m still quite confident) it’s very hard to do. But they’re only releasing it if they think they’ve got it working, and I’m looking forward to seeing it. One key piece of the puzzle is a new tech feature they briefly mentioned: boss abilities that target N people will no longer stairstep at certain raid sizes, but will, at intermediate sizes, have a pro rata % chance to target 1 extra person each time. This is a crucial bit of tech that allows boss difficulty scaling to be smooth enough to fit within the expected precision for “normal” tuning rather than “easy” tuning.

One thing I still feel isn’t totally answered: why 20 instead of 25? This post very nicely answers the question “why 20 instead of 15 or some other smaller number.” But, to be frank, I didn’t consider 15-player as the only raid size to be a serious option to begin with. People always touted it as a solution to the 10/25 problem, but I never saw how it was a solution at all. 15 would have been tantamount to giving up on “big” raiding. I mention this only because 20 is still too close to 10 or 15 for complete comfort. Even for important goals like ensuring 1 of every class, 25 is a much more comfortable number. Specifically, it’s more than 2x the number of classes, which feels like an important threshold. When you have only 1 of some classes, attendance fluctuation will often give you 0.

I press on this point because the only rationale I have heard people guess so far is that it’s a sort of compromise. Something like, there was a debate between 10 and 25, and if one side flat-out “won,” people would be upset. Or more subtly, it’s the middle ground fallacy: when two sides are debating strongly, the right answer feels like it should be between them. Anyway, I hope that’s not the reason, since it’s a pretty poor one. I don’t know what it is though. I can think of a few other really minor advantages. 10% of the raid is tanks instead of 8%, slightly better for role composition. Hypothetically two 10p groups could merge (I think this is a rare case). There’s some advantage to having the flex size cap out at something higher than the hardmode size so you can bring the whole guild on farm runs. None of these, to me, outweigh the potentially added robustness of the 25-man raid size.

Overall, I think the changes are huge net positive. I said on 6/6/2013, the day Flex was announced: “[It] will probably take some thinking to lay out a good array of raid modes to cover the various kinds of players efficiently. Just to throw out brainstorms, I think the most lightweight extreme would be to have only 2 modes: flex and 25H.” I thought that was just an idealistic example to make a point, but man, they landed pretty close to it.

Just to address the most common complaint about the changes (“what will my guild do?”). If your guild is made of the right stuff–players who want to play together and have generally similar goals in WoW–it will be fine. I’m not worried at all about 25H groups, who are only affected insofar as their recruitment officers get a break at the turn of this expansion (for once). I do understand the plight of 10H guilds. It’s not fun to be the person to has to make changes for the good of the game as a whole. I think the portion who quit will be vastly outnumbered by the portion who find that 20M is no less fun than what they’re currently doing.

One Free Level 90

I know, you’re thinking, “this is the next most important announcement?” To me it is. We live in a different gaming world that we did in 2004 and people’s expectations have changed. In a lot of ways, as a gamer, I heavily resist that–I am perennially nonplussed by microtransactions in any form, for example (and I will be by the inevitable WoW ones that are already appearing in more microtransaction-oriented regions). But one I’m fine with is that newcomers to a game need a smoother experience getting pulled into fun content at the outset without doing a lot of work (WoW needs better onboarding, as the f2p marketing types might say). Some people, or most people in fact, like leveling more than I do, but you’d be hard-pressed to convince me that it’s the best part of WoW.

The only rationale that people seem to give for the requirement of doing all that leveling is that you learn to play the game and play your class in the process (“enjoyable quest content” is not a reason to require players to do it before doing other kinds of content). But any game that required people to go through 100 levels (or the equivalent number of hours) of tutorialization would be a failure. You shouldn’t look at WoW’s new-player experience any differently. Similarly, no game that’s the 6th in a series makes you play the first 5 before being even allowed to play, especially not a multiplayer game where you want to play the 6th with your friends.

At first I thought it was a little odd that new players will level their first character in only 10 levels, but if you want to play another, you’ll have to do 100 levels and it will feel horribly ponderous. But it actually makes a lot of sense. In this game, you’re supposed to hit max level and then decide what types of content you like (this was a specific focus of MoP). If some of the content you like is “leveling,” that’s the time to do it, and alts are the way for you to experience that content.

