I welcomed LFR. I wrote how can you keep it stupidity in bay during running LFR. But it seems we are losing this feature to the mindless ones. We went with 10 people. 3 of us healers. I was a bit worried that Anfini just dinged 85 and cheated the ilvl with crafted blue PvP gear. I mean I assumed we can carry him but I wasn't happy about it. At Ultraxion we almost wiped. I checked healing done to whisper it to him and ask to step out as we have problems with him. I saw this:
I already votekicked one punk for being on /follow during trash. I kicked these 3 and then 2 more DD for being way below the tank (2 others were below the tank too, but not too much). So I have only 1 kick left for the rest of the run. We killed DW, but with every possible nonsense. Warmaster at 10% when Goriona finally left? Check! 3 Hideous amalgamations at once? Check! Pulling DW before the spine loot is distributed? Check! Elementium bolts hit when Nozdormu still up? Check! Guy happily DPSing limb on wrong platform until AoE kills him? Check! 3 Elementium terrors? Almost check, last died 10 secs before new ones while the people happily DPSing DW. Every possible cooldowns were used to keep the raid alive. This raid was really on the edge, and we had 10 guildies.
The problem is fundamental: less and less good players need LFR gear while more and more M&S get enough ilvl to queue in. It's only a matter of time before LFR becomes unusable. However you can always offset it by collecting people and go with a pre-made. Just don't look for ilvl! A blue PvP geared guy is literally much better than a high ilvl M&S who couldn't hit the lake from the bottom of it.
31 comments:
I've yet to experience a LFR run that was that bad. It seems inevitable that they'll devolve into a terrible ghetto though; as you said, all the "good" players will stop needing loot soon (and may already have done so.)
Premades may be the way to go for any future alts.
I'm sure LFR will never become too terribly bad, after all, the good players will still want to cap their valor points. I do however fear that it will devolve to near LFD levels of incompetence, forcing Blizzard to nerf the nerfed.
Wont happen. Blizz make the underpreformers get higher prio on gear, as that's why they're under-preforming...
I know I'm already at the point where I won't be doing LFR on my character that is in a regular progression raid, as the only possible upgrades (trinkets and maybe DW weapons) aren't even close to being worth the hassle.
I'm not even into hard modes yet, so I imagine more progressed guilds stopped LFR running weeks ago.
The fundamental problem for a lot of people being horrible, is that they don't have a clue what they are doing. They literally do not know most of the basics about playing their class and role. E.g. healer shammies in enhancement gear as one example. Usually the first warning sign is that they are ungemmed and unenchanted.
While I haven't been on any runs that compare to your example, I have seen enough to know it's going to get really bad soon, followed by blizz nerfs to already easy content.
It was quite a fun run though.
Our DPS got to top the charts, our healers got to top the charts and our 2 tanks? Top damage taken, but the LFRetards were quite close. Impressive if you think about all the impale damage we took.
The best part was when the LFRetards raged at Gevlon for kicking healers. Once we pointed out we brought the tanks, the top DPS and the top half of the healing team they 'switched sides' and agreed to kick the m&s real quick.
It's all a vicious circle downwards. The problem isn't in the LFR, it's just witnessed there. The problem manifests throughout the rest of the game where 'teaching' is a concept that Blizzard have increasingly done away with. Can you help it if a feature just dumps 9 randoms + you in a situation expecting to make progress and obtain a positive outcome?
I scoffed at the LFR idea from the get-go for this reason. While it might be a romantic view of having everything even more accessible to everyone, the reality of the situation is the root of all Blizzard's gameplay problems. They do not rest in the numbers, the other people: but in the proper breeding of the individual themselves.
@Anonymous: you can cap out valor easier in LFD. Even if you are alone, you can run 2 LFD faster than an LFR.
On a hare brained whim, I geared my Shammy alt for max spirit, knowing I would loose throughput, so that I could act as mana battery. I figured if I'm going to be a newb again, I'd be fool-proof useful in at least one way. I didn't expect to top healing charts in LFR, but I did. I still have Rainsong equipped!
I really do ascribe to the viewpoint that gear doesn't matter very much at all, but I believe there's a bit of a contradiction in thought there. Better players will gain greater benefit from gear upgrades, lending some mental weight to the "Better gear, better performance" concept. It's a sneaky thought.
The Destingtion is a fine line. The geared M&S you'd kick after a Bossfight for just being terrible. The freshly dinged Player would probably be kicked too as he weares PvP Gear to a raid (i.e go do LFD at least).
I always had a Problem with that because to determin if those Players are trash or capable just with crap gear, I had to interact with them. Maybe ask a raid/encounter/class specific question to see if they are at least a bit capable (my favorite: "What do you have bound to the S Key?") or check their armory.
You seem surprised. Before it even debuted on live many people whom I knew were calling it Looking for Retards. And it is exactly that. It's decent people wanting easy tier looking for retards to hopefully not carry to loot. Never seems to work that way though.
