Flexible Raid System / New 5.4 Feature!

07/06/2013 11:31Posted by Valkaria

We just made tech which could made life of 25-men a lot easier. Let's give it to LFR folks. -.-

This isn’t for LFR folks, it’s for Normal folks (ahem... you know what I mean) that were going into LFR and weren’t having an enjoyable raiding experience or that just wanted an easy way to play with friends and family without spending too much time organizing it.
These players would go to LFR only for gear, not for the experience, and that’s not really what we want to see happening.

I’m hoping that players who are looking for more challenging content, but have no time to get into the usual guild raiding schedules, will start to switch from LFR to Flexible Raids.
Highly skilled players with heavy time constraints have always felt a bit left out from MMORPGs, but maybe there are ways we can deal with that.
Ideally, skill should be equally or even better rewarded than time, but there needs to be a balance between the two, we can’t provide 30 minutes of insanely difficult content with the best rewards that only 0.001% of the player base would be able reach, but we also can’t do the opposite and make rewards exclusively and directly proportional with time spent. Skill needs to enter into the equation and needs to have a pretty strong weight.

LFR still has its own place, some players are quite content with it, some have no intention of going any further than LFR in terms of raiding and are happy with the experience it provides. We’re just trying to provide content for everyone to enjoy.

This is just a preview, 5.4 isn’t even on the PTR yet, many things can still change. This is also part of the reason why we’re sharing this information with you all; the feedback we get will help us to better shape our next major content patch. I've already seen quite a few interesting and unexpected arguments in this thread and we'll share them with the devs, so keep it up! ;)

07/06/2013 07:23Posted by Etrayu

With a new raid lockout things will indeed change (not for everyone, of course). If you want to stay ahead and on the top of your game, you'd want to run both the 5.4 LFR and LFR+ since they most likely will wield upgrades, whether it be because you want to mixmax for your normal/heroic raid progress or because you want to see your character evolve.

That’s a good point, I believe that a few players might do that for a little while, but I would like to point out that the unlocking of Flexible Raids and LFR are very similar but on different timetables, this will probably mean that normal and heroic will open first, then FR and then LFR.
So by the time LFR opens, chances are, there won’t be that many upgrades left for let’s say, a fully heroic equipped 5.3 raider, which is the typical player that usually tries to get upgrades wherever and whenever possible.

This is exactly what our social guild needed!

As such we are recruiting for more to come and join our family on Draenor!

Good luck! Hopefully this will also help to improve the whole lack of social interaction that some social guilds might face due to currently raiding LFR.
Players will be able to raid together more easily and maybe fill those occasional last 2 spots through trade chat, possibly even helping to find some cool new members for the guild along the way.

07/06/2013 09:49Posted by Itharius

Anyone know if this is cross realm or not, because I couldn't find anything about it?

Yes, you’ll be able to invite Real-ID or Battle.net friends cross-realm.

I think it's an amazing idea, but I would like to see it 8-25 or 5-25 if possible + make the loot the same ilvl as normal and make flexi and normal share the lockout, or even replace the whole normal with 8-25 mode.
If there are 11-12 one night, the guild has to decide to do the low ilvl with all players, or do the high ilvl but 1-2 are left out.. and i'm almost positive they will choose the higher ilvl.

Yes that will probably happen to some extent in some groups, but that will depend on how hard the content really turns out to be and the ilvl difference between those “extra” players and the rest.
So, yes, it’s possible that some groups form with the intent to be as efficient as possible, so those will only include the best geared players in the smallest possible group.

I don’t think we should worry too much about that to be honest, in the end it’s all up to whoever organizes the raid, and that has always been the case. I sincerely doubt that most groups will leave people behind just for a small difference in terms of item level. Besides, ilvl isn’t everything, every guild decides on whom to bring to the raids based on many different factors, gear is only one of them, there’s skill, there’s personality, there’s knowledge…

07/06/2013 15:17Posted by Madalot

solution? LFR and Flex give no Tier set tokens (still give hand, leg armor etc, just not tier), give nothing towards legendary and give half the valor of normal. LFR gives 60 for 3 bosses, Flex gives the same. make them share a lockout.

I agree that Tier tokens are very appealing to raiders of any level, and devs obviously know that too, I suppose it’s just a hard call to make, to be honest.
Flexible Raids and LFR are meant to let players without enough free time to get into the commitment of having a guild raiding schedule to be able to experience a similar version of the end content, at a different difficulty level and with lesser rewards, of course.
But tokens are very special items, because they can be considered as an intrinsic part of that same content that we want more people to experience, they often provide class specific bonuses that not only provide performance boosts but that also make playing those characters a bit more entertaining.

Still, the option of removing tier tokens is worth at least considering as the benefits might outweigh the risks. We’ll share this with the devs, although I’m quite sure that they’ve considered it many times before, but since we’re talking about a new patch, everything is possible! ;)

Then let us assign loot to players whilst doing it please. One of my initial thoughts about this was it would be a useful way to help undergeared (whether through bad luck, absence due to real-life, or because they are trailists that need a little boost in ilevel) team members improve their gear.

Then I read that this new difficulty would be using the current lfr loot roll system. This would be a hindrance to such help. It would be useful if this decision were reconsidered, so that raiding guilds could assign gear to members based on need for helping us progress through normal's and heroic's.

There's nothing that cannot be reconsidered and iterated before a patch goes live, we'll share your input about the loot system with the devs.

How would you balance the amount of loot with 14 people? 17 people? How about tier pieces then?

Sorry, but I don't see that the traditional loot distribution would work with flexible raid size. If they add brackets to how many items drop based in a fixed amount of people (ie 2 with 10, 3 with 15, 4 with 20, 5 with 25) people would just pick enough people to reach that.

That’s a very good point; I assume that's probably the reason why this loot system was chosen in the first place. But like I said, everything is still subject to change, devs sometimes like to surprise us with unexpected solutions. ;)

07/06/2013 16:05Posted by Pinpoint

Will the lockout be similar to LFR where you can run it again (with only 1 chance per week for loot) or will it be like normal, where you can only kill a boss once per week?

Right now, the idea is to have FR lockouts work very similarly to lockouts in LFR.
You will be able to repeat bosses, and that will actually still be somewhat rewarding, you’ll be able to use additional bonus rolls, earn Valor Points, and potentially loot some shinnies from trash...

There’s something unique about FRs though, I’ll explain it with an example:
Let's say you join a 12man and kill the first boss, leave the raid, and join a 20man, you might have to repeat the first boss.

"Might", so how does that work?
If everyone in the new 20man raid has already killed the first boss just like you did, then that boss will not spawn.
But even if only 1 of the players in that 20man has not killed the first boss, he will spawn again and everyone else will have to repeat the encounter.

I am going to use an example raid with 4 bosses for simplicity. Paralleling your example:
Player1 joins a fresh raid, kills the first boss. The raid falls apart so he joins an already in progress raid whom are on the 4th boss.

If the raid is already inside waiting for him to enter, will he be able to enter and start with them on the 4th boss? or will it stop him from entering until bosses 2 & 3 are killed?

Yes, he will be able to enter and kill the 4th boss.
Loot is per-player, we don’t see any point in locking someone to some sort of raid-id. However, if that same group decides to queue for a new instance, any bosses that anyone in that group has not already killed, will spawn again.

And if it doesn't stop him from entering, would leaving the instance or soft resetting the instance spawn bosses 2 & 3?

There’s no soft resetting because it’s a queue system. If they queue again for a new instance, then yes, the bosses will spawn again.