Garrisons

Short because we’re still short on details (they listed a lot of things, but it’s really hard to put it all together until beta). I think that cosmetically, these look like WoW’s take on player housing–in fact they may have described it that way at one point. But WoW always said it never had a use for “player housing” as most people think of it, and I’m not sure that’s changed. The biggest role I’m seeing for garrisons is “something that makes you log in the next day (that’s not daily quests!).” That’s not what most people think of as “player housing.” It’s a giant version of the Halfhill farm (which I think they also said at some point). It’s another way that WoW is staying with the times–ever notice how every f2p game (like Hearthstone) has a thing making you want to log in at fixed intervals (often 1 day)? But WoW is really staying ahead of the times in that way, because it’s moving on from “do this quest every day to get your carrot” (which is tremendously boring) to “here’s a minigame where you sent a guy on a mission and as soon as you get home from work tomorrow you’re going to log in to see how it turned out.” It sounds infinitely better.

There are traditional player-housing features as well like trophies to show off to your friends. To be honest though, I don’t see the novelty of going to my friends’ houses lasting very long. Even if the customization is as rich as something like Animal Crossing, where people can do truly creative things with the vast array of options (I kind of doubt that it will be), they’ll just tweet their screenshots or whatever. This is probably why WoW never had player housing. It’s the minigame aspect of the Garrison that makes it worth doing. The biggest watershed in quitting any game, in my experience, is the first time a few days go by where you didn’t play or think of it–that’s when you find you’re mentally quit before you even realized it. Dailies were a way of making sure that didn’t happen, but they were so awful to actually do that it probably cut into their retentive effect. Building an entire minigame to leave you with goals that will take place at certain times in the future is a much better effort and I’m looking forward to seeing how it works.

Hit and Reforging

Plagiarizing myself again (lazier than typing). 4/26/2013:

“–Everyone has to hit 100% in PvE. Every single raider of a given class has their hit stat at exactly the same amount. The most telling part of this is that healing specs get 15% to hit. Literally the only effect of the hit stat on a piece of gear is to cause you to reforge to cancel it out.
–Reforging is not very interesting. You shuffle your worst secondary stat to your best. All it really does, other than manage the hit cap, is mute the difference between items with different secondary stats. That may have necessary when stats were less standardized, but now all it does is make gear choice less relevant. Also the little bit of free-from stat choice that it adds is completely redundant with the whole purpose of gems.

We have multiple systems now (the hit/miss attack roll and the hit stat, and the reforging system) whose sole purpose is ensuring that everyone hits everything 100% of the time. I want to argue that they’re all completely vestigial and should be gone next expansion. There are some obstacles, like the need to come up with a fourth DPS stat to replace it, but one thing at a time.”

So yeah, that happened. Unsurprisingly, I approve.

Tertiary Stats

Really neat, not an idea I’d ever even considered. To summarize:

1. Primary stats are always present in fixed value on items of a given slot/ilvl. There’s no player choice associated with them, but they mediate scaling. The increase in primary stat as you get better gear drowns out most other terms that would cause scaling imbalances.
2. Secondary stats affect your core min/maxy character ability, such as DPS or healing output. There’s player choice is figuring out which is best, but they tend to be a little one-dimensional (your spreadsheet tells you which to favor). They contribute to scaling and should be generally balanced. All items of a given slot/ilvl have comparable total secondary stats.
3. Tertiary stats don’t affect DPS and the like (“cleave” does a bit, consider than an open point for now). They don’t affect scaling or balance–your raid leader won’t view you as behind because you have less lifesteal or runspeed than someone else. It’s okay for comparable items in the same tier to have different amounts of tertiary stats (I believe many or most items will have 0, in fact).

Viewed this way, the third stat category makes a lot of sense. When thinking about how to work in e.g. runspeed as a stat, I kept getting stuck on how to balance it against DPS. An interesting debate by the way–normally players always favor DPS (in fact the whole MoP talent redesign was driven by that notion)–but there’s clearly a tipping point (a player who doesn’t use a runspeed enchant on their boots is bad). Anyway, a new category of “optional” stats is great.

As an aside, gems are being changed to an analogue of Thunderforged. It’s an extra bump to non-tertiary stats that you might roll up occasionally. Basically now there are two ways instead of one that an item can be little better than average, a socket or being Forged. So they really like the Forged idea since they’re doubling it, and even the whole tertiary stat concept is a variant of it.