It has always been like this in WoW with pretty much every tier and every type of content. When I first dinged 85, all heroic mode groups I had tackled the challenges, improved with every wipe and did good dps. Most runs didn't wipe at all. About a week or two later, it simply became impossible to find any group like that with the LFG-Tool.
The same experience if you try to pug normals or heroic modes on an alt. You'll find that the people doing so from day one of new content will do so fairly well. One month later when everyone else starts trying as well, nearly every run fails miserably.
Wrt the screenshot: the healing buffs on this fight make it impossible to compare healer output and there isn't actually much to heal until the 2nd set of buffs, and most of that will be handled by the ones with the buffs. A 333 PvP geared healer taking a buff away from someone else is what I'd be worried about.
There is only one way I accept to do LFR, and that is with at least a 20 man premade. We would ask the pugged players to leave since we are able to easily clear in 20 and we can distribute the loot in a controlled way.
We are a 25 man guild so we can do that easily but also 10 man guilds have the option to form a group with another 10 man.
Some of my guildmates at first thought I was overboard with my stance. A couple ridiculous pug runs as you describe made them understand very quickly the value of this approach.
I did my first LFR last Friday and it was mainly to test my new graphics card.
What I found was similar although not quite as bad as the experience you recounted. Having done these encounters in the guild it seemed to me that these were little more than animated training dummies.
The children are home from school for the holidays so I assumed that's why they're so bad. But I won't be rushing to do another one, well not unless I have some other hardware/software/setup to stress test.
You know there's something wrong when you think "their dps is below the tank, but not by much" is a positive thing.
LFR is a waste of resources, it breaks the rule you posted in a blog post some weeks ago: "The developers should make content that brings players that respect eachother together"
There were two main prongs to the devs' initial design of Cataclysm to make the game more fun via challenge:
(1) Making the instances harder,
(2) Making it more challenging to get good performance out of characters' abilities by increasing the complexity of "rotations".
They've backtracked on (1), but not yet on (2). (2) causes the spread in performance of goods vs. bads to be higher than it was.
I expect they will simplify dps rotations again.
With priest one should also look at damage prevented. I fucking love it how other classes tell me how much better they heal but always ignore the ammount of damage i prevented with shields.
I've done LFR every week with two chars and in the beginning I thought it not possible, but it is: you can have not enough damage in the raid.
This week with my twink we wiped 4 times on madness because the blistering tentacles were not killed fast enough. There was enough shouting and calm explanations in raidchat, I'm pretty sure noone can be this stubborn not to switch targets after 4 wipes. We only barely did it after a couple guys left and finally 5 players with decent dps were in the raid.
After that raid "sunk cost fallacy" entered my mind, next time I'll just leave after the second wipe. I was in the raid since Ultra and didn't want to do the 3 encounters again, although that would have been faster.
I will not do another LFR when I get a new trinket. I see LFR madness being nerfed in a month or so.
Best bet for a successful LFR run is to do it as soon as points reset, as decent players seem to all queue to get it over with.
Of course, when M&S realize this, then they will also starting queuing to get carried at the beginning.
from Ultraxion health => 10 normal DPSers are needed
from Ultraxion damage done => 4 normal healers are needed (last one can be terrible)
@first anon:
Lucky you, i ve had a few as bad or worse then that.
@anon 13:24
Recount adds the shields to the healing done, do not double count that, although a disc will always have less healing done then a holy, thats just how it is, although i prefer, both playing one and having.one healing.me,
@gevlon
lol, were you really going to kick a guildie from something that is nothing then a huge carry for tards?
@priest anon
Do you even play this game?
Absorbs are counted in recount healing for more than 1 year now, don't be a smart ass.
I haven't read through the comments but I've found that running LFR on Tuesdays and Wednesdays to be a faster and easier experience than later on in the week.
Also don't underestimate the amount of alts running through here; I've got 3 of em myself every week.
Healing meters are always a bit silly in LFR because on many fights so little healing is needed - even if players are idiots and stand in things. Last night I had a shadow priest pop in as the 6th healer and spend the whole gunship fight in shadow form. It was fine because she topped the dps meter :)
What LFR is missing is the teaching element. You can do Ultraxion every week and never realise that you're supposed to press the button because healers can just heal you up. The game needs to hit the M&S where it hurts. It can't be loot, because that would be open to griefing (hunter MDs boss to the enhance shaman so he dies and does not compete for drops).
No, you have to hit them in the fun. For example, on LFR Hour of Twilight should apply a 15s un-removable stun if not avoided. Doing nothing is not fun. People will learn quickly with a mechanic like this.
Well, I have seen some terrible healers as well in LFR. Both disc and holy are excellent healers in 25m Ultraxion. You do realize you don't need 6 healers in LFR to heal anything, right? I have queued tons of times as healer on my priest, then sticking to shadow. I may win a healing trinket for my off spec this way. I don't need anything for my main spec. Plus, quicker queue.
If you take red it almost doesn't matter how bad geared player you are, or how skilled you are. You will be top healer. It is a very strong buff, and you will also have the buff longest. You can also cheat by taking another buff after red (blue, for example). Especially since there may be a healer who does not take crystal.
