Yesterday was reset day in Europe. I had hatched a fiendish plan to make a huge dent in my quest for the Legendary Cloak, of course the best laid plans of mice and men came to nought. As soon as I logged on I was whispered with an invite for Flex raiding, not on my Hunter, but on my Shaman for my healing skills. Incidentally I have discovered that my Healing skills maybe a bit rusty and besides my Shaman is geared mostly in Elemental gear, but even that seem to have a sprinkling of spirit on it.
The Flex raid went Ok, a little ragged in parts, but four bosses in about 90 minutes is not too much of a hardship. The rewards were also very good, with upgrade in off-hand from iLevel 476 (barely epic shield from the Timeless Isle) to the very strange Purehearted Cricket Cage, and a ring. A combined upgrade of 108 iLevels which I believe will make a large difference in my performance.
The side effect of running Flex was that I managed to obtain all the Sigils for the Wrathion Questline. The next step in the quest is Fear Itself, for which I can see a little hole in the Blizzard masterplan. Blizzard is trying to encourage the return of absent players, and in the Timeless Isle have provide a catch up mechanism for alts and returnees alike. These people although relatively far down an expansions worth of quests may be tempted to try to obtain the Legendary cloak. Fear Itself is not difficult, but neither is it current content and to make matters worse the early Raids in MoP are sequential. My poor little Shaman who can heal in Flex but cannot queue directly for the Terrace of Endless Spring because I have not yet finished Heart of Fear.
I have done the first part of Heart of Fear only, so to progress to the Terrace of Endless Spring I will need to queue up for two different LFR's that nobody is running at the moment. It might be fair to say that I missed my chance before patch 5.4 dropped.
One solution would be to remove the prerequisites for the early Raids, or an alternative is to gather the guild together for a 10 man normal, but who are currently busy doing current content. Either way this is not a good scenario for me. My major hope is that there are others in my predicament or a guild that can now obtain an easy achievement now that we massively overgear the Raid.
You may be surprised about running HoF and Terrace, I've run a handful of older LFR raids (either just because I felt like it (yeah, that does actually happen occasionally) or for VP or to keep someone company) since 5.4 hit and the queues have been shorter and the runs have been, generally, excellent. I don't throw that word around lightly, or often. It seems the large majority of the LFR jerks have moved on to SoO, leaving the older content for folks who are looking for a more enjoyable, faster run.
ReplyDeleteYou've also indirectly pointed out another reason to actually have LFR in the game and to allow folks to run older ones for full credit... those who are trying to catch up on something. Imagine doing that questline if you had to find a NORMAL group at this point and didn't have 7-9 folks who owed you a large favour.
Good point, so LFR is the saviour of older raids. I must confess when it was introduced for Dragon Soul, I hoped it would be rolled back to include BD, BoT, TotFW and Firelands. I had no success last night but it was late and on a reset day.
DeleteI will try again on Saturday which is the day of the ultra casual.
Thanks for the tip.
Two very nice runs in LFR (shock horror, yes they do exist) it would appear that R called this one right. I did them with the so called troublesome, Kids home from school/college time of day. They did want they needed to without grumbling, one wipe without a cross word. LFR is not dead, maybe it is the Raiders in the current content that are the problem. "The world owes me a living", and "look at me aren't I great".
ReplyDeleteThe player who does what is required, keeps his mouth shut, unless they have something useful to contribute and stays out of the bad, is better than the gobby monster DpS monster, who wants to blame the healer when they failed to moved.