I’m mildly surprised they’re doing away with (traditional) gems as well as reforging. Much of the thrust of my issues with reforging was being redundant with gems (free stat choice). Getting rid one of one mode of free stat adjustment felt like an obvious change to me, but not both. Still, I can’t say picking gems was very interesting, so I have no reason to complain.

—–

Okay, have to stop typing for now, I hit on the big design issues we know about. I didn’t touch on L100 talents, but it mostly would have been “a bunch of neat ideas, too early to worry about min/maxing them anyway.” I think doing in-depth into the L100 talents so far will be a good avenue for launching into thoughts on class changes (which we otherwise haven’t seen). But right now, reading them doesn’t let me infer anything big about what they’re doing with classes in WoD.

Let me know your thoughts.

Transmog has been a hit since it launched in Patch 4.3, and it seemed inevitable that armor would eventually find its way to the Blizzard Store, as it finally did last week.

My opinions have gone back and forth on the store helms over the past week. Initially I thought that adding more transmog flexibility was a great idea, then I balked at the prices announced on Tuesday. However, after seeing so many users enthusiastically upload detailed screenshots to Wowhead, I’m thinking that the items have a targeted niche, and I’m just not one of the people intended to  purchase these items.

I want to look at why these helm designs were possibly chosen, explain why I’m not the target audience, and suggest some potential Blizzard Store armor for the future.

Blizzard Store Helm Designs

Helms occupy an interesting place in transmog. It’s one of two slots players can hide, meaning that not everyone will utilize helm transmog in the first place. In addition, players are split between wanting a fantastically-themed helm that covers their faces, or one that leaves hairstyles and facial markings visible. Other times players get attached to a particular helm, such as how many leather-users are with the Cursed Vision of Sargeras.

For Blizzard to release helms people feel compelled to buy from the Blizzard Store, Blizzard’s designs have to fill a noticeable transmog void. With the option to hide helm graphics, new transmog options have to be pretty compelling.

Looking over Wowhead transmog set comments, these three new helms work very well on popular BoE sets that were missing matching helms. (Many vanilla BoE sets did not have matching helms and shoulders.) They also match popular tier sets for outspoken transmog classes–Death Knights and Paladins are very vocal, leaving many comments about matching accessories and weapons on their set pages.

The Crown of Eternal Winter is a blue crown that periodically glows and covers the user’s face with a skull. A bit too garish for my tastes, but it’s appealed to many players that are Death Knights or enjoy a frosty theme. Looking at the Blizzard preview images, two are of priest T6 and two images are of plate sets. The Wowhead submissions have overwhelmingly been plate sets–the T11 Magma Plated set has shown up at least five times, but Death Knight Tier 10, Tier 8, and Tier 13 has also shown up as well. The Magma Plated set may be especially popular because most of the set has lookalike items any plate user can farm up. There’s also some representation among frost mages, with Tier 3 and Tier 4 transmog, and rogues using old tier sets with blue and black accents.

A common theme in these screenshots is that wearing the Crown of Eternal Winter leaves the player’s face more exposed than the completely hooded helms intended for many of these sets. Creating a helm that both has a cool animation and leaves the user’s face exposed may win over some transmoggers who did not farm up a set’s bulky matching helm.

The helm also appeals to a subset of users who enjoy the appearance of frost resistance gear, which is an elite transmog look since there’s no way to learn recipes for these sets anymore (save for chests/boots and select duplicate quest rewards). I’ve noted in the past that the Naxxramas Plate set has a large number of comments for a set that’s nearly impossible to get, indicating players really like neon blue gear. This helm certainly fits that description, and the Crown’s page has submissions from users wearing full cloth, leather, and plate frost resistance gear–impressive that people have held onto those sets for years.

The Jewel of the Firelord, a set of fiery horns with golden glowing eyes, seems to appeal to Paladins, players using expensive BoE sets missing helms like Blood Knight Mail or Glorious Plate, and specs with natural affinities towards fire, like Fire Mages and Destro Warlocks. Paladins are one of the most vocal transmog classes–check out the comments on Judgement or Lightbringer pages. Many of their sets feature gold accents, and for players who dislike bulky plate helms, this works as  a lighter alternative.