Still, Ultraxion is a bad example. I really don't care what the meters say there: it means little to nothing. What matters is do people stay alive. If you wipe, it is either too low DPS or too many people don't follow tactic + perhaps healer not skilled enough. So if you have trouble healing Ultraxion in LFR it is because your M&S randoms are standing outside. Or because they think the 1,5 sec they cannot DPS is more important than evading the damage. Which might be true, but is annoying from healer POV. In normal and heroic different story.
Healing alone means nothing, and you should have absorbs included in recount. The overhealing done would also be interesting. Another fight where healing done means nothing is Spine. Luckily, some addons notice the overhealing done on the debuff.
Heroics and Madness is where healing matters. Even in LFR you need a few average healers. All other fights if people die it is almost never the healer's fault. It is fault of people taking unnecessary damage. So as healer you have a boring task, and sometimes can do some great saves and performance. Also note that, as always, the worse your damage dealers are, the more healing is required.
People not nuking bolt, people not single targetting blistering, people not spreading for tentacle. It is horrible and leads to wipe in normal and heroic, but in LFR you can just heal through it. The solution? Indeed, make them suffer in an other way. Like professor putricide heroic: there goes your hit rating! Loved it.
I have 5 toons that I do LFR on. A bit insanely, I have done every possible LFR on all of them since the first week it opened.
From my anecdotal experience, the quality of LFR players have deteriorated steadily since the first 2 weeks. The last few I did over the new year weekend was horrendous.
On the DW encounter, people didn't kill bloods, which followed the group to subsequent platforms, didn't kill bolts and did dismal DPS. A few of us were commenting that the longer LFR has been out, the more difficult it has become.
The meta gaming is working perfect for me for LFR so far. You need to do LFR Wednesday preferably. More you delay more you get worse scenarios, being a real nightmare on weekend and followed Monday and Tuesday. I have seen it before in troll heroics grind.
Keep in mind that in LFR:
Some lazy fucks just AFK.
Some people just don't know the fight mechanics. Despite the fact that you may/may not have killed Deathwing every week since release, there are still people who haven't done this raid.
Some people are just "bad" players.
LFR was made for "bads". If you're going to cry about it...stick to Normal or Heroic with your guild. Do you ever say anything positive about this game? Every time somebody links me a blog you post, it can be summarized in two characters: QQ
I will be glad when the l337ist complainers stop running LFR. I'm a competent player, but lack the time to raid on a schedule. I will gladly wipe a few times on content that I never got to see before because it was gated by you guys demanding to see my "cheevo".
Yes, it will get harder (more challenging) when the players face rolling and ignoring mechanics move on. Then I can play without having to read the constant bitching about.
But, unfortunately, none of you will really move on, will you? You'll continue to use a brilliant tool, designed for players like me, and continue to bitch and moan, and only offer help such as "come on 'tards, it's so EASY!"
"Then I can play without having to read the constant bitching about."
I value my time. I have done the instance various times. For me it is a joke (even on normal) no matter on what character I'd come, even if I am undergeared I'd do better DPS than many others.
Tossers are too lazy and dumb to read the dungeon journal. Or watch a video. Or enchant/gem/forge their gear.
There is almost nothing which one-shots you with the exception of tank. Easy solution: new to an instance? No problem. Queue DPS or healer. Don't queue as tank when you never did the instance before. Tanking is about positioning, knowing what spawns where, heck even knowing the trash mechanics (no video or dungeon journal explains you this).
This is frustrating, and why I evade LFR now unless it is wednesday or thursday. After that you will not find me there anymore.
In normal and heroic raid I'd be good with some wiping and bitching.
Eventually, people like me don't need VP anymore and don't need LFR gear either. You will only see us boosting guildies/friends in LFR then (which for me will mean you probably won't see me) which is both a performance loss (you miss a DPS/healer who follows tactics, is overgeared, performs, able to lead/help leader) and sometimes a blessing since you won't hear the bitching. I talk for myself here, but I don't doubt there are more like me out there. People who have been carrying tossers in LFR, and who won't do that anymore.
> Is it possible to do so low without being mentally retarded (in the medical sense)?
Possible. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MYn5GySB4fA
I thank the OP for this article. It is the exact reason I no longer play hi end PVE anymore.
I play PvP though, with a friend and my son in arena and of course the daily BG's.
I simply can't stand the false elitism anymore. The "noob comments", the kicking, the remarks and that DREADFUL tool of recount that simply means shit for healing.
I can top all healing charts and STILL be the worst healer of my group. If you can't understand it, it shows a lot.
It must be great grouping with the OP, certainly from the standpoint of those people that try to enjoy a great game and get kicked in the butt by some no lifers.
I'll do my dungeon crawling in D3 with my RL friends, ty, no more Wow pve for me anymore.
Btw, any decently rated pvp player knows his class better than most pve raiders.
OP, never act upon people like that. Period.
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