Gold is also a very versatile color, as this fiery helm can both match sets that are primarily gold, as well as unrelated sets that simply have gold metallic accents. There’s even a few uploaded screenshots of completely bland gear with this fiery helm serving as the only colorful accent.

The user screenshots for this helm include a large number of mail sets, unlike the other two helms. The sets these match are generally expensive BoEs–Radiant, Masterwork, Magnificent, Glimmering Mail. The store helm seems to be building off of the popularity of Ragnaros’ Crown of Destruction serving as a fiery non-set conversation piece, except the color scheme is geared towards yellow instead of orange sets.

Similar to how frost mages used the Crown of Eternal Winter, there’s pictures of the Jewel of the Firelord using Warlock sets–Tier 10, Tier 6, and Tier 5–as well as Mage Tier 5. These sets also got accessorized with fiery spell effects in screenshots.

Another observation is that players really went out of their way to make creative screenshots for this helm, more so than the other two. Players have posed with fiery mounts, core hound pets, and Ragnaros and lava in the background. The Crown of Eternal Winter does have some Arthas-themed screenshots, but there’s less variation in the screenshot creativity.

The Hood of Hungering Darkness has noticeably less comments and submissions. Perhaps this is due to its face-hiding model, which doesn’t appeal to all players and too-closely resembles bulky helms already designed to match tier. The Blizzard Store images pair this helm with a Sunwell PvP set, cloth fire resistance, Warrior Tier 13, and Wrath questing plate. However, the plate sets already come with bulky helms, so this may look too similar to existing models. The cloth fire resistance set doesn’t really have a matching helm though, so perhaps it was hoped matching fire resistance gear would be as popular as the Crown was for matching frost resistance gear, and users do seem excited by my suggestion to pair this helm with the plate fire resistance set.

This helm overall may have slightly more limited use, but based on user submissions, it’s already been paired with both fire resistance gear and BoE transmog sets, both of which are missing helms.

Transmog: Not Like Other WoW Collections

This next part of the blog I originally wrote before analyzing the Wowhead screenshots above. After reflecting on it, I’ve modified this part slightly to get across that I’m probably not the targeted audience for these helms, not that the helms were poorly calculated–because based on user submissions, people are really enjoying them, both new players who just started transmogging, and older players that had expensive items and TCG tabards saved up.

For long-time collectors like myself, transmog is a new fun collecting game, but it’s different from typical WoW collecting in one important way–there’s no shared endpoint. You don’t collect transmog gear to add to a trackable collection total, like mounts or pets. Finishing a set is satisfying on your own creative terms, instead of comparing your progress to a measurable subset of achievements.

Even participating in the traditional collecting model for mounts, pets, and achievements, it’s easy to get choosier as time goes on. At this point, if someone gave me $100 and said I could only spend it on WoW mounts, I would prefer to spend it on a single TCG mount like the Ghastly Charger, instead of four Blizzard Store mounts at $25 each. My collection is at a point where I rotate between the rare mounts I have and don’t feel compelled to rush and acquire the “low-hanging fruit” mounts simply to increase my quantity. After so many years playing WoW, increasing my collection’s quantity isn’t compelling enough of a reason by itself. This is one reason why I’m not going to rush out and buy the three extra helms simply for additional transmog options.

For players who choose sets to compliment a particular meaningful item or express a RP character concept (beyond fire/frost specs), these helms probably won’t be an essential purchase. The BoA status on the helms is nice, but people who devote effort into transmogging all of their alts usually enjoy variation and get tired of the identical heirloom look.

Transmog gear is also one of the few things in WoW that can parallel real life a bit. While much of WoW is pure escapism, transmog is more realistic. Slaying dragons, riding dragons, summoning cute dragons as battle pets–none of that is happening in real life. Transmog is essentially a glorified shopping experience though, where you can buy as many clothes as you like, without having to worry about economics, body image, annoying magazines, or trends.

With transmog, your character’s persona is literally their costume. It’s both addictive and freeing to know that you’re still being judged on your appearance, but you’re completely in control of it in Azeroth. Paying money for helms throws a bit of a wrench in this–it’s not a huge issue with three helms, but if there were a wider variety of high-quality store helms available, people may feel their creativity tread upon.

While I quickly shelled out $25 for the Celestial Steed since it was a fantastical mount, spending $15 on an in-game hat reminds me, as a fashion enthusiast, that I could spend that money towards an actual real-life accessory I’d get much more use out of. And when I think about $45 for three hats vs some dresses on sale…it’s not a hard choice at all.

Potential Future Store Items

To potentially get more collectors like me engaged with in-game armor, I think selling tabards would be a good development. While tabards did get some gorgeous artwork in Mists of Pandaria, they’re mostly tied to reputation grinds not every player wants to do, like the August Celestials Tabard. There are fewer tabards than there are helms currently: 108 tabards to over 3700 helms. There’s a far greater likelihood that fashion-conscious players are lacking a perfect tabard than they are a helm.

There are currently some luxury tabards like Tabard of Frost, which was discontinued some years ago when the WoW TCG underwent some changes. These items are very expensive, as no new loot codes are being generated, and they are also BoP, so old-time players can’t transfer this tabard to new characters. Adding artistic BoA tabards could have a potential market, as there are so few tabard options, both in-game and via the TCG.

Players have demonstrated they’ve cared about in-game tabards as well. The Tabard of the Scarlet Crusade has over 300 comments, and many player were sad to see it temporarily vanish when the Scarlet instances were revamped in Mists of Pandaria. Playing back in vanilla, it was always exciting to see it drop, and finally getting enough good gear to solo the instance at 60 for the tabard was a big deal. The tabard had a pretty basic design, but players liked it since dungeon tabards were novel and it had cool lore behind it.

The Tabard of the Lightbringer has always been one of the most sought-after rewards from Shadowmourne, currently averaging 150,000g on the AH. It’s dear to many players, especially Paladins, who love that it looks like the Tabard of the Silver Hand. It also has a special Use effect–it encases the player in glowing light.

Very few tabards have on use affects, and even fewer have on use vanity effects, so if Blizzard Store tabards could be both BoA and include special effects, that would be amazing. Relating the tabards to lore would be a good hook–in addition to the two lore-base tabards mentioned above, the Illidari tabards are also very popular, which are from a lore-filled questline.

I personally might be tempted to buy some demon-hunter themed accessories if the Blizzard Store eventually offered them. This may seem too much of a niche, but the TCG has a good number of Illidan-themed items (Path of Illidan, Demon Hunter’s Aspect, Dark Portal Hearthstone, etc) and Blizzard has plans to sell more vanity items in the future like the Seesaw and Iron Hitching Post. In the meantime, it appears the helms have been encouraging users to transmog more, in spite of my early worries.

A collaborative essay by Hamlet and Perculia.

Tuesday night. Like many others, you queued for LFR because you were Looking For a Raid. The question we want to explore here is, is what you found actually a raid?

We know what you’re after when you queue up. It’s not so much a raid, per se, that’s on the forefront of your mind. It’s that you’ll win an epic. Yes, the odds are low (you’re not even totally sure what they are), but maybe this will be the week. Maybe your item is from the final boss, so your hopes are prolonged further before being dashed by a bag of gold. Yes, that bag of gold you bitterly accept, but you’d almost rather throw it away in protest. Preferably at someone’s head. But since WoW doesn’t let you do that, you dutifully click on it and add the gold to your inventory. Nobody will ever know anyway. You’re never going to see these people again.

If ever, in that moment, you wished you hadn’t come to LFR, you’ve already begun to understand what we’re telling you today.

This is at first blush a piece about LFR. But what it’s really about is raiding, and the things that make raiding a unique gaming experience. LFR demonstrates what remains when you strip the element of human interaction away: a shell that resembles raiding only superficially. Through the case study of LFR, we hope to remind you of what raiding is about, why you got started doing it, and why so many people love it.

There is one exception that runs throughout all of our comments. The people who make a group with friends and run LFR because they can’t raid Normal for whatever reason (group size, cross-realm, skill level, scheduling, or maybe they’re also raiding Normal but still doing LFR for gear). This is the exception that proves the rule. Because they’re using the “LFR” system as a workaround for logistical or other issues, not because they need to Look For a Raid. As will be discussed below, these people are the target audience for Flex raiding, which is better suited to their social raiding needs and will hopefully replace LFR for them. Our primary focus is the player who doggedly runs LFR outside the context of an already-established raid group. It is to these people that we send the message: don’t.

Background: The Better Part of Valor

LFR was introduced in Patch 4.3, but its genesis can be traced back to the Dungeon Finder, which was so very appealing to everyone (ourselves included), when it first appeared. The obvious reason for this was that it cut down on time spent queueing for a 5-player dungeon. But even this is a bit idealistic.

The system came in when 5-mans Heroics began to award Emblems of Frost (Tier 9 equivalent of Valor Points). This was the moment the now-familiar daily Heroic became a new chore for each raider, and the predominant sentiment was that anything which could get it out of the way faster was welcome. At that time, Emblems did not have a weekly cap, and moreover they were required for tier gear. So it’s fair to point out at the outset that for many players, the Dungeon Finder was merely a spoonful of sugar that helped make it tolerable to swallow the newly prescribed medicine of enforced time in 5-mans every day.

Specifically, LFD allowed players to easily run dungeons without having to wait around for guildmates, or be one of the unlucky DPS that didn’t nab a guild tank and healer. But soon a narrative began to emerge. To put it simply, people discovered with shocking regularity that their Blizzard-appointed dungeon compatriots were not providing the sort of PvE group experience they were used to. LFD horror stories became a common source of amusement and commiseration in raiding circles.

The tradeoff presented was subtle and was easy to ignore: click a button to queue and you get into your dungeon faster, only to languish in a slow-moving and impersonal clear. Did the downside seem really important at the time? We’re willing to admit that to us it didn’t. Getting those 2 Emblems without having to entreat, beg, or blackmail a guild tank was a powerful motivator indeed. But we wish we could tell our past selves that this path was treacherous, and once you set out on it, it is very easy to lose your way.

At first they seemed innocent, largely a supplement to guild runs in raid groups. The tide really turned in Cataclysm, where suddenly players found themselves turning to LFD as fresh 85s, too impatient to wait for their friends to level up. New talents seemed miserable, dungeons appeared overtuned, and everyone attributed their bad performance to their weak gear. Adding the Satchel of Exotic Mysteries in 4.1 made queuing up more appealing for tanks and healers in theory, but in reality, it ushered in a new wave of horror stories of clueless players in unacceptable gear simply taking on an in-demand role to “earn” a bag with a mount inside. And we still put up with it, since we believed obtaining rewards from LFD were the best way to improve our characters on a daily basis.

We might have seen the fundamental problem sooner. The increasing prevalence of antisocial behavior should have alerted us: the dungeon grouping experience was no longer about people. We needed LFD because we were committed to doing bland content we didn’t want to be doing in the first place. Out of this environment arose LFR in Patch 4.3.

LFR: Bread and Circuses

Many players believe that weekly LFR is a necessary, if unpleasant, undertaking, because it provides essential upgrades and a hefty chunk of Valor. Your WoW experience will be much more interesting and multifaceted when you free yourself from this idea.

LFR’s intentions may have been to draw people into raiding and whet their appetites for more challenges when it was introduced in Dragon Soul. In its current state, LFR is primarily a place where people hope to get Valor Points and gear upgrades without much thought, often walking away empty-handed and frustrated. At the start of Mists, LFR was unfortunately one of the more attractive ways to gain Valor Points and epics (much easier than gated reputation grinds). Initially they provided even more Valor than Normal raids, which was frankly a sign that something had gone terribly wrong. Later Mists patches have continually added more varied and better ways to accomplish these goals.

LFR’s 90 Valor may look appealing at first glance, but there is more to WoW (and, we daresay, to life) than choosing the activity with the highest number of Valor Points. While acquisition of gear is the most visible carrot, through most of WoW’s life the desire to acquire gear sneakily draw you into activities (like raiding) that would help you progress on many important axes: character stats, player skill, and people to play with. LFR, unfortunately, provides them in the reverse order of importance: it gives you gear easily, but does little to nothing to exercise your WoW skills, and its ability to connect you to a stable play group is virtually nonexistent (seemingly by design).

Even insofar as your goal is improving your WoW performance, you can do better than dutifully capping VP every week for gear upgrades. By choosing to acquire Valor from a Heroic Scenario, a Challenge Mode, or even a Barrens weekly, you’ll be testing your character’s skill and improving their performance in ways LFR never could. You’ll also be playing with people, either friends or potential new friends, who will provide the necessary social foundation for any future non-LFR activities. Obsessing over VP and your epic upgrades is a lazy way to view character improvement. Take an active role in your character’s performance instead of attributing it to their LFR loot luck and ilvl.

And with Challenge Modes, the new Proving Grounds (we expect), and Battlegrounds scaling down all gear, there’s more and more content where you can see what the game is like when your gear crutch is temporarily stripped away. These types of content reverse the priorities from LFR: players can simply focus on playing well and coordinating with others to succeed, and they are rewarded with increased ability to play and coordinate rather than with gear. While we don’t expect (or desire) for most WoW content to neutralize gear in this way, the existence of these few helps balance out the influence of LFR.

At some point each week you return to raiding, the activity that puts everything together—skill, gear, and social. So when you engage in WoW pursuits that are heavily motivated by a desire to support your raiding, you’re better off choosing modes of preparation that help you on all of those fronts, rather than the one which gives gear and VP but has no other redeeming quality.

Friendship is Magic

LFR makes a promise that’s almost mystical in its ability to redefine a person’s entire relationship with WoW: a lifetime supply of epics. With no strings attached.

You don’t have to log in and send your guild leader a tell at 8PM Eastern (7PM server time). You don’t have to whisper someone in trade chat “need a Rogue?”. You don’t have to link any achievements to anyone or have them complain about your ilvl. You don’t have to bring consumables. You don’t have to know the boss abilities (moving boss information from the internet to the Dungeon Journal was nice but still, who wants to read all that?). No required addons, no officer taking attendance. You don’t have to spend 4 hours on Vent with that guy whose voice annoys you. Your gear doesn’t have to be gemmed or enchanted impeccably. Your gear doesn’t have to be gemmed or enchanted at all. You don’t find out at start time whether you have to sit out. You don’t have less DKP than your class partner. You’re not alt-tabbing after a wipe to try to make sense of someone’s MSPaint diagram. In short: for better or worse, you never have to see any of these people again.

It is the Tyler Durden single-serving friendship, the one-night stand of WoW. Nobody is going to call you the next day.

But maybe at times, after finishing an LFR, you’ve felt a little unsatisfied. You’re thinking mostly about the stupid tank who pulled Lei Shen into the wrong quadrant, and above all, about the 12 bags of 28 gold in your inventory. You feel some sense of accomplishment that you got up to 1000 VP as planned and therefore are a Good Raider.

Or is what you feel actually feel a sense of … relief? If you’re trying to figure out why, after spending your evening playing your favorite game World of Warcraft, a certain part of you wishes you could have the evening back, we suggest the answer lies somewhere other than the wipes or the gold or the VP. We suggest you look back above and wonder whether, in the absence of all those “burdens,” you had no earthly reason to care about what was happening in the raid you were participating in, or the people you were playing with.

And this is the essence of what we want to convey here. Raiding is the experience of sharing both defeat and victory with 24 or 9 other people (or soon, any number in between; we’re not picky here). Raiding should not be a painless experience devoid of emotion—killing a boss you’re proud of takes wipes, reworking strategies, and perhaps arguments. Minor annoyances from past raids, once irritating, now take on a strangely nostalgic quality as we reminisce over the planning and challenges that went into each victory.

The payoff is staying up chatting on Vent because you can’t sleep because of the excitement of the kill. Logging into WoW and finding your friends waiting for you. Keeping up with your old guild members and still seeing them around in chat after real life has pulled them away from their raiding schedule. Finding out that the new recruit watches the same TV show you do. Other people being happy when you got an upgrade. Having people help you go to old raids for vanity items. Being excited months in advance for the guild meetup at Blizzcon. And all the rest. If you’ve ever raided, we don’t have to explain. So why did you endure those annoyances we mentioned? Because you knew what they bought you: the real treasures of raiding. Which, and we cannot stress this enough, are not purple.

So every time you queue for LFR, well, we have no doubt that you were indeed Looking For a Raid. But, to answer the question we posed at the beginning: no, you didn’t find one.

/Flex

Flexible Raiding is a new raiding mode that allows cross-realm groups (pre-made only) of any size from 10 to 25 to do raid content that scales to match the group size. It’s designed largely for pre-existing groups of friends, but will be quite amenable to pickup groups (the difficulty is below that of Normal raiding), so long as the players organize the group themselves. It encourages new players to try out raiding in a friendly setting, and gives seasoned raiders a relaxing group activity to do with friends. Flex is a way to fill gear gaps, without being a real threat to the value of Normal or Heroic drops. It allows players to experience fights first-hand with their friends (versions of the fights that will have all the abilities, we expect) without worrying about rigid roster requirements or splitting up loot.

A telling difference between LFR and Flex raiding is the requirement to join. LFR requires players to have gear above a certain ilvl, as a way to exclude dead weight from the group (a goal which is emphatically not accomplished by the requirement, we might add). Flex raiding in contrast has no such ilvl requirement. You’re in the raid because your friends wanted to take you along and thought you’d meaningfully contribute, or that they could teach or carry you. This encapsulates the reason why LFR and Flex, so superficially similar, are such polar opposites in our minds. Even for those without a ready-made group of friends, the only requirement for Flex is a tiny modicum of human interaction to join the group (a low bar—we all know how tradechat pugs are formed).

Social interactions are mandatory for Flex raiding. While LFR may have been intended to recreate the raiding experience, without social interactions it only emphasized winning gear for minimal effort. As Flex Raids require you to be among friends (or at the very least, people who are willing to continue playing with you), it raises the bar for good behavior and taking responsibility for your actions. This in turn makes players put effort into fights since the raid team doesn’t consist of 24 anonymous annoyed players they’ll never meet again. It rekindles a spirit of teamwork, which withers in LFR’s loot-fueled atmosphere. You care if one of your fellow teammates moves out of the fire and will try to help them learn to do so. Largely because, in this mode, the fire might actually kill them.

Even the rewards from Flex are better, and not just because of their ilvl. Flex raiding will award achievements, mounts, and items that can’t be obtained in LFR. But more importantly, while raiding may reward players with powerful gear, it’s meaningful only to the extent that you feel you earned it. LFR epics may be a higher ilvl than epics from the previous tier, but nobody is proud of them. If you fail at a boss, you get comically buffed; when the boss dies, loot is automatically passed out and players often drop group if they need nothing else from the instance. Epics held power in past expansions because of the memories and challenge associated with their acquisition—wearing gear from LFR just shows you have a lot of patience, some luck, and a block of free time.

Flex accomplishes every valid purpose that LFR did have, without undermining the entire concept of raiding in such a fundamental way. Our criticisms of LFR have certainly existed for a long time, but the introduction of Flex makes things much simpler. This is what a casual raid should look like.

Conclusion: You Have to Tell Everybody

“And now you know what you’ve been missing. There was a world once, you punk.
I was there. I can prove it.”

Does the advent of a new mode of raiding sound the death knell of LFR? The smart money is on “no”. There will even be some uses that don’t especially bother us, such as the avid lore/art fan who prefers a single LFR trip over Youtube. We don’t need to be dogmatic about wiping LFR from the face of Azeroth, but we can be concerned about its influence on the raiding culture. We can hope that people reading this think twice about LFR and its unique ability to turn a much-loved gaming experience into one of drudgery.

There are a lot of reasons we play WoW. A lot of things that motivate us. Nobody will deny that the prospect of acquiring new in-game items is an omnipresent driving force that shapes people’s activities throughout the entire game. But the moment it’s simplified down to the bare desire to acquire gear with no particular thought as to what you’re doing to get it, why you want it, or with whom you’ll be using it, you should stop and consider what you are doing.

Our not-so-secret hope is that, if nobody remembers anything anything else from this essay, the “don’t pug” movement will capture people. It’s what this whole post is trying to get at. Yes, LFR the difficulty level is one issue, but LFR the ethos—the ethos of WoW being about valor points and ilvls instead of about playing with other people—is the bigger one. And we urge you to let it go.

This essay was for people who enjoy, or are interested in, raiding in WoW. To remind you why you’ve done it, possibly for years. To help you find the way to keep enjoying it has you have before. If you haven’t, to give you an inkling of why you should. If you’ve only ever done solo LFR, while we mean no disrespect at all, you’ve never raided. But we sincerely hope you try. This is in fact one of our chief objectives.

But to all of the people above, take the message to heart. Your time spent raiding is worth as much as your relationships with the people you spend it with. No less, and no more. And spread the word.

Tell everybody. Listen to me. You’ve gotta tell ’em:

WoW Raiding … is made out of people.